big jazz producer he's a videographer and we're just going to say he's everything so that we don't have to spin ten minutes saying everything that you do have that hopefully not master of all the what is a jack of all so let's just focus on that why first how did you become a jazz producer well i mean years ago back around two thousand and eight i had been i had two music degrees than a performer and throughout that formation as a as a classically trained singer i was recording my friends i was working myself with gear that i had and i went into the corporate world and when i you know i felt sort of like that elephant in the far side cartoon who's sitting at the piano saying i'm a flutist you know and and i just decided i really needed to i needed to take what i had learned as a musician and what i had learned as a as a geek you know in the corporate world and bring it together in service of musicians so that's when i formed my little business and you know was i met people as i made friends at mercer county community colleges radio station and i made friends on the classical side and on the jazz side and the people on the jazz side said hey you know we need producers for our program so you know that's how i got my slot on the jazz on two  d you know being from new orleans you know it's a rich musical history i didn't appreciate it enough really until i wasn't there anymore yeah and so i just had this affinity for jazz musicians i had this curiosity about  evolved you know new orleans real place in the evolution of jazz as opposed to the popular version of it that we always hear and so you know this is a line to me with the jazz musicians and well what did you do in a corporate world  i was an i t security analyst for lehman brothers was my last stop but before that you know i went to austria to take some russian language courses and ended up staying there for six years and the way that i sustained saying there for six years was getting a job in the u n system and when i was ready to come back to the u s it was natural that the ideal world would make me the offer that would bring  back to the u s and brought me to new jersey so when you got into music production were doing right is the time when computers were so important needed production where they were starting to become important i mean when i started doing this i was very skeptical about the idea of recording with a computer as opposed to with a real device that was made for audio recording so i feel like in a way i was in on those early days of computers becoming something that you could  seriously record music with so how in your opinion how has this real computerized recording system has affected the music in any way to musicians big time well because for one thing  enabled more people to make their own recordings so it makes it a little bit more of a competitive world for people who want to do this for a living you know no longer i think is it possible to  comfortably establish oneself as an audio only recording engineer i mean it can be done but it's really difficult because so many people will so quickly turn to doing it at home with their own equipment so i think you know the path that i've chosen is to be a digital media producer where you know i've striven to be the best audio engineer and the best videographer that i could be and seeing the two things together but especially for musicians how how does it affect if you want to have a like a big band and you're recording them with a computerized system how is that different from when they use t old manual tracks of them well i mean i think we have some more possibilities because you know adding another track or two a project is child's play so i think it allows us to be a little bit more nimble and it also changes the way the whole recording desk and in the editing suite in the control room look because we're used to have to have a huge mixing board control multi track studio now you can have a computerized surface that maybe has you know a dozen sliders on it instead of twenty four and you can shift it because it's hooked up to the computer you can shift t sound of course it does but yeah positively negatively differently with differently i think ok you know we could get into those arguments of analog versus digital recording and i think there's a there's a lot to be taken seriously on both sides of that argument but we're going where we're going and you know computerized recording is getting media ability to work with a client where you know i record and i sort of i don't like completely dry rooms and i don't like to resident rooms because it limits your options but if i have a good sounding room using a computer i can find an ambience or reverb if you will for a much bigger space that matches the room that i recorded in so i can take the amount of and being in the room where i record it and expand on it but rather than just taking a few more channels than i would of if i was doing it with the old school just because it's so easy to follow the session i can say i just want to patch on another channel here and and the other thing that it would change of course is if miss sarah vaughn says you know i want to make a change to this i can follow her so quickly i mean literally i can look at the sound ways and drag my mouse across the syrian and i could find the spot she wants to record you know and and and a client an artist who really knows what they want when they come in often the vocalist will say i want to be in the booth so i want the musicians out in the main room and i want to be in the booth and they'll record their whole session that way with headphones on and then they'll come the next day and they'll go through their whole session and they'll say i want to punch in that spot that spot that spot now you could do that in the old analog world but it was a lot recording studio is a little bit crazier and you know i'm different from the standard one another in the field i mean this this operation and i have has evolved in response to fellow musicians but the way my space looks as i have about a twenty seven by thirty five foot room with the control room off to the side and then i have a thing called a vocal booth in my room which is you know it's a little bit bigger than this table maybe you know it's a room that somebody can sit comfortably and or stand and it's got a lot of sound absorbing materials on the walls so when you when you go in there it sounds like you're you're nowhere you know it's a clean slate so so wh i can do is i can put a combo out in the main room and then the the soloist the lead singer you know the featured artist can decide you know do they want to go for broke and record out in the room me can really make a recording that you know the listener afterwards is not going to be able to tell the difference it's just that some performers feel like they're off their energy if they're not in real time with their combo really everything i do is in response to what the client wants so they tell me you know they want to be separate or they want to be in with their with their colleagues you know one of the things that you find is is with all john's the music then i'm going to specially with vocalists more so than anyone else when you hear them on order record a record for the record c d s it sounds wonderful to perfect but then when you see them at present even though there's a whole lot of lives and they do in the studio right sometimes people don't understand that and you know and there's that there's not a fact auto tune right that's now part of the hip hop industry it's a sound it's a recognized sound use but but auto tune was no correction rights to then you know when the notes were quite in tune and and one day somebody used it turned up a little bit too high and it made this really cool sound in which i believe it was cher who used it the first time you know and now you'll see you can go to youtube and you'll find video tutorials on and cooperate auto tune well into a recording