Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid – Frank Zappa

The path to the recording studio was anything but a straight line for Alby Cohen. While he studied jazz at Goddard College under both Ernie Stires and Don Glasgow of the Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble, he never attended sound school. He had tinkered with 4-tracks in high school and college and knew basic tracking, but initially had more of an interest in being a musician.

He began his musical career by playing drums and singing in a band in Ithaca called Damn Brandy, which led him to take a field semester away from Goddard. As the story unfolds, the band gained some traction and next thing he knew he’d been living and touring out of Ithaca with Damn Brandy for a matter of years. The band recorded a couple of demos and went to studios to do some mastering, but before long, lives got in the way and the band broke up.

After the band split up, Alby moved back to Brooklyn; finished his last year of college remotely; put himself through grad school; and ultimately fell into advertising. He slugged it out in the corporate world, but eventually fell prey to the credit crisis in 2008. He got laid off. Meanwhile, a gentleman named Doug Martin – now his boss – had asked a few years back if he wanted to be involved in a studio he planned to build. The stars eventually aligned with the studio coming to fruition right and Alby hitting a career inflection point, so he decided to go full tilt. Cohen didn’t have much engineering experience at the time, but after realizing over the course of several rounds of corporate interviews that he had to go with his heart. He chose music.

READ ON for more of the Alby Cohen Story…

Today, we’re kicking off a new column of occasional periodicity here at Hidden Track called Tracks of the Trade, whereby we swap stories with some of the more interesting folks in the music industry, the producers. These folks are the sonic equivalent of surgeons; charged not only with the careful dissection of dozens of tiny interactive pieces and ensuring their cohesive functionality, but also developing strong emotional bonds with their patients (often mental), offering varying degrees of bedside manner, and even sharing potentially critical advice.

To kick off the series in style, we invited one of the most prolific producers/mixers in music today, Peter Katis, to drop by to chew the fat. Peter Katis has collaborated on countless modern classics by the likes of the National, Frightened Rabbit, Interpol, Fanfarlo, Tokyo Police Club, Jonsi (Sigur Ros), and The Get Up Kids.

The “Sound” of “Music”

In thinking about our little surgeon analogy, in a likeness to the way we all go about choosing a doctor, it’s important to understand the mannerisms of a producer. After all, you have to like the person as much as the work. Specific to music, different producers take different positions as to where their role fits in with the musicians.

“I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum than say someone like a Rick Rubin. He really focuses on the songwriting aspect, the arrangements, the words, whereas to me, those things like lyrics for a band, that’s their own thing. I really don’t feel comfortable messing with that.” READ ON…