Technician,
Engineer,
& Producer
Since 2008, John has made most of his living on the technical side of media production, exercising skills ranging from deploying and operating PAs for music to wireless coordination to marketing software development to repairing electronics and musical instruments.
As an engineer and producer, John has had a hand in dozens of albums for artists as diverse as cafe-style jazz and punk rock. His main engineering project since 2024 has been remodeling a series of hunting cabins near Ignacio, CO to serve as a recording room. While as of this writing there’s still no plumbing (hopefully the outhouse will be relegated to “emergency only” use next summer) , the off-grid electrical system has been cleaner and more reliable than the local grid power.
Performance experience on stage and across multiple instruments have often been helpful in producing larger-than-life sounds- several of the albums John has produced have mostly been the artist’s vocals and writing over backing tracks entirely performed by John. The studio is mostly an outgrowth of that workflow, intended to quickly get musical ideas onto “tape” by leaving stations for drums, keyboards, and vocals more-or-less permanently installed.
And although the studio’s main room itself is architecturally rough, the equipment is top notch, featuring pairs of Coles 4038, Schoeps SDCs, and AKG 414 among other classics. The outboard is also quality; Neve, Emperical Labs, and API units can be heard through the Genelec monitors. The room has hosted 7-piece bands, and boasts a great drumset (DW Collectors) as well as an immaculate 73′ Rhodes, Hammond C3 and Leslie and plenty of toys at hand.
Portable Ledge, LLC is John’s production company, offering audio production, small PA rentals, wireless rentals, back-line rentals, stage management, and other production help. While the equipment John owns is qualtiy (Meyer mains and RCF monitors, for instance), the real core of running a stage is “bedside manner”- being able to make musicians understand that they are in good hands is just as important as getting a microphone into a useful position.
John’s 15 years of stagehand work at the Kerrville Folk Festival, including many years of stage managing the chaotic, 24-performer “New Folk” Competition concert, were a great primer on dealing with musicians from diverse backgrounds and levels of experiences, playing in a stressful environment with short turn around times.
Years of working as the sound tech in bars and honky tonks also gave many lessons in what could be referred to as “combat audio”: making the show happen and sound good regardless of the challenges of questionable equipment or the experience level of the musicians.
Growing up in a home with a DIY modular synthesizer and modified 4-track reel-to-reel machine left John with a desire to know how technology ticks. Being handy with an oscilloscope and a soldering iron has led to being able to solve a lot of problems that would have blocked shows or required expensive replacements.
John might be the only person willing to repair accordions in the Four Corners area, but he’s fixed quite a lot of musical and audio equipment, from re-padding clarinets to diagnosing faulty transistors in mixers.
As a location mixer and boom op, John has worked on numerous indy productions in Texas and Colorado, and he’s experienced as a video producer, making reels for several of his musician friends.
One of the lucky things in John’s life has been the ability to step away from the more lucrative professions of doing programming for the web. Having written code and managed hosting for websites to help government agencies, public entities, non-profits and NGOS communicate with the public was a great basis for developing marketing for musicians, but thankfully those website skills are somewhat receding as the demands become more and more arranged around music: making spaces where other musicians can focus on their creative projects is a large portion of John’s professional goals, which is much more rewarding than, say, writing third-person accounts of their skills onto a web page editor.