Izzy Garza Runs the Boards at Barron and Keeps the Screw Tape Honest

By Dani Reyes, October 15, 2026

The easiest place to find Izzy Garza is a credit line, and one of them sits right where Houston's studio work meets its slowed-down history.

The credit that tells the story

Jastin Martin & OG Ron C: Miss Me Yet? (Chopped Not Slopped)

Jastin Martin & OG Ron C: Miss Me Yet? (Chopped Not Slopped)

Pull up the Apple Music page for Miss Me Yet? (Chopped Not Slopped), the March 29, 2024 album credited to Jastin Martin and OG Ron C. On the title track's credits, OG Ron C is listed as remixer and mixing engineer. The recording engineer is listed as "Ismael 'Izzy' Garza." The same split shows up on "Do Right (Interlude / Chopped Not Slopped)".

That pairing is the profile in miniature. Garza is a senior engineer at Barron Studios in Houston, and his Barron bio calls him, under his DJ name DJ Izzy Ill, "an official ChopStar DJ." Here his name sits next to the head of the ChopStars on a chopped record. The credits don't say who did what in which room. They do show an engineer whose day job and night job share a release.

A working room in Rice Military

Barron runs on volume. When the Houston Press profiled the studio on November 13, 2018, writer John Amar described a Rice Military facility with three recording studios and six engineers, and reported that Barron had worked with 1,100 artists and recorded 7,000 songs that year alone. Garza appears in that piece in a photo captioned "Senior Engineer Izzy Garza." Those numbers are almost eight years old, so treat them as history, not a current count.

Todd Macek, who built the studio with his brother Chris, gave the Press its thesis: "So whether you're famous, or first time on the microphone, it doesn't matter." A studio that books first-timers and touring names on one calendar needs engineers who can handle both, and Garza's bio says he covers "recording, mixing, and mastering, with a sharp attention to detail, song movement & structure."

Barron also turns up in the origin story of North Houston rapper Kenneth Millyun: All About Ginger reported that TeeZol pushed him toward "a proper session at Barron Studios." Nothing I found says Garza was at that session.

What the ChopStars are guarding

To see why "official ChopStar" means something, start with DJ Screw. Texas Monthly's Michael Hall, in his April 2001 story, put the idea plainly: "slow down the music, like taking a 45 record and playing it at 33 rpm. Then he put it on tape and sold it." NPR's 2023 history of Houston rap breaks the method into two moves: chopping, "repeating certain phrases for punctuated effect," and screwing, "slowing the music down to a snail's pace."

Screw died in 2000. The ChopStars are among the groups that kept the method going. The Houston Press called OG Ron C "head of the Chopstars" in 2014 and wrote that the crew had grown from "a rag-tag group of DJs from across the state and parts of Louisiana to become a label within a label." NPR wrote in 2017 that the collective's artists "honor and extend Screw's legacy," the week its chopped take on the Moonlight soundtrack, Purple Moonlight, came out.

Ron C has always framed the job as discipline. "It's about blending," he said in that 2014 Houston Press piece, explaining the "chop not slop" name. He went further with Reverb in 2020: "If you know the real essence of how to chop up a record, then you'll know you're chopping up the record and not the words. The words will fall into place."

That's an engineer's sentence, about structure and timing, not vibe. Set it next to Garza's bio line about "song movement & structure" and the overlap is hard to miss. That's my read, not his claim.

Vinyl, Pro Tools, and the line between them

Garza's bio says he offers chopped and screwed remixes using "authentic Technic vinyl turntables and Pro Tools for mastering." Both halves of that sentence have history. Texas Monthly called Screw "a diligent analog guy in a digital world, a deejay who worked with vinyl when others had graduated to computers." Ron C told Reverb he started on Technics SL-1200 turntables and moved to software: "After the Cakewalk era, it went to the Pro Tools era and we ain't look back since then."

So the tradition was never anti-technology. It was anti-sloppiness. An engineer who keeps turntables for the performance and session software for the finish sits squarely inside that line, and I'd trust that setup over a one-click slowed edit.

The bio also names him co-founder of The Astronavtz. I found little independent reporting on the crew beyond a Do713 listing for an Astronavtz DJ night at Lightnin' Good Times in Houston on June 28, 2024.

The credits, checked

Here's what holds up in the databases. Apple Music's credits for Tobe and Fat Nwigwe's "They Want It, But No," from the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack, list Ismael Garza as recording and mixing engineer, alongside Dorothy Chan, who is also on Barron's engineer roster. Discogs lists Izzy Garza as mixer on Big Pup's 2019 album Degree°z-Of-Difficulty, mixed and mastered at Barron.

The bigger names need a qualifier. According to his Barron Studios bio, his engineering credits include collaborations with Key Glock, Big K.R.I.T., Paul Wall, BeatKing, Mike Jones, and 2 Chainz. I couldn't match those to a credits database, so they stay attributed to the studio until liner notes say otherwise.

That gap is common for staff engineers, and it's why this column exists. Houston's DJ economy runs on bookings and reputation, as Maiya Papaya's story showed. Engineers like YoungPrototype earn their names one verified line at a time. Garza has a few of those now, and one puts him on a ChopStars record. In the city that invented the screwed tape, that's the credit I'd frame.

Dani Reyes, Behind the Boards. Credits check: Ismael "Izzy" Garza on "Miss Me Yet? (Chopped Not Slopped)."