Stuck on Sound

In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes his friend and fellow Recording Academy governor Audrey Martinovich, co-owner of Audio for the Arts Recording Studios in Madison, Wisconsin, and Professor of Music Production at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Audrey has built a career recording everything from chamber orchestras to comedy specials, bringing a rare combination of technical depth and genuine warmth to the conversation.

Audrey traces her path back to childhood, watching her father play campfire-style guitar and singing in every choir and band her school offered. She initially set her sights on becoming a choir teacher, until a documentary about the band Dresden Dolls opened her eyes to live sound and pulled her toward engineering instead. Joey and Audrey talk candidly about what it took for a young woman to break into an industry that has historically had few women and few people with disabilities in leadership roles, and why loving music enough to feel incomplete without it is the real prerequisite for the work.

The conversation spans Audrey's eclectic body of work, from recording the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra and running live sound for Reebok on a barge floating in Lake Monona, to engineering stand-up comedy albums for Comedy Central and scoring sessions for film composers. She and Joey dig into the textures of jazz recording, the value of microphone placement and room tone over compression, and her work mentoring newer engineers through SoundGirls, GRAMMY U, and Girls Rock Camp, as well as her role as Secretary and DEI Ambassador for the Recording Academy's Chicago Chapter.

The episode closes on a theme Audrey clearly practices as much as she preaches: protecting your time. She describes setting firm working hours after years of grinding sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, and Joey applauds her discipline as a lesson every working musician and engineer needs to hear. It is a fitting note for an episode about building a sustainable, generous career in an industry that rarely hands one to you.

Audrey's Studio Website: Audio for the Arts - Madison, WI

SoundGirls' Website: SoundGirls- Empowering the Next Generation of Women in Audio

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STATEMENT FROM THE FAMILY OF JOEY STUCKEY

It is with profound sadness that we announce that Joey Stuckey passed away suddenly on October 17, 2026, in Madison, WI, at the age of 53.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests contributions to:

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital

or MusiCares

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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joey@joeystuckey.com

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey talks with Ben Medina, the guitarist for 10,000 Maniacs based in Rockford, Illinois. Ben is in five other projects besides the Maniacs, from country and R&B to a pop-rock original band, and he describes a career built on never being able to say no to a good gig.

Ben traces his love of music back to a toddler-sized record player, but says the moment that made him want to be a musician was seeing 10,000 Maniacs on their first Saturday Night Live appearance, which he calls his Ed Sullivan moment. His father taught him basic chords on a guitar that had belonged to Ben's bluegrass-playing grandfather, a full-time musician in Western Colorado who died before Ben was born. Ben learned the rest by watching the Maniacs on TV, and he did not start formal study until 2018, when he began working with Chicago blues legend Pistol Pete and fell in love with music theory.

The conversation centers on how a lifelong fan ended up on stage with the band. Ben had attended nearly every Maniacs show in the Chicago area since 1995, so when the band needed someone to cover two dates in 2024, he already knew the songs. An audition led to a full-time job. Ben explains how he keeps the fan and the performer separate on stage, why the band plays without amps, using processors instead, why he prefers solid-state amps like his rare Roland GA-212, and how he came out of a brief 2023 retirement from music, which he regretted almost immediately. He and Joey also compare guitar collections, talk about the Les Paul Foundation's studio, and swap new music recommendations.

The episode closes on the state of the business: music oversaturation, the loss of music as a shared experience, and Ben's firm stance against generative AI in music, which Joey meets with a call for guardrails and hope that people will return to music made by humans, for humans.

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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joey@joeystuckey.com

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey talks with Shelby Lock, an audio engineer, producer, composer, and the owner of Silver Moon Sound, a boutique recording studio in California's Santa Cruz Mountains built around acoustic and classical music. Shelby has more than 250 commercial recording credits and a growing catalog of her own compositions, including a piece premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2022, but the conversation ranges far beyond her resume.

Shelby traces her path back to starting piano at seven, drifting away from it, and finding her way back through composing her own music. A pivotal moment came at a Christian rock camp in Nashville, where an instructor named Tony Hooper told her she needed to learn to record her own songs. She bought Logic Express 8 in 2008, taught herself on borrowed gear, and eventually pursued a double degree in audio engineering and composition at Belmont University before landing at the Chicago College of Performing Arts, where a graduate assistantship running the electro acoustic studios turned into her first professional engineering job.

