Thirty years,
still at the desk.

I love making records. All of it. The load-in, the takes that don't work, the one that suddenly does, the mix at eleven at night when it finally sits. Thirty years in and I still get to the studio early.

Most of my work is guitar, bass, drums and voice, and I'm happiest in rock and americana, where the record lives or dies on whether the band sounds like a band in a room. I take every jazz session I can get too. Fewer overdubs, more listening, and the whole thing hangs on capturing players reacting to each other in real time.

The specifics are what I actually enjoy: getting a drum sound in a room that was never built for it, making a vocal sit without squashing it, and delivering something that holds up on a phone speaker and on a proper system.

The Atmos work grew out of the same instinct. A spatial mix should be the record, not a novelty version of it, and the way to get there is to treat it as mixing rather than conversion.

I came at this from behind the kit. I started in New Mexico, moved to San Francisco in the eighties, and spent years drumming in The Sextants and Seven Day Diary. Touring, recording, winning and losing record deals, and getting a close look at how records were actually made. The producers on those sessions were Larry Hirsch, Joe Chiccarelli and Gil Norton, and watching them work is what got me interested in the other side of the glass. In 1994 I traded the sticks for faders.

Since then: studio ownership, and the education that comes with it. I ran a room in San Francisco through the financial crisis and went back to freelance in 2012 when the numbers stopped working. That experience is the reason Working Class Audio exists.

Thirty-odd years on, Joe brought me in to do the Atmos mixes for the new Arde Bogotá record. Same two people, opposite sides of the glass.

Working Class Audio. I host a podcast about how this job actually works, which has run since 2014 and is well past 600 episodes. Engineers talk to me about rates, burnout, gear they regret, and how they stay solvent. It has taught me more about this business than anything else I've done. You can find it at workingclassaudio.com.

Featured by Denon. Denon profiled me in their Meet the Makers series, which you can watch on their site.

Sharkbite Studios in Oakland is my regular room. I also work at 25th Street Recording and Brothers Chinese Recording, and I own a rig that travels, so a session can happen wherever the record wants to be made.

Mixing and mastering clients are anywhere. Files travel.