Why I’m doing this..

 I was 16 years old when I experienced my first recording session. I was drumming in an admittedly bad band in Seattle and had saved months of my Burger King salary to be able to go into a studio to make what I was sure would be the next hit record. We had a four-hour slot, after hours, in which to load our gear in, get set up, get sounds and start tracking. After all the overhead, we probably had two hours left to record our two songs – at a cost of about one day of burger flipping per minute. The engineer no doubt saw us for what we were and had little interest in anything other than getting it over with and going home. At the end of the night we walked out with our heads low, carrying a shitty sounding tape.

In short, the experience was awful, and I vowed to myself then that if I ever had the opportunity to have a studio, I would do things differently.

I continued playing in countless bands, first in Seattle, then Boston, then San Francisco. My chance to pursue my recording engineer dream came when Digidesign released the digi001 in 1998. This was the first viable recording device that was available to the consumer, and I quickly assembled a rack of gear that my good friend Brian Mello dubbed the "Craftphonic Mobile Recordifier." I was hooked pretty much immediately, and it wasn't long before I built my first studio in the garage of my San Francisco house - the original Boxer Lodge. It was a modest studio with a tiny live room and an even tinier control room, but it was mostly soundproof and provided me with the opportunity to record numerous records and hone my skills.

I never lost sight of my ultimate vision, which was to establish an environment completely unlike my first terrible recording experience, a place where artists can wake up, grab a cup of coffee, walk in and start recording. That vision became a reality when I built my second studio in a house in the hills above Napa Valley. This studio would be nothing like the original Boxer Lodge. I worked with a contractor who had previously built both Phil Lesh's and Boz Scaggs’s studios to construct a 437-square-foot live room with vaulted ceilings, a dedicated control room, and wiring to overflow into the main house for additional tracking/isolation possibilities.

The new Boxer Lodge opened in 2019, and a year later, as the word-of-mouth business picked up, I decided to leave my day job as a software engineer to make records full time. In the spring of 2022, seeking to refine my mixing skills, I travelled to France to study with Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Rolling Stones, The National) as part of the Mix with the Masters program. That trip proved so valuable that I returned in the fall of 2022 to study with Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, Kacey Musgraves, The War On Drugs).

In just a few years, dozens of artists have recorded at Boxer Lodge, creating music in a fully equipped space dedicated entirely to them-- whether for a single or multi-day session--and having an experience about as far from my first recording session as it’s possible to get.