The heart of the conversation covers the studio Shelby built on her own terms, one that rejects the dark, cave-like aesthetic of a typical recording space in favor of natural light and full wheelchair accessibility. She and Joey discuss a striking Dolby Atmos project that combined a solo piano recording in California with a string orchestra recorded remotely in Venezuela, and Shelby explains the origin of her advocacy work, including founding the Audio Engineering Society's accessibility subcommittee after a mystery illness left her using a wheelchair. She introduces the concept of clean air accessibility, using hospital-grade filtration and emerging far-UVC technology to protect immunocompromised clients and herself.

The episode closes with Shelby's sharp, well-reasoned stance on generative AI, which she argues is built on the uncompensated work of the artists whose styles it imitates, along with her closing rebuttal to the idea that nobody wants to learn an instrument anymore. The conversation moves fluidly between technical craft, disability advocacy, and a genuine passion for making music the hard, honest way.

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

Shadow Sound Studio Website
joey@joeystuckey.com

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In episode 24 of Stuck on Sound, host Joey Stuckey welcomes his dear friend Daniel Keller, a musician, audio engineer, producer, and educator, for a conversation about building a creative life through curiosity and a willingness to learn. Daniel traces his journey from finding refuge in music and sculpture as a teenager to playing in bands, working at Los Angeles recording studios, producing artists in Germany, and teaching at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Along the way, the two explore his love of bass, the lessons of a largely self-taught career, and why helping an artist deliver an honest performance matters more than chasing technical perfection.

The conversation turns to Daniel’s Artist Brain Collective and his work helping artists navigate self-doubt, comparison, and imposter syndrome. He shares the personal experience that led him to a powerful realization: “I’m enough.” Joey brings his own perspective as a blind musician and brain tumor survivor to their discussion of resilience, critical listening, and choosing joy. Together, they consider how limitations can inspire better music, where AI can support creativity and accessibility, and why human expression should remain at the center of the process. Filled with studio stories and the easy humor of two longtime friends, this episode encourages anyone learning to trust their creative voice.

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

Shadow Sound Studio Website
joey@joeystuckey.com

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with his dear friend and fellow Recording Academy Atlanta board member Diane Durrett. Diane is a singer, songwriter, producer, Georgia treasure, and, as Atlanta Magazine put it, a modern-day Renaissance woman. Joey and Diane have a warm, wide-ranging conversation about a life built on original music, community service, and a stubborn refusal to quit.

Diane traces her musical beginning to her mother, a choir director and soloist at Second Ponce de Leon Church on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, who put her in front of a choir before she was old enough to wonder whether she wanted to be there. From children's choir, she moved into the early wave of contemporary Christian music, forming a rock band with guitarist Doug Keys and eventually playing churches across Georgia, including one unforgettable night in Jonesboro where their Marshall-stack volume prompted a gracious host to observe that everyone praises the Lord in their own way. She studied at Mercer and Georgia State, played in cover bands, and finally found her footing when the cover band she had started fired her. She took it as a sign. From that moment on, Diane has made only original music: ten American Roots albums, including her 2025 release Sweet Georgia Blues, whose singles Chasing Sunsets and The Sweet Spot earned placement on Apple Music's Best New Blues Songs. Along the way, she has shared stages with Sting, Tina Turner, Faith Hill, and Gregg Allman, co-written with William Bell, Shawn Mullins, Oliver Wood of the Wood Brothers, and Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, and co-produced her new EP American Quilt Sessions with multi-Grammy Award-winning producer Kabir Sehgal.

The conversation turns to Diane's decade of service to the Recording Academy's Atlanta chapter, including her current role as chapter president, and her partnership with Songwriter Hall of Famer Tricky Stewart as co-chair of the Songwriter and Composer wing. Joey shares how he, Diane, and Tricky all ended up in the same room at Tricky's Atlanta studio one day, writing with Ed Roland of Collective Soul, and what it means to find creative collaborators you trust completely. Diane also speaks candidly about her commitment to keeping her studio and sessions clean and focused, a professional standard born from watching the drug culture of the 1980s and 90s take its toll, and about pursuing music without needing the rock and roll mythology that surrounds it.

