Hidden track Red Hot Chili Peppers · Orlando, FL · Before the studio
January 30, 2007.
The night a sound crew let a flight student stand at the mixing desk.
When I was growing up, my dad had a really good stereo. Billy Joel, the Beatles, the Eagles: every time a great track came on, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
Years later I was a student pilot at Embry-Riddle in Daytona Beach, studying for a flight exam, when my friend James called with a spare ticket to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Orlando. I went back and forth, then closed the book and went.
James had floor seats. My ticket was up in the nosebleeds. He snuck me down, but there was no seat left on the floor, so I stood near front of house, the mixing desk out in the crowd, staring at the gear. I’d been messing with audio since high school and was part of WIKD, the campus radio station, so I knew what I was looking at, just never at that scale.
A security guard leaned over: Wow, man, it looks like you really like that stuff. Then Dave Rat’s crew noticed me. Dave was the band’s front-of-house engineer and the owner of Rat Sound, and I knew him from magazines. They waved me over, and I spent the whole show beside the Midas console, watching one person mix an arena.
A Full Sail instructor, Gene Henry, was there too. When the lights came up he asked if I worked there. No, I said. Just looking at the gear. He handed me his card.
I walked out saying wow, wow, wow. That August I transferred to Full Sail’s Recording Arts program, and a year later I graduated and moved back home to Puerto Rico.
In San Juan I found Playbach Studio and its owner, Ramón Martínez, and worked my way up from studio assistant to assistant engineer to engineer and mixer. In 2010 Eduardo Cabra of Calle 13 came in with a problem in his home studio, and I offered to take a look. A year later I had a Latin Grammy of my own, as engineer and mixer on Entren Los Que Quieran.
Years later, when the Chili Peppers played Puerto Rico, I crossed paths with Dave Rat again. I have the picture.
I still think like a pilot: checklists, instruments, stay calm when something fails. That night I traded one instrument panel for another.
I said it to Full Sail in 2011 and I’d say it now: the award only made me want to work harder, and the most important thing in this business is to be humble and always be learning.
From the console to the cloud.
In the studio the work was the same every day: get every signal where it needs to go, lose nothing on the way, and let the artist think only about the music.
That habit followed me into technology: streaming at SHOUTcast, customer success at Veritone and PreSonus, then back to Veritone to lead its support services. Along the way I earned an MS in Computer Science and built the tools the work needed, including a stream ingestion engine that recorded broadcasts around the clock.
Today I’m a Senior Technical Account Manager at CloudLogics. It is the control room again, with different signals: know the system end to end, keep it running, and translate between the people who use it and the people who build it.
I still want to know where every signal goes.
— J.B.
Up next
The records it led to.
Playbach Studio first, then seven years at La Casa del Sombrero, recording and mixing for more than thirty international artists.