Oh, man. I’m proud of just about everything that I’ve worked on over the years. I think something I’m most proud of is Teezo Touchdown’s Debut Album “How Do You Sleep at Night.” Teezo and I spent a year and a half working on this album. It was my first time really helping an artist develop his sound and grow together musically. Teezo gave me the freedom to be extremely experimental with vocal production. For example, sometimes we slow down the song down by 30 BPM or so to record vocals. Then we speed it back up after we’re done cutting. This gives the vocal a jagged sound when it switches notes. Almost like a hard auto tune setting. But it preserves the natural timbre of the artist’s voice. Sometimes we do this with a stereo x/y pair of mics! This creates super cool artifacts between the left and right channels that make it feel like the vocals are being pulled apart in your ears! Check out “The Original was Better” to hear this effect.

Some of my first interactions with music were playing violin in the local Suzuki program. I played the violin from age 6-10. I soon became more interested in playing the drums. My dad was a drummer when he was in high school. He had some old pairs of drum sticks lying around the house. I would pull those out and turn the entire living room into a drum set. My parents eventually bought me a used drum kit to save the lampshades.

The music my dad played was a big influence on my early musical taste. We’d listen to the Beatles, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and Led Zeppelin to name a few. As a teenager I gravitated more toward rock artists like Rage Against the Machine, Green Day, and Linkin Park. The first CD I bought myself was a used copy of Green Day’s “Dookie.” My music taste has grown to be pretty eclectic—you can catch me listening to jazz artists such as Ambrose Akinmusire to indie folk like Andy Shauf as well as pop like Jessie Murph.

One of my biggest influences as a young teen was my drum teacher Pat Fitzgerald. He owned one of the few recording studios in Fairbanks, Alaska. He introduced me to the job of a recording engineer and producer. He brought me to his studio a few times and I was immediately drawn to the technology.

Another big hero of mine was Rudy Van Gelder. Rudy was the primary engineer for most of the Blue Note Records albums in the 50s and 60s. Rudy really pioneered the home recording studio. He converted his family home into a studio where he recorded artists such Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis. I read somewhere that he even convinced his family to let him knock down a wall to expand his control room! This showed me that you didn’t need state-of-the-art equipment or the perfect acoustical space to make incredible music.

DON’T GIVE UP! I think as long as you keep going and saying yes to everything, eventually you’ll get an opportunity. Patience is important. It’s easy to get impatient wanting to work on the big projects with big artists right away. I’m grateful for the years I spent in the second engineer roll watching other great recording engineers work. As an engineer, the path is somewhat straightforward. I recommend getting a job at a major studio and working your way up. It still is the best way to learn the professional work flow and you can make a little money as you learn how to operate as a professional.

Headphones have been a big part of my journey as an engineer. Before I could afford a $10,000 pair of speakers I had a pair of studio headphones. It meant that even if I was in a poorly soundproofed room, I could still get a somewhat honest representation of what was going on. Currently, headphones are a huge part of my workflow. I like to use headphones while cutting. I turn the NS-10s way down so if people are in the room they can still kind of hear what’s going on. The headphones allow me to enter the same space as the artist. I hear exactly what they hear.

One thing that really has helped me is my Audeze LCD-X Headphones. I travel all over the US recording music in studios, most of which I’ve never worked in before. As a tracking engineer, it’s my job to be able to listen critically within the first few minutes of being in a studio. I find the LCD-X the solution to grounding myself in a new studio. I’m able to feel a sense of familiarity and I can trust that what I hear through the LCD-Xs is the truth. I can then use the headphones as a reference to the playback speakers to make correct decisions outside of the headphones if needed.

The LCD-X seem to translate very well to all other playback systems. I can trust the low end is accurate (rare for a pair of headphones). Also the high end is fairly flat without the cheap-sounding high end bumps that many studio headphones have. The open back element of the LCD-Xs means that there is still cross-talk between the headphones and this creates a natural sounding stereo field.