The episode closes on something deeply personal. Diane's song "All Is Well" was written about her mother, the first liver transplant patient in the state of Georgia, and her grandmother's steady mantra through that crisis found Joey at a moment when he needed it most. He was performing at the same event as Diane, horribly ill backstage from complications related to his brain tumor, and her performance of that song from the stage reached him in a way he had not anticipated or expected. It is a quiet, remarkable ending to an episode full of joy, humor, and craft, a reminder that the songs we make for one reason can do something entirely different for someone we love.

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

Shadow Sound Studio Website
joey@joeystuckey.com

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes Gary Gottlieb. Gary is an AES Past President and Fellow, longtime professor, textbook author, New York studio engineer, and a man whose forty-year career spans so many disciplines that Joey jokes he must be a thousand years old. Joey and Gary have a generous and wide-ranging conversation about how the audio world works, how it is changing, and what it means to give back after a lifetime of doing it all.

Gary's origin story runs through a drumming career he was self-aware enough to abandon early. His cousin, studio drummer Barry Lazarowicz, took a teenage Gary to see Billy Cobham perform. Somewhere between watching Cobham's four limbs seem to multiply, Gary decided his future was behind a different set of controls. His cousin also took him to sessions at New York studios like A&R, where Gary found himself ignoring the musicians entirely and watching the engineer: the slight turn of a knob, the way the vocal just got a little brighter. He eventually knocked on the doors of a hundred New York studios and landed a coffee-and-garbage job at Counterpoint. When owner Jerry Raggevoy installed a pair of brand-new SSL 6000E consoles, Gary did something no one else thought to do: he took the manuals home. He came back the only person in New York who knew how to run the SSL computer. Within months, he was being called into major mix sessions across the city, not because he was a great mixer, but because he could make the room's most powerful new tool do what everyone else needed it to do. The rest followed from there.

From the New York studio floor, Gary built a career that expanded in every direction. Thirty years in education (including fifteen as a professor and department chair at Webster University), music criticism, broadcast work at WEQX (one of America's first alternative rock stations), sound design, and sound reinforcement. He has chaired the AES Historical, Conference, and Events Coordination Committees, served as Regional Vice President, and remained a central voice in AES leadership for more than twenty-five years. His two most recent books, both second editions released with Routledge Press, are Shaping Sound in the Studio and Beyond and How Does it Sound Now? Legendary Engineers and Vintage Gear — an interview collection with some of the defining figures of the past eight decades of recorded music. Joey lobbies him, cheerfully and at some length, to make the latter an audiobook.

The conversation closes on AI, a subject Gary approaches with a nuanced honesty that cuts through both the boosterism and the panic. He doesn't like it, he says plainly, and he is genuinely concerned about the dilution of artist royalties on streaming platforms awash in AI-generated content. But he tells his students to learn it, get out in front of it, and make it do the boring work so they can focus on the creative work, citing engineer David Bowles, who uses AI to mark edit points in live recordings rather than scanning hours of tape himself. Gary closes with news that he is, for the third time in his career, retired, now living in Mexico, heading to the AES show in Nashville in October and the Latin American AES convention in Lima, Peru shortly after. His friends, he admits, no longer believe the retirement will stick.

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

Shadow Sound Studio Website
joey@joeystuckey.com

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with his dear friend and mentor John Krivit. John is Past President of the Audio Engineering Society, an Emerson College faculty member, founder of the Hey Audio Student Facebook Group, and one of the audio world's most tireless advocates for education and international connection. Joey's conversation with John ranges from a Tascam 388 in a Boston apartment to a broken set of discs in a Colombian granddaughter's hands.

John traces his unlikely entry into audio from rock bands in a Michigan college dorm through a stint working for the notorious music industry figure Morris Levy at a Boston record store, a brief detour through advertising, and a fateful decision to buy a Tascam 388 and start recording anyone who would call. For ten years he built a demo studio, raised his rates a little each month, and eventually started teaching at a Boston college. He expected his career to end in exposure as a fraud when his department chair assigned him to run an AES student chapter. Instead, the job that terrified him became the foundation of everything that followed. By simply staying curious, including inviting a wax cylinder demonstrator, a special agent from the FBI, and producers who had worked with Sly Stone and Jaco Pastorius, John built a reputation and an educational ecosystem that carried him, fifteen years later, to the presidency of the worldwide AES.

