At a very young age, I was fascinated with sound. Weekend mornings were filled with the sounds of my parents’ choice in music — Motown, Elvis, Sam Cooke, Buddy Holly, The Beatles, and Johnny Cash — all emanated from the Zenith stereo in the corner of our dining room. That isn’t to say they didn’t enjoy the music of the 1980’s as well — John Mellencamp, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Michael Jackson all had their moments on the turntable platter. In fact, the first drummer’s name I remember learning was not Ringo, but the powerful rhythms of Liberty DeVitto, Billy Joel’s drummer.

When I was of age, I was taught how to use the record player — and I was even given my own records to play. Sesame Street’s “The Best of Bert”, Disney “Sing-A-Long Songs”, and even my own copy of Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams (Get Into My Car)” began my lifelong collection of records, cassettes, and CDs.

To the annoyance of my entire family, I would spend hours listening to the same song over and over…and over. So much so that my parents finally broke down and gave me a Fisher-Price portable record player to allow me to listen to my records in the room I shared with one of my older brothers. This habit would continue all through my life — which at the time I had no idea would train my ears to be a better engineer.

My father was a journalist, which meant that I had access to his GE interview recorder. He did his best to hide it from me, but with a considerable amount of my paper route money spent on blank cassettes, I would find it so that I could record myself on piano, drums, or whatever I felt was interesting.

Fast forward to high school, when I started playing in punk bands with my friends in the scene. My friend Andrew’s dad was getting rid of a cassette deck that had a mic input, along with a Radio Shack omnidirectional microphone. And so my engineering life began.

I took out a book about recording from the local library. I found out what mulitrack recording was. I learned that my high school had an 8-track cassette recorder — so I took the manual, learned everything about it, and began recording the jazz ensemble at school.

It was now the late 1990’s and eBay had just launched. My first purchase to make sure it was legit, was Clerks on VHS. After saving some money, my second purchase was a Fostex XR-5 4-track cassette studio for $99.00. I still own it and use it to this day.

Twenty-some odd years later, I am still creating sound. My tools have changed, from cassettes to unlimited channels in Pro Tools, through expensive consoles and microphones. However, my philosophy remains as it was when I was a teenager.

I want to help musicians realize their sonic vision and create something beautiful.