Remote Mixing and Mastering

Q: What's your 'promise' to your clients?

A: I will always do everything I can to bring out the best in your music.

Q: What questions do customers most commonly ask you? What's your answer?

A: Can you make it louder? My answer usually "YES!" but sometimes it works better to turn down something else.

Q: What's the biggest misconception about what you do?

A: I don't write lyrics and generally don't write new musical parts or sections. If I feel like something in the song isn't quite getting to where it needs to be. I ask the artist about their intention for the section and push them to figure out how to make it more impactful. There is a stigma about music producers that they change things or rewrite things and maybe that's true sometimes. For me, I want the artist to maintain ownership of the writing. I think it makes for more genuine performances and recordings. I do think my teaching background is helpful in pushing the artists to good places though.

Q: What questions do you ask prospective clients?

A: How many records have you done before? What are some of your favorite records of all time? What are some of your favorite records from the last two years? What are some records you would like your record to sound like? What is your favorite pizza topping?

Q: What advice do you have for a customer looking to hire a provider like you?

A: Make sure your songs or tracks are ready to go before reaching out. If you are going to use reference tracks, make sure you obtain high quality wav. files rather than MP3s or Spotify links! Those compressed files are missing a lot of the sound! Make sure you take the time to listen to the results of the providers work between each revision.

Q: If you were on a desert island and could take just 5 pieces of gear, what would they be?

A: Macbook Pro, AxeFX, Guitar, AKG 414 Mic, Giant harddrive to carry all the samples!

Q: What was your career path? How long have you been doing this?

A: I started out with an internship at a recording studio in place of my senior year in high school. From there I went to Berklee College of Music and graduated with a degree in professional music in 2007. Once I finished college, I was hired to engineer at a small studio in upstate New York. At the same time I began teaching music and ended up moving to NYC to pursue teaching and performing. I played around in metal and rock bands, produced some recordings and did live sound for cover bands and off-broadway theater at night while working in music education during the day. In 2017, I decided I wanted to go into Music Production full time and moved on from teaching to make records full time. I also went back to school and graduated with honors from the Berklee Masters program in Music Production in 2020.

Q: How would you describe your style?

A: My style shifts from production to production and mix to mix but I always try to find the most engaging thing about the song/artist and really amp those things up. As a general philosophy, I want my artist to sound like a superhero version of themselves, playing a show in a scrappy city bar, with some drinks in their belly.

Q: Which artist would you like to work with and why?

A: I really loved the first few Coheed and Cambria records and I would love to work with them on an epic concept album. That is a band where I feel like all of my influences would really contribute to a production.

Q: Can you share one music production tip?

A: Don't try to mix while you are producing or writing a track but do try to choose complimentary sounds. I often will use a spectrum analyzer on my tracks while producing. This way if I am choosing a guitar amp setting or synth sound, I can see where the frequencies are thin in a production and fill them in. If all else fails, use percussion or pads to fill the space!

Q: What type of music do you usually work on?

A: Rock, metal and guitar driven genres

Q: What do you bring to a song?

A: I think something that a producer or mixer should always do is bring a trained set of ears to the music but also listen like a fan and not like a scientist. Whatever I am doing with a song, I try to bring out the things that draw me to it the most.

Q: What's your typical work process?

A: For a full production, I like to spend a lot of time in pre-production. Trying different things and making sure the song feels great to listen to without all the bells and whistles. I want the musicians to enter the recording process certain of what they are trying to do! This way there aren't a lot of surprises or guessing going on when we are looking to get final tracks. This also cuts down on costs if we are renting a studio or people are taking days off from work. For mixing I like to set everything up so it's ready to be mixed and then spend some time listening to the artists favorite music and/or music that is currently competitive in their genre. Then when I go to mix the song, I've got that sound calibrated in my ears. This helps me work creatively and worry less about referencing until I've really got a vibe happening with the tune.

Q: Tell us about your studio setup.

A: I've got a tricked out Macbook Pro and iMac with a Fractal AxeFX XL, UAD Apollo x8p, a large variety of plugins by UAD, Izotope, Fabfilter, Waves, JST, Nerual DSP, Drumforge, and many other developers. I can work in Protools or Logic. I've got Adam Audio monitors, HD650 headphones and a variety of other headphones and listening systems to check for transferability.

Q: What other musicians or music production professionals inspire you?

A: I really like Adam "Nolly" Getgood, Taylor Larson, Jason Suecof and Josh Wilbur for modern metal sounds. Brendan O'Brien, Sean Slade and David Bottrill have worked on some of my favorite rock records. As far as Artists and bands, I grew up on 70s Rock, Punk and Grunge, eventually got into stuff like Steve Vai and Symphony X. These days I still listen to all of that stuff along with artists like Periphery, Tesseract and Black Dahlia Murder. I've also been getting into Synthwave and lo-fi video game remixes recently.

Q: Describe the most common type of work you do for your clients.

A: I have done a lot of full productions over the last few years from pre-production to recording, editing and mixing. However, since the start of the pandemic, I have been mixing and mastering more often. I've also done some remote producing which I've found can be an extremely fun process.