Jon Chase

"I play drums and have been gigging since I was teenager, although until I went to Berklee, I didn't actually realize that you could make a living making music. So it was a leap of faith to realize that my gift had to do with music and to go to Berklee. Since then, music is all I've ever done at a professional level."

"I was a successful jingle writer and producer for a number of years, but after about five or six years it wasn't fun. I ended up gravitating toward the engineering and production side of music. Im completely self-taught; there really wasn't an opportunity like Berklee when I was coming up. So everything I know I learned from my own experience or from reading."

"In Technology Tools and Sound Processing for Writers, I teach students to use more sophisticated audio tools to bring more sonic polish to their work. So much of today's music is being recorded in home studios and at personal computers—in hotel rooms, on airplanes, and in all sorts of places—and much of the recording process is done by artists themselves. So I want to give my students the skills to do it themselves as professionally as possible."

"To me, the recording studio is a musical instrument. You need to spend time with it: learn how to caress it to get the right sounds out of it. There are no rules for this stuff because we're talking about art. All you can do is emulate what someone else has done or come up with your own creative ideas. And that has to do with experience—making mistakes until you figure out how to do what you want to do. I give my students direction, but I'm always telling them that there is no right or wrong in the audio world. Sometimes horrible mistakes turn into 'eureka moments.'"