The conversation centers on a story that connects acoustic physics to Colombian political history. At a 2019 AES conference in Lima, Peru, John met Professor Ricardo Esquillon of Javeriana University in Bogotá, who told him about Jorge Gaitán, the progressive mayor of Bogotá, champion of the working poor, and near-certain president of Colombia whose speeches were captured on direct-to-disc recordings until his assassination in April 1948 set off riots that left the city burning and the records smashed to pieces. In August 2024, John and Professor Esquillon brought those broken discs to the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Massachusetts and used the IRENE optical imaging system, one of only six in the world, to read sound from the fragments and restore the long-silenced voice of a man erased by violence. John also discusses the 2018 AES Conference on Audio Archiving, Preservation and Restoration at the Library of Congress, the wax cylinder recording demo that introduced this technology to many in the field, and the ongoing debates within the archiving community about how much restoration is too much.

The episode closes on John's vision of audio education as an act of bridge-building: the Pan-American Audio Educators Conference he founded at the World Trade Center in Mexico City, the Istanbul Audio Educators Conference on the horizon, the Hey Audio Student Facebook Group with its seventy-seven million views, and his simple belief that a professor from Macon, Georgia deserves to know a professor from Montevideo, and vice versa. He keeps a ukulele in his car at all times. The parallel is not accidental.

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes Jennifer Roe, the Executive Director of Folk Alliance International and a former Capitol Hill staffer turned passionate advocate for independent music and the artists who make it. The conversation focuses on community, advocacy, and what it actually takes to run one of the most beloved annual gatherings in American roots music.

Jennifer traces a career path that was anything but straight. She arrived in Washington, D.C. as a 21-year-old political science major, landing an internship in the office of Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, one of the authors of the Americans with Disabilities Act, before working on his presidential campaign and later at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. When she returned to Kansas City, she shifted into work with individuals with disabilities, eventually building an administrative services business whose clients included Folk Alliance International. What began as a professional relationship became a calling: Jennifer joined FAI full time in 2013 and has since grown its global membership to more than three thousand artists, record companies, publishers, managers, agents, and arts administrators.

At the heart of the conversation is Joey's firsthand enthusiasm for the FAI annual conference, which drew nearly 2,700 attendees in New Orleans, and Jennifer's explanation of what makes it unlike any other music industry gathering. Alongside 160 official showcase slots, hundreds of artists perform in private showcases: late-night, acoustic, intimate sets staged in hotel rooms where the beds have been moved aside to make room for an audience of devoted listeners. Jennifer walks through FAI's work on cultural equity, including the reconvening of its Cultural Equity Council to develop toolkits for members navigating issues of safety, representation, and access, and the organization's ongoing advocacy work, which has taken her back to Capitol Hill to make the economic case for arts funding in rooms where the language of cultural value alone rarely lands. The federal arts landscape is, as both she and Joey acknowledge, at a particularly fraught moment.

The episode closes with Joey's personal account of attending the FAI conference as a blind man navigating a large convention, and his genuine gratitude for how accessible and thoughtfully organized it was, a compliment Jennifer receives with characteristic warmth and a quick request for any improvement ideas listeners might have. She signs off with a reminder that folk.org is where to find showcase applications, membership information, and everything else FAI has to offer, and that the community it represents is worth showing up for.

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes his friend and colleague Grant Maloy Smith. Grant is a Billboard Top 10 Americana recording artist, MusicRow charting songwriter, Carnegie Hall performer, and one of the most thoughtful musical storytellers working in roots music today. The conversation covers history, craft, independence, and the unlikely intersection of visual art and song.

Grant traces his beginnings to a childhood shaped by his Kentucky grandmother's mountain music (Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers), a peculiar and beloved record collection that included both the Beatles and Captain Kangaroo, and a primary identity as a visual artist, a painter and drawer who seemed destined for art school until, one month before graduating high school, he watched the shyest kid in his class hold a ring of classmates spellbound with a guitar and a song. Grant immediately went home and got himself a guitar. The rest, as he puts it, is history, though making that history took decades of serious work, self-taught music theory, a band that opened for the Guess Who and Steppenwolf, and an eventual commitment to the kind of research-driven Americana storytelling that has defined his most celebrated work.

