Before I could walk, I was fascinated with music and sound. My parents would laugh at me when I would excitedly crawl up to the bathroom door so I could dance to the rhythmic doppler shift of the hairdryer going back and forth.
By 3 years old, my favorite place was sitting in the living room in front of the turntable with headphones on, listening for hours to stacks of records. I would listen to just the guitar, then before hitting the scratch-bump, scratch-bump, scratch-bump of the center label, I’d move the needle back to the beginning to listen through again to just the bass, then to the beginning again for backup vocals, then drums, etc. My earliest memories include my mom listening to records with me, asking me to name and pick out every individual instrument in the music.
At 5-8 years old, I became drawn to the idea that a voice or a sound could be captured and reproduced, and I started recording EVERYTHING. My fascination with recording only intensified when I realized that I could take apart and reassemble my tape recorder, and then even connect old speakers to the microphone jack or cheap dynamic microphones to the headphone jack with crazy results.
I grew up listening primarily to 50’s/60’s rock and Motown, and while I became a decent bassist through junior high and high school by studying and obsessing over James Jamerson’s ingenious Motown baselines, my fascination with recording continued to steal my attention away from concentrating solely on my playing. I played in rock bands, jazz ensembles, high school marching and concert bands, but finally found my niche at 15 when recording my high school rock band in our drummer’s dad’s recording studio (who happened to be the original bassist of The Beach Boys). That quickly blossomed into an internship at Public Recording in Brea, CA while I also began to build my own recording setup with cheap mics, even cheaper preamps, and an Apple LCIII computer with an 80MB hard drive and a stack of floppy disks. By day I’d be sitting behind a Neve console and winding 2” tape on a Studer reel-to-reel; on nights and weekends I’d be recording friends’ flute and piano performances, and occasionally lugging around my gear to stretch my limits by recording the high school marching and jazz bands.
At UC San Diego, I had the honor of studying under digital music pioneers and audio/acoustic luminaries such as F. Richard Moore, Tom Erbe, and Miller S. Puckett. I spent many long and memorable nights in the school studios, while also playing in an 80’s/90’s cover band, musical theater orchestra, and running live sound and multitrack recordings/mixes as the lead sound designer and engineer for musical theater productions.
Upon graduating, my love of and strong foundation in the physics of sound, plus the newly available tools allowing construction of 5.1 surround setups in more modest studios, led me to focus my efforts on mixing surround sound for independent films and companies such as EA Games, Qualcomm, and Sanrio (aka Hello Kitty).
As 2008/2009 squeezed marketing and therefore sound-for-picture projects, the silver lining was that I fell back into my original love of music. In the years since, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with everyone from garage bands to rock legends, bedroom singer-songwriters to Broadway superstars, and beginning producers to Hip-Hop icons.
My favorite projects by far are those that “break the mold” and are therefore in need of both my foundation in classic analog recording techniques as well as my education in digital synthesis and processing.
My philosophy on mastering is that the heavily technical aspect of the process is an important starting point, but the collaboration works best when my ears and studio function as a seamless extension of my client’s hard work and production process, not as a “one size fits all” turn-and-burn project.
I love spending non-studio time adventuring with my wonderful and supportive wife, Amanda, our daughter Rowan, and our studio-loving (but walk-preferring) Jack Russell Terrier, Dexter. I occasionally still have the honor of playing bass with Slackstring, and during the warm months I try to jump in the ocean a couple of times per week.