Blog

Here are a few tips I’ve found that help my workflow as a sound engineer and music producer who uses many different DAWs. When making an electronic dance music or hyperpop beat, I always love to start in Ableton. It’s easy to drag in samples into the drum rack and use the warping feature to quickly adjust audio files. Sure, Logic and ProTools do the same, but it’s much faster and highly intuitive. When it comes to live instruments, such as guitar or bass, Logic is the way to go. The pedals used are just like hardware versions, and finding interesting stock software instruments (such as a Koto) makes any of your rap beats sound infinitely more worldly. Lastly, I love mixing everything in ProTools. Sometimes classic truly is the best, and even if the interfaces aren’t as clean, it’s the most broad in amount of variables to change.

As a kid, I was very fortunate and lucky enough that my parents, upon my sudden love for the violin, signed me up for lessons at five years old. What they didn’t expect, was my whining every time I played a wrong note, and that I’d get very upset when that happened, so we asked my violin teacher. That’s how I found out that I had perfect pitch.

When I grew older, joining more orchestras and branching out into more genres, I joined an orchestra at 12 that focused on teaching classically trained kid musicians about playing other types of music on their instruments. I had already loved rock and punk music from my father’s influence, but playing purple haze and thunderstruck’s solos on the violin opened up a whole new world for me.

I started to truly find happiness in playing this music and wanted to write my own. At thirteen, I started lessons in Guitar, Bass Guitar, Logic Pro X, and Ukulele and by fourteen, I made a band. Through my teacher, he introduced me to his daughter and a few other kids who took lessons at the store and we started a band. I helped cowrite and write most of the songs, and we performed all over SoCal. As soon as the opportunity struck, I started working at fifteen at a local music store. During that time, I learned a lot about music production and decided it was my passion.

Writing songs for the band and being able to create and record them onto a DAW made me feel alive. So by sixteen, I tested out of high school so that I could go to Los Angeles Recording School to not waste any time. Unfortunately at seventeen years old, the band and I went separate ways as I started diving deeper into my school work and music production skills (during that time I left my job too). Now, at 21, I’m graduated with a degree in music production, with all the protools certifications one can get, and on my way toward the work force.