You're from Colombia?
I am, born and raised. I was born in Bogotá and I lived there for 16 years. My mom was working for UNICEF, and she got transferred to Bolivia when I was 16. I graduated from high school there. By then, I knew I wanted to do audio engineering.
How did you know that?
My mom told me to be an audio engineer. When I was born, my mom was a television producer. She would take me on set to the telenovela she was shooting. I remember being at recording studios with my mom since I was seven or eight. She'd be like, "Do you want to go inside the booth and do a recording for a young girl?" She'd have me overdubbing and doing voiceovers for her shows.
You learned the routine of it, to wait for the cue and to put on the headphones?
I'd have an audio engineer saying, "Could you please get close to the microphone?" Very early on in my life I realized I was very musical. When Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York came out, I knew I wanted to play guitar. I really wanted to go to music school, but I never felt I was a performer. I can sing in tune, but I never thought I had the personality to be a singer. I was studying classical guitar, but I didn't see myself as a classical guitarist. The other thing is that, throughout my life, I've always been very handy at fixing things. When I was about to graduate, my mom said, "You know, there's a career called audio engineering. There's a career where you can blend those two." There weren't any universities in Bolivia that offered that program, but I moved to Chile and got into the Universidad de Chile – a huge university. They offered an audio engineering program inside the arts faculty. I lived in Chile for almost three years. Then one of the top universities in Bogotá had changed their audio engineering program into a five year music program, with a major in audio engineering. I basically had to start over. I was already two and a half years in from Chile, so I ended up doing seven and a half years in undergrad programs. I was working at a post-production house as an audio professional already while I was still a student, and I was also teaching audio basics as a student. I was also a sound designer for a couple of movies, one of which [Contracorriente] got picked by Peru for their selection for the Oscars as a foreign film; a French/Peruvian/Colombian production. I was dealing with real clients. There was a Colombian audio engineer, Jose Pupo, who had just come back from the McGill University program in Canada. Martha De Francisco is one of the head professors at the McGill program; she's Colombian. She came to Bogotá, where we had several workshops with her. Her assistant, Jose, who had been working with her for a while, came back to Colombia and was doing some recordings, and he chose me to assist. After that, he was going to do the first big classical professional, all-in album for the Bogotá Philharmonic, with a real budget and distribution deal. They took me again to be the assistant recording engineer. That's how I entered the classical recording world as an audio engineer.
Were they tracking sections of the score and editing later, or was it a full performance?
It was a full performance, with some retakes. That special record was orchestral renditions of Colombian folklore. The arrangements included Colombian instruments. By the end of that recording session, I was sleeping one or two hours a day. We were obviously running on a budget and tight on schedule. We had 120 mics to set up. I didn't really do the studio thing, like being the proper studio intern. I had a different internship approach doing post-production; I was dealing with real clients and real television networks with real, paid expectations. Then, on the other hand, I was dealing with real recordings of classical sessions of people who were expecting a lot. Classical musicians are interesting; their relationship with technology is very weird. They hate the presence of the microphone, because it's all about them being on stage, which I understand.
What happened after school in Bogotá?
When I graduated, I kept working with Jose Pupo. There's a big festival in Colombia for classical music in Cartagena [Cartagena International Music Festival]. It's a beautiful city, and they bring the top classical performers from all over the world. It's a once-a-year program – four to five concerts a day, for a span of two weeks.
You were out of school and working?
Out of school, but I couldn't find more work in Bogotá so I went back to teaching at a college. I was producing bands, as well as recording and mixing, but it was at a very limited level. Not because there wasn't a scene there, but because people would see me, which still happens. "Can you do what you say you do? Are you actually good at doing it?" That happened 12 years ago, and I'm still getting the same questions. I've gotten used to it. If I'm in a venue and I have a guy who's assisting me – who might look much younger than I am – the fact that they're going to say hello to him, and introduce themselves to him, that tells you something about what people are expecting.
It's so annoying.
Then again, I understand I'm not the face of audio.
The sexism is going to go away someday. That's my belief.
I hope. I've suffered through it, in a way. That's why I'm very supportive of every single initiative that comes in, or that I hear about [that champions women in the industry]. She Is The Music, SoundGirls, Women's Audio Mission, Women In Music – you name it. The farther south you get from Miami, the more sexist it is going to get. That's our culture; we can't deny it. It got to the point where I wasn't doing the job that I wanted. Jose hired me to be the post-production supervisor for a reality show [Protagonistas de Nuestra Tele]. I was the second in charge. We had a team of 20 audio engineers, and they were all under my wing. We had 15 people living underneath a roof, and everybody was wired. We had about 70 mics all around the studio house where they were living. The audio engineers would do shifts of eight hours. After everything was shot and recorded, I was doing post-production on that. I got the episode delivered at 2:30 p.m., and by 9:30 p.m. the episode was airing for millions of viewers in Colombia. It was very hard work.
How did you end up in Nashville and going to MTSU [Middle Tennessee State University]?
I always wanted to be at a studio. Things have drastically changed in Colombia, so what I'm saying may sound irrelevant to people now; but back then there were two places where you could go and see an SSL console, or a Neve console, or gear. I didn't see one at my university. Nowadays they have the biggest audio program in Latin America. Back then we only had three computers for the entire program! I thought about going to McGill, because it made sense. Parallel to this, I was starting to get professional label mixes in Colombia; reggaeton, back in 2010. I wanted to get a different perspective. Jose was like, "You're not McGill material at all! You're going to drive yourself away from pop music and be stuck in this whole musical jazz super-strict world. But I've heard about a program in Tennessee." I started looking into it and thought it was perfect. But I had no money to go. In our career, we don't make a lot of money.
If I'd gone to a college in a different state than I grew up, it would have cost me more.
When you are an international student they ask you to have a lot of money in your bank account, just to get the visa. I thought, "I'm going to write to them and say, 'Here's my biography and resume. I really want to go there, but I have no money.' Let's see what they can come up with." They actually offered me a full tuition. They have a program that's an assistantship tuition. I became a graduate teacher; an assistant. So, I did the graduate program for three years.
What did you think of going to there from a totally different culture and school?
I loved it. The audio engineering program was a dream to me. There's an API Vision [console], an [SSL] Duality [console], two SSL 900 [consoles]. Any mics that you want. The rooms were beautiful. Because I was a tutor and working as a graduate teacher, I had the chance to stay at the studios and do more studio time than anybody else. For me, it was a dream come true. Then I started interacting with the whole Nashville community, going to shows, and meeting people. It was perfect.
