While Freelance Audio Engineering has been my bread and butter over the years, I’ve also been experimenting with producing, and enjoying it quite a bit. I’ve decided to take this role more seriously, and I’m currently focusing on becoming more skilled in the art of pop and rock music production. As a part of this effort, I’m offering a limited-time free service to all songwriters who are interested.

This summer, I will be spending some time producing tracks for free. If you are a songwriter who has some demos lying around that need a good track, send me your demo, and if I feel that I can do it justice, I will make a track for you for free. I’m not asking for a cut of publishing, no upfront fees, no nothin’! Here’s the deal: Read More

I recently finished working on an album called Sweet Little Devil. This is one of George Gershwin’s earlier musicals, and it is his earliest surviving score. The album is being released by PS Classics, working in partnership with the Library of Congress to bring us this rare gem as a part of their Forgotten Musicals series. Read More

With the recent passing of Dynamic Range Day ’12, I’ve seen many articles making their plea to the music industry to stop the loudness wars. They say that in an effort to outdo each other, the powers that be are putting pressure on mastering engineers to make albums louder and louder. This, they claim, is making albums sound progressively worse and worse. The articles claim that we’ve been abusing technology, and that today’s albums don’t sound as good as the albums of old. I have a couple of bones to pick with this argument, so let me wax philosophical for a minute… Read More

Alright! I finally got myself a great set of headphones!  If you’ve been following the blog, you read about my previous headphone shopping experiences. Well, eventually it came down to the Dennon D7000′s, AKG 702′s and the Sehnnheiser HD 650′s. I got my hands on one of each, I borrowed a good headphone amp, and got down to some critical listening!  After several days, the winner emerged…

And it is the Sehnnheiser HD 650′s!  Man, this was a tough choice. Each one of these headphones was pretty spectacular in many ways. My girlfriend was doing her best to convince me to keep more than one, probably because I was ignoring her for days, getting lost in headphone world!

So here’s the breakdown of the pros and cons of each: Read More

Yesterday, I visited a recording studio called KAS Music & Sound. KAS lives in the basement of the Kaufman Astoria Studio, which is NYC’s premiere film and television facility. This is a place with tons of history, as it’s existed since 1921. You definitely feel inspired in this place. After the closing of The Hit Factory, Sony Studios, Clinton, and Legacy West over the last decade, I’m pretty sure that KAS now has one of the biggest live room in NYC. Since I often record large orchestral sessions, I figured I’d come and check the place out. Read More

Hey! I just found out that I will be recording the broadway cast album of “Porgy And Bess”! I went to see the show a few days ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it! I’ve been starting to think about how I’ll be setting up the session, and it got me thinking about headphone mixes. I thought I’d share what I think about when figuring out how to set up the headphone feeds.

Say you’re doing an orchestral tracking session. As with just about every large tracking session, you’re limited as to how many separate headphone cues you can provide. Maybe you are using a headphone mixer system like the “Private Cue” into which you can pump about eight separate feeds. Or maybe you just have a few stereo sends running to cue boxes. Either way, you’re gonna have to prioritize. Who gets separate feeds, and who gets sub-mixed with other instruments? Who gets their own cue? Here’s a few things I consider when setting these priorities: Read More

Over the last few days, I’ve been listening to the five albums nominated for this year’s Best Engineering Non-Classical Grammy award, and I was surprised to hear that two of the five nominees were committing sins of nasty Auto-Tune. I felt a bit sad because they were otherwise great sounding albums. Over the years, we’ve all grown accustomed to this engineering technique, as it has become status quo in the industry, but I still think that there’s a right way and a wrong way to tune a vocal. Let’s talk about a few ways to use and misuse this effect. Read More

I’ve been running a business as a Freelance Audio Engineer for about ten years now, and for this entire time, I’ve been doing it sans-website.  Well, I finally decided to change this, so I put together a website that will expose what I do for a living to the interwebz. I started this website a couple of months ago, but I haven’t been telling anyone about it because I’ve been tweaking some design details and gathering testimonials. Now that this is done, I’m proclaiming this site as officially open! I’m glad to finally have a place where I can jot down and share my thoughts about being a Freelance Audio Engineer. If you’re interested about reading some Audio Engineering tips, and general musings on the subject, do subscribe, either by email, or RSS. And do leave a reply if you like a post, I’d love to hear your opinions on my musings.  Also, I wanted to give a huge Thank You to Alex Brubaker for helping me with the look of the site.