The conversation digs into Grant's acclaimed American Stories trilogy: Dust Bowl, Appalachia, and Mississippi, each a thematically unified album accompanied by carefully researched liner notes and, in later editions, full hardcover books exploring the history behind every song. Grant explains how each project demands two to three years of deep archival research and writing, and how the series has grown with each installment, from a twelve-song debut with a pamphlet to a sixteen-song Mississippi accompanied by a substantial book. He also previews Wild West: American Stories, an ambitious two-LP vinyl box set with a nearly hundred-page hardcover book releasing on September 18, already available to order on his website at grant-maloy-smith.com, covering the full sweep of the American frontier from the Louisiana Purchase through Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, and beyond.

Joey and Grant close with a frank and affectionate exchange about the realities of the independent artist's life: the cost of touring, the challenge of original music venues, the joy of performing solo, and the deep satisfaction of continuing to make records that matter to the people who find them. Grant still designs his own album covers, still believes in the 180-gram vinyl record, and still makes music for the same reason he always has: because the story demands to be told.

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With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with Larry Villella, lifelong musician, Columbia University alumnus, and founder of ADK Microphones for a conversation that moves effortlessly between Boston recording studios, legendary jazz sessions, the obsessive craft of microphone design, and the pleasures of a life lived in a 500-year-old home in Lecce, Italy.

Larry's origin story begins with a piano at age five and a guitar at ten, and runs through church choirs, barbershop quartets, madrigal groups, and four vocal ensembles in high school before he landed at Columbia University with seventy-five dollars in his pocket and a guitar in one hand. A pivot to Boston — and to a makeshift recording school built around Renaissance Studios, funded by the great-grandson of Eli Lilly — set the course for everything that followed. The school's defining moment came when an instructor arrived one day and announced they would spend a week recording a new artist nobody had heard of. His name was Chick Corea. Larry and his colleagues documented the Circle group, Corea on piano, playing with drumsticks; Anthony Braxton on everything from sopranino saxophone to contrabass clarinet; Dave Holland; and Barry Altschul, an avant-garde experience that threw Larry into the deep end of professional recording and never let him go.

From those early sessions, Larry traces the path that led him to found ADK in 1998 with a clear and contrarian mission: not to clone vintage microphones, but to improve on them. Rather than treating classic tube mics of the late 1940s through early 1960s as the destination, ADK used them as a launchpad, refining capsule design, pursuing transformer combinations through years of testing, and building relationships with golden-eared beta testers like Chuck Ainley and Ronnie Brookshire to get the sound exactly right. The results speak for themselves: ADK microphones have found their way into the hands of Stevie Wonder, Sting, Ray Charles, the Manhattan Transfer, Amy Grant, and sixteen years of Jazz at Lincoln Center, among many others.

The episode closes with Larry describing his current life in Italy practicing Pilates, walking five million steps a year, playing jazz in search of a new band, and working remotely with the ADK team he handed to Miles Fulwider in 2023. He also shares plans for an upcoming live recording session at the legendary Les Paul Studio at United in Los Angeles — no click track, no isolation, just a room full of people making music together and letting it breathe.

Correction: Larry realized it was Chuck Ange, not George Lilly, who was the team leader and principal recordist on the 1971 Chick Corea sessions. He regrets his error.

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With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes multi-Grammy Award-winning producer, composer, and performer Lonnie Park for a candid and inspiring conversation about a career built on eclecticism, faith, hard work, and a refusal to be boxed in by genre or geography.

Lonnie's origin story is one of the most memorable in the podcast's run. He grew up in a deeply conservative Baptist home where rock and roll, in fact, virtually any contemporary music with a drumbeat, was forbidden. His first real encounter with rock music came when a friend handed him a copy of the Police's Synchronicity and dared him to explain what was so evil about it. Lonnie dutifully filled a notebook with objections. He was wrong about all of them. Years later, his path would come full circle in the most unexpected way: he ended up producing an album with Stewart Copeland of the Police, which went on to win a Grammy. He told Copeland the story. Copeland laughed his ass off.

