Bobby Owsinski's Inner Circle Podcast

This episode features guest Bruce Houghton, who started his boutique Skyline Artists Agency more than 25 year ago. The agency now has offices in Los Angeles, Nashville, New England, Virginia, Florida and St. Louis, and serves 60 diverse artists that include Roger McGuinn, Poco, Atlanta Rhythm Section, The Motels, Freddie McGregor Zoe Keating, Darlingside, Gangstagrass and more.. Bruce is also the...

Scott Sugden started as a live systems engineer for bands like Van Halen and Steve Miller Band to theater productions like Spamalot and The Producers before specializing in large format sound system design for festivals. He initially came to L-Acoustics as application support and education engineer, which led into a product role with the company. Scott is now a product manager for L-Acoustic’s fan...

My guest this week is engineer Craig Burbidge, who gained multi-platinum status having worked with hundreds of artists including Barry White, Steve Perry, Natalie Cole, Take 6, Teddy Pendergrass, Paul Jackson Jr., Vanessa Williams, Brian McKnight, Kirk Franklin and many more. Craig was also one of the first American engineers to take his talents to Asia, working with Taiwanese superstar David Tao....

My guest this week is engineer, mixer and composer Jesse Ray Ernster, who grew up in a musical family with both his parents playing in bands and making records. Jesse’s entrance in the music business began at age of 16 touring with several artists as a lead guitarist/vocalist, but he then realized his true calling was being in the studio, creating music from the ground up. Jesse originally paid th...

This week's guest is Vince Wilburn Jr., who has both toured and recorded with his uncle Miles Davis on many legendary recordings from 1984 through 1987. He is also a producer on the Grammy-winning “Miles Ahead” soundtrack for “Best Compilation Soundtrack For Visual Media, and is co-executor of Miles Davis Properties. Vince has played with a wide variety of bands including AL7, The Dells and C...

Terri Winston is the executive director of Women’s Audio Mission, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that uses music and media to attract over 2,000 underserved women and girls every year to STEM and creative technology studies. WAM’s award-winning curriculum weaves art and music with science, technology and computer programming and works to close the critical gender gap in creative tech...

6 time Grammy Award-winner Fred Vogler is the principal sound designer and FOH mixer for the Hollywood Bowl and Walt Disney Concert Hall. Throughout the year, he also records the Los Angeles Philharmonic, LA Opera, Los Angeles Master Chorale, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for commercial and broadcast release. Fred is also one of the first live mixers to work in immersive audio using the L-Acoust...

My guest this week is Diego Farias, who's a digital music and tech expert with experience from some of the world’s most successful tech companies. He now serves as the CEO and co-founder of record label and music distributor Amuse. Amuse has a unique business model in that it provides free distribution to all the streaming services. The company then analyzes music consumption and listening ha...

Joe Solo turned a chance meeting with Macy Gray into a 17 year journey that culminated in a Grammy win, a double platinum album, and a hit MTV video. Soon afterward Joe transitioned into the world of music publishing as the head staff writer/producer for Paramount’s Famous Music Publishing division and has since had hundreds of professional collaborations and over 2,000 song placements in films, t...

Kristen Agee is a classically trained violinist and started playing multiple instruments at the age of 7. She opened a studio in Silver Lake, California where she recorded punk bands and wrote music for various artists, all while touring as bassist after learning the instrument from Rolling Stone’s bass player Daryl Jones. Her writing led to work with a number of publishers and in 2012 she started...

This week's guest is Steve Genewick, who's worked at Capitol Studios in Hollywood for 25 years. During that time he’s had the opportunity to work with a wide variety of legendary artists including Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Queen, George Harrison, Michael Jackson and many more. Steve has also been able to work closely with some of the greatest engineers ever, including Al Sch...

Dave Audé is a producer and remixer with an astounding 133 #1’s on Billboard’s Dance Club chart. That’s more than any other producer, and what makes it even more impressive is that 14 are his own singles as an artist. He’s also won a Grammy for his remix of "Uptown Funk" by Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars. Dave has produced for superstar artists such as U2, KoЯn, Coldplay, One Direction, Katy...

