SOUND IS PHYSICS

Any sound you have ever heard is reproducible. Every aspect of every sound has a physical cause, and these causes can be harnessed and manipulated to create exactly the sounds you want to create. My job is to know those physical causes and shape sounds into exactly what you want to express.

For example, if you want a distorted vocal effect, what kind of distortion are you looking for? Clipped transistors? Overdriven tubes? Truncated bit depth? Rectification? Driver breakup? The list of options goes on and on, and they all impart different physical changes to the soundwave and evoke different aesthetic and emotional responses. They will each take up different regions and amounts of sonic space and alter the texture and intelligibility of the vocal in drastically different ways.

These kinds of decisions have to be made thousands of times per song. In every stage of the process, be it writing, arranging, sound designing, performing, recording, mixing or mastering, every single sound that is placed in a record has countless attributes that will all be impacted by these choices that are made consciously or unconsciously. If you want a teammate on your record to help make those decisions more consciously, that’s what I do.