Meet Brandon Allshouse | Audio Mastering Engineer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Brandon Allshouse and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Brandon, any advice for those thinking about whether to keep going or to give up?
Artistic/Creative career fields are brutal. At a younger age I always just presumed that we can do it if we put our mind to it, and while this is true, rarely do others adequately prepare you for the constant rejection we face in this field. I learned this early on when I started my music studio. Constantly you will ask yourself whether you are good enough and will most likely measure yourself up to other people’s success. This is commonly referred to as “imposter syndrome” and what i’ve learned in my time is that this still happens to those who we would consider successful.

If you love what you do, you’ll find happiness in it. I love working on music with people. My mission statement is more or less “If you make rad music, I want to work on it with you”, and I tell artists and musicians this all the time. Some might say, what if my music isn’t rad, to which I would respond, “it doesnt sound like you believe in yourself then?” If we have a mentality of success, we will ultimately be successful. If being in a career field as brutal as music can be constantly makes you upset and discourage, I would ask why do you continue on with something that you find little to no pleasure in? Sometimes what we may want is ultimately not the plan for our lives. Sometimes we may just be going at it in a wrong direction and need to refocus ourselves and our plan.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Audio engineering, specifically mastering, is a mysterious thing to a lot of people, even other audio engineers who don’t do it. To those outside the audio community, Mastering is like a final quality control check of someone’s music before going out to distribution. We routinely check for errors that may have been made, such as pop and click noises, any bad edits that may have slipped by, and even excessive distortion that could have been caused by a number of issues. It’s our job to then help clean this up and/or advise the mix engineer on fixing these issues on their end. Once that is taken care (and sometimes there is no big issues like these), we can proceed to tonal balancing, making the mix sound the best it can, and when needed, bringing the volume of the track up to the desired level in order to compete with other releases.

As a lot of other mastering engineers, I cut my teeth on recording and mixing for bands and artists. Eventually you find yourself either needing to play the role of a mastering engineer out of necessity of a groups budget, or just because you want an all hands on approach. This eventually led to others asking me to master songs for them. Through this, I really came to appreciate the fine art and detail of the craft and devoted my time to focusing just on audio mastering, and referring musicians off to other recording and mix engineers.

Its never an easy path in this career field and anyone who told you it was, is probably lying, or was a one in a million case with a ton of help on the back end. It has its up’s and downs for sure, even today.

Lessons I’ve learned along the way would be not to trust everything you see online in terms of success. Just because it looks like everyone around you is mad successful, doesn’t mean that is actually the case. Music is a tough enough world to make it in to begin with, and social media just makes it extremely easy to only show the upside of ones life, or in some cases, completely fabricate a false view of success. I’ve seen this many times before, and to someone starting out, it can be really deflating wondering why you can’t attain the same level of success. Stick with it if you love it, it takes a long time to build a music business up. It’s a lot more of who you know and the networking, then it may be of what you know. In other words, you could be the most talented producer or musician around but if no one knows who you are, how do you ever expect to gain traction and success?

Steel House Mastering will always be about providing artists and producers with a great experience. I’ve known far too many artists say they had a disappointing experience with other engineers and I never want to be associated with that. We all work very hard and I want to show people that I truly care about their goal and vision for their music.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Greenville SC is a fantastic city and one of the fastest growing cities in the country currently. Its become a very art and food forward city, so for a foodie such as myself, if you are coming for a visit we are eating lots of food! Papi’s Taco’s in the art district has some seriously great taco’s. The horchata is just the ticket on a nice hot sunny day as well. From there you can easily walk through some art studio’s and support local artists, all while taking in a view of downtowns Fall’s Park. Make sure you walk over the single suspension bridge and take photos of the waterfall!

Coffee Underground is a must and during midweek/weekend’s make sure to catch one of the stand up comedy shows held there. There are a ton of local breweries as well, a lot of them holding concerts on weekends. No shortage of great beer here!

If you love walking or cycling, there is no better way to see some of the sights of the Greenville area than taking the Swamp Rabbit Trail which spans 11 miles through a few parks, all the way from Greenville to the town of Travelers Rest.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
From very early on in my audio career I met William Bowser over at Quality Touch Studio. Will has such a passion and a drive and has been inspiring to watch grow in his business too. It’s not often you meet someone with a level of passion and is able to keep that, propelling himself towards success daily. We have shared tips and tricks with each other, advised gear purchases, and just general moral boosting talk. It’s so important to find a close community of friends and colleagues to get you through the rough days

Website: www.steelhousemastering.com

Instagram: www.instagram.com/brandon_steelhousemastering

Image Credits
Brandon Hart