My guest this week is at the forefront of mixing music in Dolby Atmos. Greg Penny has produced hits with k.d. lang, Cher, and Paul Young, among others, but a meeting with Elton John while Greg was in his teens turned into an award-winning mixing journey with the legend many years down the road. Besides producing and mixing Elton’s many albums in surround, Greg is now mixing them in the latest imme...

My guest today is the CEO of Primphonic, Thomas Steffens. Primephonic is a music streaming service dedicated to keeping classical music alive and accessible through the tech revolution Most streaming networks are geared towards modern pop music and don’t serve classical well. It’s difficult to find what you want, and labels, conductors and orchestras aren’t paid much since their piece run far long...

Jim Dunne is the founder and senior acoustic consultant of the ground-breaking Smart Studio, which completely disrupts how recording studios and dubbing theaters have been built. Smart Studio supplies a modular system that provides not only isolation but excellent acoustic design. Jim has over 30 years experience in the acoustics and noise control industry, as well as on-site construction activiti...

My guest on the podcast this week is Bree Noble, who is a champion for women in music thanks to her Female Entrepreneur Musician Podcast and Female Musician Academy. Bree quit her corporate job as a Director of Finance at a top opera company to pursue a successful run as a touring singer/songwriter where she won several songwriting and artist awards and even sang the National Anthem at Dodger Stad...

Jonathan Stone has had a long career as a director of creative services in music publishing at heavyweight companies like ATV Music, MCA Music, Quincy Jones Qwest Music Publishing, and Windswept. He now runs the disruptive music service Rocketsongs, that not only helps artists to find and license songs, but supplies the tracks as well. In the interview we talk about the new song structure and how...

Zubin Gadhoke is a co-founder and producer for Olympus Projects, which is a management and consulting agency that provides artists with help in the day-to-day operations and development of their businesses. In the interview we talked about artist branding, building social authority, creating a new industry sound, the power of SoundCloud, and much more. The intro takes a look at the YouTube’s frequ...

Rick Goetz has been a a major label A&R representative, a music supervisor, an artist manager, a bass player, and record label owner. He has worked for Lava/Atlantic, Elektra, and EMI, with projects by artists that include Kid Rock, Matchbox 20 and Sarah Brightman, and on television shows including Sesame Street and Psychic Detectives. Since leaving the major labels in 2007, he has handled mus...

David Kalt launched the super popular gear site Reverb.com in 2013 after growing frustrated with the process of buying and selling guitars on eBay. To get it started, David raised more than $47 million in funding from investors ranging from Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen and country star Brad Paisley to tech leaders like Eric Ries and Max Levchin. Since then, Reverb has sold more than $1 billion...

My guest today is Robert Siciliano, who started as a music recording engineer, but by almost a quirk of fate got a temp job at NBC that turned into a career. In the interview we talked about making the transition to postproduction, the turnaround time for an audio job, dealing with audio that isn’t well-recorded. On the intro I'll take a look at Google and YouTube’s streaming numbers, and the...

After years as a touring pedal steel guitarist with everyone from Dan Fogelberg and Phil Everly to Pat Boone and Bobby Womack, Dave Pearlman opened his Rotund Rascal Studio in North Hollywood in 1979. To save money on outside techs, Dave began to do repairs and modifications on classic mics like the U47, 67 and AKG C12. His side business became so successful that Dave closed the studio after 25 ye...

David Frangioni started his music career as a drummer, but soon became a pioneer in MIDI technology. This lead him into the studio as an engineer and producer for dozens of top artists including The Stones, Ringo Starr, Aerosmith, Elton John, Sting, Carl Palmer, Journey, Styx, KISS, Phil Collins, Shakira, Ozzy Osbourne, and more. David is also the founder of Audio One, one of the most successful a...

My guest today is Michael Abbott, who started in television audio doing front-of-house sound for projects like the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympics and the Academy awards, to working for the major television networks as a staff mixer on a variety of shows. Michael now heads the sound design, engineering and consulting company All Ears, where he not only co-ordinates the audio for th...

Ritch Esra is the former promotion coordinator for A&M Records and director of A&R for Arista Records, where he worked extensively with the publishing and songwriting communities for material for Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Melissa Manchester, Tanya Tucker, Jennifer Warnes and Jermaine Jackson, and various major motion pictures. Since 1992, Ritch has been running the...