Based in Freeville, New York, a one-square town in the middle of nowhere, Lonnie built a career by taking every client in every genre who came through the door, accumulating expertise across jazz, gospel, new age, children's music, world, country, folk, and progressive metal. He holds three Grammy Awards and eight Grammy nominations, as well as a United Nations Action Award, and his work has repeatedly placed him on the Billboard charts. The conversation explores what it means to produce with genuine personal investment. Lonnie describes getting so immersed in a project that he sometimes has to remind himself that the music is not his, and that it is the level of care that separates a good record from a great one.

Joey and Lonnie close with an honest exchange about the economics and mental health realities of life as an independent artist and producer, the promises and perils of AI in creative work, and the advice Lonnie gives anyone who asks how to make it: forget about making it, and remember why you started. Almost every meaningful break in his career, he notes, came not from strategy but from showing up fully and letting the work speak.

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With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

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In Episode 16 of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey reconnects with Tim Duffy, co-founder of the Music Maker Foundation, for a soulful conversation about roots music, cultural preservation, dignity, and the artists whose voices deserve to be heard.

Tim reflects on meeting Joey years ago at Adam’s Lounge in Georgia, one of those real musical places where history, community, and raw talent all collide. From there, he shares the mission behind Music Maker: supporting traditional American musicians not only by recording and presenting their work, but by helping meet real day-to-day needs so they can continue creating.

The episode explores Tim’s decades of field recording, artist relationships, juke joints, gospel traditions, blues culture, and the hidden musical depth of places like Georgia, North Carolina, and the rural South. He discusses Music Maker’s work with hundreds of artists, thousands of performances, museum exhibitions, international tours, and a catalog built around preserving voices that might otherwise never reach the wider world.

Joey and Tim also dig into the modern challenges facing musicians, from the collapse of old record-business models to social media pressure, AI music, sync disruption, and the difficulty of building sustainable careers in an attention economy. But the heart of the conversation is hope: music as healing, purpose, rehabilitation, and a way of restoring dignity.

The result is a moving episode about friendship, service, preservation, and the belief that America’s deepest musical treasures are often found far from the spotlight.

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With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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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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With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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In Episode 14 of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with acclaimed producer, musician, author, and creative strategist Michael Beinhorn for a wide-ranging conversation about records, risk, taste, technology, and what a producer is really there to do.

Michael reflects on his early years co-founding the New York musical collective Material with Bill Laswell, his work on Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” and the path that led him into producing era-defining records for artists including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Hole, Marilyn Manson, Soul Asylum, Korn, and others. Joey opens with a personal story about discovering, after meeting Michael, that he had produced one of Joey’s favorite albums of all time: Soundgarden’s Superunknown.

From there, the conversation explores the deeper craft of record-making: how to recognize the emotional center of a song, why great records often require discomfort, and how a producer must sometimes serve as captain, translator, psychologist, and truth-teller. Michael talks candidly about band dynamics, the pressure of high-stakes sessions, the danger of mediocrity, and the importance of helping artists push beyond their first or easiest ideas.

Joey and Michael also discuss the evolution of recording from live band performance to modern editing, the creative value of limitations, and the difference between using technology as a tool versus allowing it to flatten human expression. Michael offers a nuanced take on AI, arguing that the real issue is not simply the tool itself, but the way it is being marketed, deployed, and used to replace rather than deepen human creativity.

The episode closes with Michael’s current work in remote production and artist development, showing that the producer’s core job has not changed: listen deeply, respond honestly, and help artists make the strongest work they are capable of making.

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With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey welcomes multiple Grammy Award-winning producer, engineer, and mixer Ross Hogarth for a rich conversation about a four-decade career spent in the company of some of the greatest artists in rock, blues, reggae, and beyond. From the downtown New York punk scene to the California studios where legends are made, Ross's story is one of relentless curiosity, hard-won instincts, and an unshakable belief that music is chosen — not pursued.

Ross traces his beginnings as a drummer in New York, where the couch took a beating from soup spoons before he ever touched a real kit, through his years as a guitarist in bands, a student of folk music in the company of Pete Seeger's circle, and eventually a roadie and guitar tech for David Lindley, Jackson Browne, Mick Fleetwood, and Jim Keltner in Santa Cruz and Southern California. He shares how showing up — on time, prepared, and willing — opened doors that no resume ever could, and how the discipline of the drummer's relationship with time would become the secret weapon of his production and engineering career.

