Thank you, Mark Rubel

I first met Mark during my Sophomore year of college, during a recording session at Pogo. I was playing drums with a band and we spent a weekend recording some demos. Pogo was this amazing, weird little world, Mark was such an amazing presence, and I was like "I gotta stay connected with this guy!". But I was also kinda intimidated by how cool he was!

So, over the years I took his recording classes through Parkland College, bummed around the studio helping him with stuff now and then, and he eventually hired me to cover some sessions. It was an amazing vote of confidence I probably didn't deserve, but it was an amazing experience to run the studio and pretend to know what I was doing! It was also motivation and inspiration to keep learning and gaining experience.

I admired and respected Mark so much, and just kept picking his brain over the years over chai lattes at Cafe Kopi, and eventually when he left EIU to go to Blackbird, he recommended me for the job he was vacating, and they took his advice! So I quite literally owe my career to him.

But most of all, I am so grateful for the joy he had in music, audio, and teaching. Music can kind of chew you up and spit you out, and there are so many exhausted, frustrated, jaded people in/around it. He was the opposite of that. He exuded joy, wonder, delight, curiosity, and playfulness, and I knew that's how I wanted to be. Memories of him have always been a north star for me.

Thank you, Mark.

The Complete Piano Works of Frederic Chopin

From 2010 to 2019, I worked with virtuoso pianist Ian Hobson and producer Samir Golescu to release recordings of every piece of Chopin’s piano music. It took the form of a 16-disc set containing on Hobson’s Zephyr record label, and I worked on volumes eight through sixteen.

This project evokes pride and a bit of sadness for me - I inherited it from Jon Schoenoff following his untimely death in 2010. Jon was a mentor to me in classical/acoustic music recording and production. The recordings had all been previously completed on DAT tapes in Warsaw, Poland. I did a few things on this project:

Audio - I transferred the audio to hard disk and edited takes in to complete movements.

Art/text layout - Placed designer David Colley’s cover art, formatted scholar Ates Orga’s liner notes, created and track information, logos, and barcodes. Overall, a lot of work went in to consistency and coherency within each volume and between volumes. This was especially challenging because the discs were released over several years.

You can listen HERE