Mastering

Q: Analog or digital and why?

A: As the name suggests I use both analog and digital. I like to use digital for clean processing and analog for color.

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

A: I always aim to make a client happy, so I'll does many revisions as necessary to make a client happy.

Q: What do you like most about your job?

A: I like bringing a fresh and objective opinion to a production team to help a piece of music be the best it can be.

Q: What questions do you ask prospective clients?

A: A couple reference tracks with a note or two stating what the client likes about it.

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

A: Do not over limit your mixes or references. Mix engineers should aim to leave some headroom for a mastering engineer.

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

A: I've been doing this for 12 years. I started out in a high school band wanting to record our music, that lead to a B.S. in Recording Arts from Loyola Marymount University. From there I worked in Epic Records' recording studio amongst others until I went do to Orange County, California and opened Hybrid Studios.

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

A: An artist that is looking to for a dynamic master. Streaming services now use loudness normalization and songs that are over baked for loudness tend to not perform as well. So an artist that isn't just looking for loudness would be a great fit for me!

Q: Can you share one music production tip?

A: As a mastering engineer, a nice tool to bring up the level for a quiet section of music is parallel compression. Split an audio signal into two, then take one of those signals and very heavily compress it. Lastly, slowly blend the heavily compressed version into the non process version.

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

A: Work on many different genres, but a lot of the time I get rock and pop.

Q: What's your strongest skill?

A: Attention to detail. This is incredibly important for a mastering engineer as many times my job is to embed all the metadata (artist name, song title, ISRC codes, etc.) into the audio files along with keeping track of the different file types, sample rates, and bit depths.

Q: What do you bring to a song?

A: First and foremost, an objective and professional opinion formed with the expertise gained of working in professional commercial studios for 12 years.

Q: What's your typical work process?

A: Typically I'll do a listen through of the song, and make a couple notes on my first impressions. I like to take a minimalist approach and use as little process as possible. I sometimes use linear eq, M/S eq, multi band compression, de-essing, color EQ, color compression, and limiting. Every song is different and I try to use what equipment and tools I think the individual song calls for.

Q: Tell us about your studio setup.

A: Commercial studio with mastering grade acoustics. We have high end mastering hardware and software.

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

A: Bob Ludwig and Bob Katz

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

A: Mastering music, and with loudness normalization, I put an emphasis on dynamics and frequency balance.