I learned to speak engineer, operations, and leadership.
Before tech I was a recording engineer, which turned out to be the same discipline I practice now: keeping critical systems running for the people who depend on them. I studied audio engineering at the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences, then moved to Nashville for a six-month internship at Welcome to 1979, a studio built around vintage analog gear.
I stayed on as Chris Mara's assistant and house assistant, learning to repair and calibrate American-made MCI consoles and tape machines: schematics, signal flow, soldering, calibration. I sat in sessions with Jeremy Ferguson on Turbo Fruits' Echo Kid, then became chief audio engineer at Quaver Music, a startup building a digital music curriculum, where I built the network storage, pioneered the on-set and live-audio workflows, and mixed The Protomen's live Queen cover album, A Night of Queen, at Welcome to 1979. A family relocation brought me to Seattle, and after a year running live sound at El Corazon, I stopped building the infrastructure that powers other people's art and started running the technology itself.