Welcome!

My name is Alan and I’m addicted to music. It’s been at the core of my life since birth and my childhood was spent playing several instruments—starting on piano at age three, moving on to an intense stint as a classical violinist a few years later, eventually becoming a guitarist who formed a power trio that would go on to record a demo with Les Paul Jr. at the console, and attending a semester at the Berklee College of Music—all before turning 17. Shortly after that, I also played Philadelphia’s leading club circuit with a high end top-40 cover band called Merlin.

Right around my 20th birthday, I had a bit of an epiphany about the practicality of a career in music (especially given the non-commercial nature of my predominant interests and distaste for compromise in this regard) and decided to opt out in favor of a path in the technical sciences, where I was very fortunate to thrive for close to four decades. With the financial dependency on music removed, the freedom to make the music I truly loved led to the formation of the progressive-rock band, Advent, in 1989—something that has provided the most inspirational and meaningful moments of my musical life thus far.

Taking advantage of an incentive to leave my professional/technical career in the autumn of 2020, it has been a great pleasure to finally return to making music on a full-time basis once again. Since October, a few key areas of focus in this area have been:

• Composing, recording, and mixing tracks for my (upcoming) debut solo album
• Leveling up my already-established mixing skills
• Developing significant expertise in the art of mastering (audio)
• Reestablishing capabilities on my secondary instruments (Stick and keyboards in particular)

Though creating new music will likely remain my primary goal for the foreseeable future, I’m also in the process of launching my new mastering service and additionally thinking, rather seriously, about starting to teach guitar and Stick once again. Please reach out via email if you’re interested in any of these areas or would just like to get in touch.

With the launch of this new blog, I hope to cover lots of interesting topics—mostly related to music and audio engineering, but possibly a bit more as well if inspiration strikes. Welcome, thanks very much for reading this introductory post, and sending you my best wishes!