in it all started off as something to fix people's mistakes is that something that can be reproduced live oh yeah oh oh yeah it can be and you know in some some of this correction stuff can be done i mean it's i feel really fortunate because most of the musicians that i work with want to have nothing to do with that ok and i don't refuse it when it's asked for but i really don't offer it because we live you know you know how blessed we are the here in the princeton area in princeton with princeton and trenton and philadelphia and new brunswick around us there is more talent you know and mercer county in the counties around us so i think i think that we've got so many people here who don't need any of that you know i just feel really lucky to be here so before we were going to pull up more about you what advice would you give young you know whatever age people who are getting is already a business what would you tell them about how to set up their business how to maintain  potential customers and marketing to the people who talk to your potential customers right so in other words i could i could one of the things that i do that we have talked about you know as i make a lot of recordings for emerging artists when they audition for schools and music programs and i love doing that now i could i could put flyers you know in every student mail box at the local music schools or i could forge relationships with the singing teachers good point right and for just so you want to forge relationships with the people who are already working with all of we're under a lot of pressure right it's expensive to run a business to expensive to sustain all of this and and if we if we simply pass that on to the artists without a thought you know we create and a really unsustainable business model because you know who can afford to to utilize a well equipped digital media business at at at what the honest cost of running that are so we have to think  about how do we give these artists value how do we give them value that that then makes what we're debating paying for our services sustainable and i think the big thing now is  you know we've come into an age where there are basically the internet is its own closed circuit television service so you know and you can monetize it so you know if you say to an artist i'm going to charge you x amount of dollars to make your your your audition video your your your next recording and it's on the artist to figure out how it's going to be sold and promoted  you know most artists are going to say thank you very much and that's the last you'll hear of it so you know we have to think about well ok is where is your genre where is your genre have the biggest potential pocket of fans maybe it's not even in the united states maybe it's in europe maybe it's in asia and so we can reach those markets now and we can reach those markets with pay per view media  and it's available to everybody i mean very low initial cost of entry to get in there so i really feel like that's my mission now to the local artists is be creative about write that not even thought about anything else because you know these all this equipment uses a lot of lectures the insurance right you know i mean i have i have a number of if i want to work for any of these institutions or large corporate clients unless i carry liability insurance they're not going to let me work for them so just covering costs like that you know the time is is over i think where we can casually pull people in and call them independent contractors you know they're there comes a point pretty early on where if somebody is working for me they're my employee and i have to treat them as my employee and i have to insure them as if they're my employee so it's like you're saying it's  it's expensive to be in business and so you have to be really really creative about making the equation sustainable for everybody before we did move on just one less thing why did the audio technician in the liability insurance could you explain well because i don't do everything only in my studio so if i go out into the field and i put three remote control cameras in an auditorium i mean i may be very fastidious about taping over all my lines and double securing everything but you know god forbid somebody knocks over a camera on a tripod and gets injured you know all of these things have to be have to be thought through and it's just where the world works i it's funny because i mean i got to undergraduate school not really knowing that not kind of accepting that that the voice was my instrument and that that's what i wanted to do and then i was very fortunate to be a you know an undergraduate school as oil university in new orleans with a wonderful liberal arts college with a great music with a great school of music so i was allowed to go there and basically explore and find my way and i found a wonderful voice teacher who really nurtured me and and turned me into you know pretty decent singer from my sophomore year in college you know and then  then i was accepted to the master's program of boston university after that there's a vocal as a vocalist and got my master's degree there but you know the wonderful thing and new jersey has been wonderful to me because you know my friends down the street from at westminster choir college have so many things going on that include the community i mean everybody knows about westminster choir college but how many people really aware of what westminster conservatory is doing i've never even heard of it it's a community music school where the form and they have saturday seminars and i've met incredibly influential people in my musical life through saturday seminars at westminster choir college  so all of this stuff is here but you know when i really decided to to devote the bulk of my energies to this digital media production you know i've met all of these wonderful musicians from different sectors i've met the jazz musicians that we're talking about one of my one of the clients i'm proudest of is a group called the glance key institute which basically their mission is to teach people to practice and play in a way that unlocks their potential and also saves them from injuring themselves when they practice so we reproduce a week of seminars and evening performances for them at princeton every summer and for people in the community who don't know about that activity for a week in july some of the best pianists you'll ever hear are giving concerts every evening where can people find out about these upcoming one well they can go to gold lansky institute dot org is their web site and you'll see on there on their website their international they teach all over the world but very prominent there is there princeton summer symposium and international piano festival wonderful you may see all of these great things are happening here and you know the funny thing is the  has put me back in touch with the former classmate of mine from oil in new orleans father sean dugan benedict than an ordained benedict and is one of the foremost by keyboard players in the country wow he's a member of the lansky institute faculty so you can hear him perform most years during that evening festival really we were running out of time i don't believe this concert pianist from philadelphia and this mardi archives love chose me to help her produce two c d s and she's a genius because the first cd she actually looked on social media and found the most searched for classical piano pieces and made a recording of that we made it we made a cd of that which we're currently finalizing the editing of and that is  going to that's going to enlarge her following because her big project she's she's one of the foremost proponents of finnish music in the united states is a recording of all finnish composers so lots of classical she's made a recording of that and my good friends i kind of had piano in philadelphia went a gorgeous seven foot doesn't offer a grand wow for this recording so the quip that i