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Over the course of my career, I’ve been blessed to be involved with many albums that I’ve been proud of. A few that come to mind are Tedeschi Trucks Band “Layla”, Aloe Blacc “Good Things”, Cut Copy "Zonoscope", Garth Stevenson “Flying”, the Fela Kuti complete catalog remastering, and recently a new upcoming album by New Zealand dream pop band Marlin’s Dreaming.
In 2001 I founded my own mastering studio “Timeless Mastering”. Check out the partial discography of projects mastered there over the years.
In 2015 after years of constructing and designing mastering studios, I undertook one of my most ambitious projects: architecture, design, and construction of Timeless’s 5th studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn NYC. The project spanned almost one year and was designed to be a warm, welcoming, minimal environment for daily work. After it’s completion, the studio saw the likes of artists such as Björk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Beach House, and Deerhunter.
My primary role is as a mastering and vinyl cutting engineer.
Early in life I was fascinated by musical instruments. Eventually, that led me to playing trombone in the school band. In high school I played in several jazz swing orchestras and really loved it. That led me to listening to a lot of big band stuff like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Stan Kenton. From there, I became obsessed with jazz instrumentalists and composers such as Wayne Shorter, J.J. Johnson, John Coltrane, Horace Silver, Woody Shaw, and Hank Mobley.
I ended up going to school at Berklee College of Music in Boston to study with some of my jazz heroes. After moving to NYC, I started working in studios where my musical exposure was totally different. Hip hop, R&B, classic rock, metal, etc. That opened up a vast new musical frontier for me. However, my approach to mastering and production is still rooted in my love for jazz music to this day.
Early on in high school, I attended several jazz summer camps which had a drastic impact on me musically. Some of my teachers in college did as well. Most notable are saxophonist Joe Lovano, pianist Ken Werner, saxophonist composer and director Ed Tomassi. As a mastering engineer, George Marino and Tom Coyne were big influences and mentors. Currently my beautiful wife Esther and my daughter Arden are my inspiration for everything I do and aspire to be.
I used to struggle with pinpointing distortion and other anomalies when printing loud masters. Especially masters with a lot of side material. Eventually, I learned to better gain-stage mixes with a lot of stereo content. I learned my own personal “bell curve” of fatigue and how to work at mostly low volume levels. I tried many different headphone amps, and ended up using a kit amp designed by Wayne Kirkwood called the Dual Class A II Reference Headphone amp. I find this amp to be super clean with plenty of power to drive the LCD-5’s. Nowadays there’s practically no anomaly I can’t hear because the monitoring is so pristine.
For mastering, I’ve always been a big fan of running a hybrid workflow. I get excited about advances in both digital and analog processing. I’m lucky enough to have a few analog tools in my rig that keep delivering far superior sonic results compared to their digital clones. When it comes to new tools, I tend to go through a long process (several months or more) before I decide whether it’s right for my toolbox or not. Some recent tools that have passed this process for me in the analog realm are a new mastering disc cutting transfer console I designed with Wayne Kirkwood (ka-electronics.com), Lavry Engineering’s “Savitr” AD converter (lavryengineering.com), and the Etec DBTL-20 Bass and Treble frequency limiter from Denmark. In the digital realm, GoldClip by Schwabe Digital (schwabedigital.com), all of the offerings from Tone Projects (toneprojects.com), and the recent Special Filters bundle by Tokyo Dawn Labs (tokyodawn.net).
Patience, kindness, and balance. One of the best things about this business is there is always something new to learn to keep things interesting. Hard work and discipline can lead to exciting new discoveries. Also, we are now in a world where there is over saturation everywhere you look. Establish limits with your workflow and take your time.
Professionally for almost 30 years now. When I worked at Sterling Sound I had access to all sorts of high end headphones. I found that many of them were quite “muffled” sounding and very uncomfortable to work long hours with. My boss at the time Tom Coyne was using simple Sony 7506 headphones for a majority of his work, I imagine for this very reason. I myself was mainly using those same Sonys daily, until fairly recently. For most of my career, I believe that achieving the best master I personally can deliver requires a balance between loudspeakers and headphones. Lately, I’ve had a need for high end headphones to fine tune my cutterheads and more immersively monitor the audio quality of my cuts.
Disc cutting is a very high stakes business. Cutterheads, cutting styli, and blanks are easy to ruin and can be very costly. The LCD-5s allow me to hear every nuance which is super useful in preventing damage and waste. Fine tuning the cutterhead EQ curve I find is a bit easier in headphones of this quality. Detecting bass and treble problems is easier as well.
The LCD-5s have quickly become an essential tool in my studio. I needed a pair of headphones that could possibly replace the speakers in my mastering room in certain scenarios. For most of my career I had a very minimal approach to using headphones. Thus, I wanted to hear a wide range options out there before making a final decision on what to buy. After a long process, I landed on the LCD-5s. Already they have made a significant improvement in my workflow. The depth and precision of the soundstage is just the kind of thing I was looking for. I also find them to be quite light and very comfortable for long sessions.