The conversation moves through some of the most celebrated sessions of Ross's career, including his Grammy wins with Quincy Jones and Keb' Mo', the making of Van Halen's A Different Kind of Truth — the band's first record with David Lee Roth in twenty-eight years — and his Grammy-winning work with Ziggy Marley, TajMo, and Edgar Winter. Ross speaks candidly about the craft of analog recording, the near-surgical precision required to punch in and out on tape, and why his background as a musician gave him an irreplaceable edge in communicating with artists on either side of the glass.

Joey and Ross close with a conversation about the value of imperfection in recorded music — the grinding and clanking of the B3 organ, the tempo that breathes between the verse and the chorus, the odd bar that gives a lyric room to land. Ross makes a heartfelt case that the soul of a great record lives in those human moments, and that the goal of any producer worth the title is not perfection, but presence.

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with the legendary Richard Blade. He's an Oxford-educated DJ, bestselling author, actor, and one of the most beloved voices in American radio. The episode features a wide-ranging conversation about music, adventure, identity, and the power of saying yes even when the odds are stacked against you.

Richard traces his journey from Torquay, England, where a transistor radio and a love of music captured his imagination, through his years DJing at Oxford University colleges, touring Europe with a battered MG Midget packed full of gear, and eventually landing in Los Angeles just as the post-punk and new wave scene was exploding on the Sunset Strip. Joey and Richard dive deep into the storied history of KROQ, the station Richard would help define throughout the 1980s — including the remarkable story of how he got his foot in the door by agreeing to work for free and quit his paying job at the same time. Richard also shares the behind-the-scenes origin of his iconic name, which he stumbled into almost by accident from a billboard for Blade Runner moments before going live on air.

The conversation turns to Richard's decades-long tenure hosting his daily show on SiriusXM's 1st Wave, his passion for the artists and music that shaped a generation, and the deep connection he maintains with listeners who grew up on the sounds he championed. Joey and Richard also discuss Richard's busy life as a writer, including his autobiography World in My Eyes, five novels, and two non-fiction music books featuring conversations with some of music's biggest names, all of which debuted at number one on Amazon's bestseller lists.

Richard reflects on receiving his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in June 2024, with Billy Idol and Jimmy Kimmel at his side, and the humbling sense of gratitude that comes from a lifetime spent doing exactly what you love. The episode closes on a deeply personal note, with a discussion about small acts of human kindness and the importance of giving back, a philosophy that informs both Richard's public work and his private life.

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With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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In this episode of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with his dear friend Lachi, recording artist, music executive, Disability Culture champion, Recording Academy National Trustee, and author, for a conversation that is by turns hilarious, moving, and genuinely revelatory. Born legally blind, Lachi has spent her career using music, advocacy, and storytelling to bring Disability Culture into the mainstream, and this episode captures her doing all three at once.

Joey and Lachi open with an enthusiastic discussion of her book I Identify as Blind, published by Penguin Random House, which uses humor, candor, and celebrity interviews to celebrate and amplify disability identity and pride. The two compare notes on growing up blind in a world that rarely made space for them, navigating schools, social circles, and industries that were not designed with them in mind, and Lachi describes how it was only after finding success in the music business that she realized she could not be the only one, and that finding community was both urgent and transformative.

From there, Lachi tells the origin story of RAMPD (Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities), which grew out of a 2021 Recording Academy panel that went viral during COVID and sparked a flood of messages from music professionals who had been masking their disabilities for years. She explains how RAMPD now works with Netflix, Live Nation, the GRAMMYs, and others to build disability-inclusive programming across the industry, and how it has become a vital network for hundreds of creative professionals who previously had nowhere to turn.

The episode includes a powerful history lesson on the disability rights movement, as Lachi shares the story of Judy Heumann, Brad Lomax, and the 28-day sit-in that ultimately led to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a story made possible in part by the Black Panthers, whose crucial contribution Lachi is committed to making sure is never forgotten. The conversation is a reminder that music and advocacy are not separate vocations but two expressions of the same impulse: to be fully heard.

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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In Episode 10 of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with music marketing strategist, author, educator, and Cyber PR founder Ariel Hyatt for a practical and deeply human conversation about what it really takes to build a lasting music career in the digital age.

