Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ethan Alijah. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Ethan, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

In regards to audio engineering and producing music, I mainly learned from YouTube and messing around with free DAWs that I downloaded from the internet. This experience was a ton of fun, and there is no shortage of great information online; although there is a lot of bad information if you look in the wrong places! In 2021 I started school at The Recording Arts Center, where I learned even more about working at a commercial recording studio and creating music on large format music consoles. Although I started learning engineering years before I decided to go to school, I think the pace that I was at was right for me. The years of me being “upset” with my mixes, and experimenting with different processors and processes, has helped me develop skills that I do not think I would acquire now; so I am very grateful for those years of struggling with the quality of my results. In terms of mixing, I think learning how to mix bad recordings helped me in the long run. Now I work at a commercial studio where most of the recordings are incredible quality, and the mixes are a lot simpler for me.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Ethan Alijah and I am a music producer/singer-songwriter/audio engineer. I spend most of my days working at a commercial recording studio in San Diego where I produce, record, and mix music. I started my career as an after-work hobby where I produced, recorded, and mixes my own songs in my bedroom. I would spend most of my nights slaving away at my computer trying to get the best sounds that I could. It was a long journey of getting to a point where I started to like my mixes, but I believe my discipline while learning came from the fact that I am very passionate about music and wanted to make “the music thing work”. Now, I am helping artists produce their songs, and I offer recording and mixing services. My favorite part of the job is the producing and mixing services. Some people might say that my mixes sound “musical”; I believe this is because I was a musician before I ever got into audio engineering. When I am mixing a band, I am trying to make each instrument sit in their select pocket of the band’s sound. The end product should include sounds that cooperate with each other and work as a team; and most of the time the band sounds are accompanying the star of the show: the vocals. I have not thought about it much, but looking back at my past mixes has made me very proud of where I sit now with my current mixing skills. I am still hard on myself when my mixes don’t sound the way I want them to, but overall I think that will just drive me to become a better engineer.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I think the most rewarding part of being an audio engineer is delivering a great product to a client. Whenever I send a mix, or production, to a client and they respond with excitement, I am always driven to want to do even more.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

What I think society can do to support creatives is share their craft with their friends and family! At the end of the day, the people closest to you will help and support you the most.

Contact Info:

• Website: Ethanalijah.com
• Instagram: Instagram.com/theretroethan
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethan-kregel-78a4b564

Image Credits
Michael Lopez, Andres Hermosillo, Kacey Kregel