AES Student Blog

Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from and what do you study?

I'm originally from New York City, but I came to Montreal to do my undergrad at McGill University in Percussion Performance, and have since graduated and I am now in my second year of the Sound Recording Master's Degree at McGill. 

What initiated your passion for audio? When did it start? 

My passion for Audio definitely began in High School, when I first started making electronic music. I was making beats all throughout my undergrad, and when I began mixing my first EP I realized that working on records in my DAW was something that I truly loved to do, so I decided to work toward entering the Sound Recording Masters to work more on my production skills. 

Tell us about production of your submission? What is the story behind it? What inspired it? How long did you work on it? Was it your first entry?

My submission was part of a 5 song EP that I submitted as my end of first year "production project" for my master's degree. I first started working on the song with Henri over the summer of 2015, and then decided that I wanted to work on a whole EP with him for my 1st year project. We went through the pre-production slowly until about February 2016, when we began tracking. The song was done by the end of April 2016, I believe. The project was quite interesting to work on, since when we started there wasn't a group together to perform the songs. So Henri and I had to write out parts and find musicians to play them for all of our recording sessions. This also made producing the record kind of fun, because we didn't have the constraints of having a set instrumentation to conform to, so the limit was really our imagination. This was actually my first entry into the student recording competitions. 

What/who made you join AES?

I initially joined the AES to attend the convention in New York in October 2015. 

Tell us about your favourite experiences at the 141st AES convention in LA!

Probably my favorite experience at the 141st convention was attending the student recording competitions, and hearing both the skill of my contemporaries, along with the judges' feedback for each of the different categories. Additionally, it's always fun and exciting to window shop at all of the gear retailers booths. 

To hear Will's project, click here