Philosophy

Precision. Vision. Communication.

Mastering is both art and precision. Rather than a purely transparent approach, I shape each project to enhance its depth, emotion, and flow—ensuring your music is presented at its best.

A Human Collaborator

Working with an expert mixing and/or mastering engineer can make your music shine (in ways that you simply cannot manage alone). For one, you get to share the journey, get fresh creative input, and a professional quality check. A collaborator can invigorate and inspire your project so much. Invite me to collaborate on your music!

Fresh Ears

When you’ve heard your music a thousand times already, you get to a point where you’re no longer able to hear the forest for the trees. You probably also can’t hear the trees for the forest. A mixing and/or mastering engineer is a skilled gardener who can still tell what’s what, and what to do about fitting it all together beautifully.

Technical Precision

When I get a new project, I will first listen critically with fresh ears, address any problems with my specialized toolbox and skilled craftwork, and set everything up for success.

I can hear your songs like it’s my first time (because it is). I can use my fresh perspective and my highly optimized listening skills/gear/environment to hear your creation more clinically, to identify the things you’ve long since blurred-out for your own sanity (so many trees!).

Creative Vision

My fresh ears are also able to listen for new creative opportunities, openings where your song could be enhanced and emboldened. Keeping your vision, references, and direction in mind, I can elevate and enhance your music in new ways.

There’s a unique creative style to my work. It’s not inherently any better or worse than someone else’s, but it may fit better or worse with your music. Check out my work and think about how my sound could enhance your sound. Get in touch with the button below, and we can dream up an inspiring creative vision for your project.

Communicative Inspiration

Mixing and mastering does not ‘create’ a piece of art. It’s a craft that helps to refine an already-created work. The challenge is to creatively enhance your project, not overrun it with new ideas.

A great mixing and/or mastering engineer is able to understand and adapt to what you need. That takes another special skillset: the ability to listen, learn, adapt, and communicate clearly at every step of the process.

There’s a Crack in Everything. That’s How the Light Gets In.

I specialize in helping your music come to life - by enhancing the liveliness, spaciousness, textural depth, and emotional impact in a song. These elements often need special attention when mixing and mastering electronic music, especially, which can lack depth, texture, dynamic variation, and spaciousness simply because of the nature of in-the-box production processes.

I don’t want to polish the face off of your song. I don’t want to round off the details with careless presets. I don’t want to wrap it in plastic and put it up on the superstore shelf, where it can blend in with a thousand other brands of canned applause.

A piece of art shouldn’t be defined by how perfect it is. If you simply chase ‘perfect’ you end up with shelves and shelves of sterile and standardized. Art isn’t actually interested in perfection. Art is intent on expression and discovery, redefinition and exploration. I want to emphasize what’s special and totally unique about your music, not make it sound the same as everything else.

As Leonard Cohen famously sang:

“There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

Good mixing and mastering should certainly aim to fix any distracting problems in your production. That’s a different thing, that’s a different kind of ‘crack’. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the ‘cracks’ that make your music special, the wrinkles and the quirks that define its unique character.

Your music should not sit safely on the superstore shelf, polished to ‘perfection.’ It should be a daring and dauntless expression of its cracks. By exalting the ‘cracks,’ by treating the cracks as perfect in themselves, we can actually express your music more fully. Rather than polishing away everything unique about your art, we can work on emphasizing what makes it special and unique and exciting. We can let the light shine in.

Get in Touch

Does the clarity, precision, separation, space, and punch of my work feel good to you?
Does the emotional depth, the vitality, and the power that comes out of my work feel good to you?
Does it feel like I’m a good communicator, who can listen and understand your needs, and apply that effectively to the work that I do for you?

Hit that Contact button if you want to talk more about your project.

I’d love to apply my technical precision, creative vision, and communicative inspiration to help make your music shine. We can get started right away - I want to hear about your goals, and we can figure out a plan for how to get there.

Contact Me