Music

Producing, performing, and building music technology

Recording and Production

During some of my time off from full-time engineering work, I’ve been dipping my toes more into music production. I’m using Logic for most of my production work, and other than vocals and a some small amounts of recording here and there, much of the musical material I’m working with are synth or samples. For those of you just getting sarted with production, definitely take a look at tools like Splice and CoSo. These are sample library apps that are great for getting off the ground with high-quality royalty free samples.

A screenshot of a typical recording project (this one from Insane)

Here are a couple songs I’ve been working on over the recent past, take a listen! All recording and production done by yours truly.

On Repeat - Demo

Insane - Demo

Consuming My Soul - Demo

Ben Bloomberrg, Jacob Collier

Back in 2015, my roommate at the time Ben Bloomberg began an incredible artistic journey with Jacob Collier. I’ve been extremely fortunate to share in small bits of that journey both technically and artistically.

Harmonizer

Original custom harmonizer built for Jacob Collier

Album Releases

  • MIT
  • LA

Personal Music Technology

Portable vox box

Too often, a mic is plugged directly into a PA. I got sick of dry, raw, boomy, dead, uncompressed, unintelligible vocals straight out of a PA. I started bringing my computer with an interface to apply live processing on the mic feed and send the processed vocal to the speakers. This makes your average karaoke or jam session sound WAY better. I don’t want to bring my computer and interface everywhere with me, and I don’t want to buy an overkill live-processing brick, so I’ve started building my own simple plug-and-play “vox-box.” It currently consists of:

  • a Raspberry Pi auto-botting into a live-session of Reaper
  • a simple single pre-amp interface
  • a screen
  • and electrical routing

all tucked nicely into a pelican case. The goal is to shrink the unit down to a small box with some knobs for compression-limiting, reverb, and delay settings to remove the need for keyboard and cursor.

Portable box prototype for live vocal processing

**If your amplification sounds bad, you sound bad.**

Performance groups

I’ve been involved with many singing groups over the years, though most of my live music is done with spontaneity these days

Portable vox box

MIT vocal jazz ensemble post-gig

Group types I’ve been a part of:

  • Choir / choral groups
  • Small group rennaisance and period vocal music
  • Musical theater
  • A cappella (MIT Logarhythms)
  • Vocal Jazz Ensemble (MIT)
  • Chamer Music Society Vocal Ensemble (MIT)
  • Back-vocals for MIT Inauguration for Sally Kornbluth - Original piece by Ricky Richardson