Ariel traces her path from a childhood shaped by theater, art, dyslexia, and music to the early days of independent music marketing, where she cut her teeth in scrappy grassroots scenes before launching her own publicity company at age 23. That journey eventually became Cyber PR, where Ariel has spent decades helping artists make sense of a music business that never stops changing.

Joey and Ariel dig into some of the most urgent questions facing artists today: how to understand your artistic identity, how to find the right fans, why fake numbers and playlist-driven “buzz marketing” can leave artists with no real audience, and why 200 genuine fans can matter more than thousands of empty streams. Ariel makes the case for moving from shallow visibility to meaningful connection, what she calls shifting from buzz to bond.

The conversation also explores the overwhelming pace of modern content, the loss of music as a focused listening experience, the value of physical releases and fan experiences, and why artists need a plan, a team, and a clear sense of what they are actually building.

Later, Joey and Ariel discuss AI in the music space, where Ariel offers a balanced view: useful as a tool for marketing, organization, and efficiency, but dangerous when it floods platforms with more low-value content and makes it even harder for human artists to be heard.

The result is an essential episode for independent artists who want to stop chasing vanity metrics and start building a more intentional, sustainable, fan-centered career.

You can find more information about Ariel and her work at:

https://arielhyatt.com/

https://cyberprmusic.com/

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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In Episode 9 of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with educator, artist, writer, and longtime Berklee professor Ellen Francese for a deeply thoughtful conversation about creativity, self-worth, teaching, illness, community, and the human need to make art.

Ellen traces her creative roots to a childhood shaped by curiosity and artistic freedom, where there was no “right” or “wrong” way to explore visual art, dance, theater, writing, or music. That foundation leads into one of the episode’s central themes: the danger of perfectionism, and the tragedy of artists feeling they need permission to create.

Joey and Ellen also discuss what she has seen in students over more than two decades of teaching, including rising anxiety, fear of failure, dependence on laptops and AI, and the deeper fear underneath it all: not belonging. Ellen frames creativity not as a luxury, but as a source of agency, identity, and connection.

The conversation moves into powerful personal territory as Ellen reflects on living with serious illness, bodybuilding as an act of resistance, and eventually shifting from a “warrior” relationship with illness to one of companionship. Joey and Ellen also explore self-worth, difference, community, and why truly loving others requires moving beyond our own reflection.

Later, Ellen makes a passionate case for art as essential to human survival, drawing on historical examples of people creating under extreme oppression and deprivation. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, her message is clear: to surrender our creative capacity is to give up something central to being human.

The result is a profound, moving episode about courage, humility, curiosity, and the sustaining power of art.

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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In Episode 8 of Stuck on Sound, Joey Stuckey sits down with producer, engineer, musician, and lifelong studio craftsman Thom “TK” Kidd for a wide-ranging conversation about career conviction, recording philosophy, studio psychology, gear obsession, and the changing role of technology in music.

TK traces his path back to a ninth-grade guidance counselor form where he wrote that he wanted to work in a recording studio, a goal that led him to an Atlanta internship just weeks after high school and eventually to becoming chief engineer of a multi-room facility by his 21st birthday. Along the way, he shares stories about mentors, early sessions, Peabo Bryson, Tom Wright, Cheshire Sound, and a vintage Neve desk that connects Atlanta studio history to records by Soundgarden and Korn.

Joey and TK also dig into the human side of record-making: why producers are often “psychiatrists,” how to guide artists without shutting them down, and why the best ideas sometimes work best when the artist feels a sense of ownership. TK contrasts analog tape’s forced decision-making with the endless deferral of DAW-based production, while also offering a practical view of AI as a useful tool when guided by taste and craft rather than treated as a replacement for musicianship.

The result is a funny, thoughtful, and deeply practical episode about microphones, mentors, humility, creative struggle, and why, in TK’s words, “if you’re not learning something, you’re not paying attention.”

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Shadow Sound Studio

With over 30 years of experience as a musician, recording engineer, and producer, and serving as the official music ambassador of Macon-Bibb, Georgia, Joey Stuckey can service all your professional audio needs.

To learn more about working with Shadow Sound Studio and Joey Stuckey, visit the website or email Joey directly.

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joey@joeystuckey.com

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