Mauldin Productions: The Historic KSIJ Room Still Belongs to Music
- Jessica Boggio
- Aug 8
- 5 min read
ETX Uncovered · Gladewater, TX · Published August 8, 2026
The room was built in 1950 to carry sound. An acoustician out of UT Austin designed the walls with irregular panels set at angles so a soundwave scatters instead of bouncing straight back at you. It's the difference between a room that sounds harsh and a room that sounds full. Musicians would set up in here, get mic'd, and play live over the radio. Seventy-some years later the room still does what it was built to do.
You wouldn't know any of that from the street. There's a storefront on the ground floor, two floors of apartments above it, and then, four floors up in a building most of Gladewater drives past without a second look, there's a recording studio that has quietly kept working the whole time.
That's where you'll find Chad Mauldin.
Chad grew up around music before he ever chose it. His dad played bluegrass, and the house filled up with other people's jam sessions. He learned to play on a right-handed guitar even though he's a lefty, because that's what his dad had to teach him on. He was in bands by the eighth grade. In high school his band, Aslan, went into a little garage studio in Longview to record, and the guy who ran it let him sit in on sessions. That was the hook. Chad got the bug there and never fully shook it.
After getting married at 20, Chad and his wife bought a two-bedroom home in Tyler's Azalea District. The second bedroom became his first home studio when digital recording was beginning to become accessible to hobbyists. He recorded local bands for little or no money so he could practice. Because online tutorials did not yet exist, he studied industry magazines such as Mix and EQ.
“I would just pore over every issue of these periodicals and just hope that they had an article about this thing I'd been wondering about.”
There were other early studio ventures as well. Chad and a friend converted a detached three-car garage in Longview into a recording studio and began charging small amounts for recording work. Later, he opened a small studio in Kilgore. He acknowledges that the Kilgore business was not successful, largely because he had not yet developed strong business skills, noting the experience as part of his education.
With two kids by then, he decided it was time to “grow up,” so he went back to school for historical theology. He stayed in it the better part of a decade and started a doctorate he never finished.
When he told me that, I'll admit my first thought was: those two things don't belong to the same person. A guy who produces Red Dirt records out of an old radio station, and a guy who spent a decade in serious academic theology? It felt like two different lives grafted onto one résumé.
So I had to ask.
“I always thought of it in a creative way,” he told me — the writing, the careful language, taking something complicated and explaining it well. So it wasn't the analytical half of his life bumping up against the artistic half. It was the same instinct, aimed at different material. History has to be interpreted. So does a song. He'd argue the theology didn't make the music make sense. If anything, it was the other way around.
To afford the schooling, he and his wife took jobs as house parents at a boarding school for at-risk kids near Fort Worth. It was supposed to be the responsible chapter, the grown-up job. They ended up staying almost ten years. And it was there, of all places, that music came back for him.
The founder's son picked up a guitar, someone found out Chad knew his way around recording, and before long the school handed him its fine arts building and told him to build a studio in it. He got a decade to figure out how to actually make a record, on someone else's payroll. He'll tell you that's where he really learned.
When that chapter ended, he stepped away from it again. Did a little recording here and there back in East Texas, nothing full-time, working on the doctorate. Then somewhere around 2014 he decided to go all in, which meant starting over from nothing and taking a pay cut he still describes as steep. What turned it was one record: a single called “Gone” for a Lindale artist named Chris Colston that took off, put Colston on the road with some of the biggest names in Texas country, and finally got people saying Chad's name back to him.
Three years of two-and-three-shows-a-week later, he had a business.
And through all of it, the theology, the studios that failed, the years he told himself he was done, music kept finding him. Every time he thought he'd left it behind, somebody handed him a reason to come back.
That same steadiness showed up when I asked what he thought about AI. Largely, unbothered. He has thought about it though, and he'll walk you through the argument if you ask: a lyric isn't a song, melody and arrangement are half the work, and if a computer does everything but one part, you didn't write it, you licensed a version of it. But underneath the argument, his actual posture isn't ruffled. “Human artists are never going anywhere,” he said, flat, like he was telling you what day it was. He's watched younger listeners reject AI music harder than anyone expected, which only confirmed what he already believed: people want the human thing, still, on the other side of the song.
Which is maybe the whole thing, when you back up from it.
Plenty of people love music. Most of them never try to make a living at it. You can love a thing your whole life and keep it in the passenger seat. Chad tried to. He kept reaching for the steadier version of a life: the degree, the doctorate, the responsible job that came with a paycheck and a place to live. Every one of them was a real attempt. None of them took.
So he stopped fighting it. He does this now not because it's a smart business (he'll be the first to tell you it isn't) but because it's the only thing that ever stuck. When I asked what he'd tell a young person thinking about doing this for a living, he didn't dress it up.
“Don't do it,” he said. “Unless you can't help it.”
He couldn't. He never could. And seventy years after somebody built a room in Gladewater to carry the sound of live musicians out over the radio, it's still carrying it. In his own words:
“Yeah, I just loved it. Always.”
Why I Interviewed Him
The best takeaway from this interview? Sometimes the thing you can't shake isn't a distraction. It's the direction. Chad spent years trying to outrun music, reaching for the steadier version of a life every time, and it kept following him home. Maybe surrendering to the thing that keeps drawing you back in is exactly what you were supposed to be doing all along.
ETX Uncovered exists to tell the story behind the businesses we may or may not know across East Texas. That fourth-floor studio in Gladewater is a straight readout of a man who loves what he does and quit trying to talk himself out of it. So whether you already know Chad's work or this is the first you've heard of Mauldin Productions, now you know the KSIJ room never went quiet.
Know a business owner building something meaningful in East Texas? I'd love to hear about them.
Chad Mauldin runs Mauldin Productions out of the historic KSIJ studio in downtown Gladewater. Find him in the ETX Discovered directory [ETX Discovered listing — add link].
Comments