·S1 E15
Episode 15: Jonathan Wyner on Mastering, AI in Music, Berklee, and Five Thousand Records Worth of Perspective
Episode Description
In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes Jonathan Wyner, mastering engineer, Berklee professor, past president of the Audio Engineering Society, chief engineer at M Works Studios, and head of artistic technology initiatives at Berklee's Emerging Artistic Technology Lab (BEATL), for a deeply thoughtful conversation about what it means to spend a life in service of other people's music and ideas.
Jonathan traces his path from a childhood home full of music and technology, where a substitute teacher running an ARP 2600 through a microphone drilled into a trombone mouthpiece ignited a lifelong obsession, through a French horn performance degree, a six-week recording workshop in Ohio, and eventually a career that has taken him into sessions with James Taylor, David Bowie, Aerosmith, Miles Davis, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, and dozens more over the course of more than five thousand recordings. He talks candidly about what drew him to the engineer's chair rather than the microphone, a combination of musical passion, shyness, and the realization that working with great artists could be just as fulfilling as being one.
The conversation digs into the practical realities of getting started in recording, what gear actually matters at the beginning, why headphones can be a legitimate starting point, and how training your ears on honest monitoring shapes every decision you will ever make in the studio. Jonathan offers clear, grounded advice for anyone working with limited resources, grounded in decades of teaching at Berklee and Berklee Online.
Joey and Jonathan also explore the central question of Jonathan's current work at BEATL: how artists, educators, and the music industry at large should engage with AI and emerging technology in ways that are honest, musically grounded, and attentive to questions of authorship and identity. Jonathan brings a nuanced perspective; he is neither a pure skeptic nor an uncritical enthusiast, and his sense of responsibility to represent working musicians in conversations with developers and policymakers gives the discussion real weight. The episode is a masterclass in how to think carefully about the tools we use and why.
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