WCA #509 - Alberto de Icaza: Mastering, Cash Flow, Client Relations, and His Journey from Mexico

🎚️Alberto de Icaza on Working Class Audio #509

In this episode of Working Class Audio, host Matt Boudreau sits down with mastering engineer Alberto de Icaza to discuss the realities of building a career in modern audio.

From starting out in Mexico City to establishing a professional career in the U.S., Alberto shares real-world insights on mastering, client relationships, and navigating today’s rapidly evolving music industry.

From Mexico City to Austin, Texas

Alberto’s journey into professional audio is anything but conventional.

Starting as a musician in metal bands, he transitioned into engineering—eventually finding his niche in mastering during the pandemic. His path took him from:

• Mexico City

• New Jersey

• Austin, Texas

Each move brought new opportunities, challenges, and connections that shaped his career.

The Shift Into Mastering

One of the key themes in this episode is the transition into mastering.

Rather than following a traditional path, Alberto leaned into:

• Remote work opportunities

• Industry relationships

• Skill specialization

This shift highlights an important reality in today’s industry:

Careers in audio are no longer linear—they’re adaptive.

Client Relationships & Word-of-Mouth Growth

A major takeaway from the conversation is the importance of organic client growth.

Instead of relying solely on ads or cold outreach, Alberto emphasizes:

• Building trust with artists

• Delivering consistent results

• Letting word-of-mouth drive referrals

In a competitive industry, reputation is your most valuable asset.

Cash Flow Management for Audio Engineers

Beyond the creative side, this episode dives into the business realities of audio:

• Managing inconsistent income

• Planning for slow periods

• Pricing services strategically

For freelance engineers, mastering cash flow management is just as important as mastering audio.

AI in Audio: Threat or Tool?

The conversation also touches on the growing role of AI in music production.

Key insights include:

• AI as a tool—not a replacement

• The importance of human taste and decision-making

• Adapting to new technologies rather than resisting them

As the industry evolves, engineers who embrace technology intelligently will stay ahead.

Expanding Into the Spanish Market

Alberto also discusses opportunities within the Spanish-speaking market:

• Leveraging bilingual communication

• Expanding reach internationally

• Building relationships across cultures

This represents a major growth opportunity for engineers looking to scale beyond local markets.

Social Media & Networking Strategy

Modern audio careers are built both in the studio and online.

Key strategies discussed:

• Consistent social media presence

• Showcasing real work and results

• Building genuine connections (not just followers)

For engineers today, your online presence is often your first impression.

Studio Setup & Remote Workflow

Operating from Austin, Texas, Alberto highlights the benefits of:

• Remote mastering workflows

• Flexible studio setups

• Working with clients globally

This reflects a major shift in the industry—location is no longer a limitation.

Lessons for Audio Engineers

If you’re building a career in mixing or mastering, here are the biggest takeaways:

• Focus on relationships, not just skills

• Adapt to industry changes quickly

• Treat your work like a business

• Embrace new tools without losing your identity

• Build a network that compounds over time

The Reality of the Journey

The episode also includes personal stories—including challenges, setbacks, and even crashing his car—reminding us that:

Behind every successful engineer is a real, imperfect journey.

Work With Alberto de Icaza

If you’re looking for professional mixing or mastering services, you can learn more here:

https://www.albertomixes.com

Transcript:

Working Class Audio #509 with Alberto de Icaza

Full Transcript

Matt Boudreau:Alberto, welcome to the podcast.

Alberto de Icaza:Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Matt Boudreau:We are meeting here today courtesy of our mutual friend, Steve Chadie, former WCA guest who’s been on the show a couple times. I’ll put a link in the show notes for the audience to check Steve out. Steve’s a great guy, does great work, and he’s the one that encouraged me to reach out to Alberto. Thanks, Steve, for the intro.

Man, this is awesome. Thank you.

Before we get started with the backstory, let’s start with where you’re at today. Where are you talking to us from, and what do you consider yourself as far as an audio professional?

Alberto de Icaza:Cool. I’m in Austin, Texas. I’m mostly a mastering engineer. I do a lot of mixing too, especially lately. I came from more of a producer-engineer world and slowly transitioned into mastering, maybe around the pandemic, which is when I kind of became more of a mastering engineer. I feel like that’s my strongest suit, and that’s what I enjoy doing the most.

Matt Boudreau:Excellent. It’s pretty natural that I guess that’s what most of the work comes from, right?

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah.

Matt Boudreau:You grew up in Mexico, right?

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah, I grew up in Mexico City. I left when I was around 19, and I moved to the U.S. for college. I was in New Jersey for about eight years, and then I moved down here to Texas ten years ago.

Matt Boudreau:Tell me about growing up in Mexico and the role of music and technology in your upbringing.

Alberto de Icaza:That was an interesting thing for me because I’m from the generation where we had a family computer and we were starting to see computers as a part of life, but it wasn’t like everybody had a phone in their pocket. It wasn’t as accessible to everybody.

I always had a passion for that. The moment my dad got a computer, I was like, “Oh, this is cool.” I learned to navigate it and learned to do all sorts of stuff there. But at the same time, I had a lot of passion for music. I’ve been playing guitar forever. I was in local rock bands over there. I used to love metal and hardcore stuff, and I had those kinds of bands going.

I was always pushing toward that. I wanted to be in a band. I kind of wanted to go study music, coming more from an instrument approach. I feel like in Mexico, that’s kind of a terrifying thing to say because especially at that time, the music industry over there wasn’t as powerful as it is right now. Now, seeing some of the artists that are coming out of there and the way the internet has been able to push music from everywhere, it’s different. But when I was there, especially for rock bands, it was very tough because there wasn’t the market like there was here.

So I always had it in my mind: I have to go to the U.S. I have to get in a band and do my thing. Maybe if I go for college, I can make my way into that, find a band, and go from there.

My parents weren’t very receptive to that idea, justifiably, because at the time in Mexico there wasn’t too much you could do with a guitar degree.

So my dad had a friend that was doing a lot of production work. Across the street from where his business was, there was a studio that they used. So they just walked me in one day and said, “Hey, do you want to try being an intern here and see if you like this?” It was kind of a different path into seeing what production was.

At that point, I had never tinkered with recording software or anything like that. I had tried to record an album with a friend that was into that, but it was super amateur. We never actually went into a studio. It was like bedroom recording. So to me, I had never explored that world.

Going into the studio was very cool because they were focused more on commercials and sound for movies. From day one, they sat me in front of — I think they were using Nuendo at the time — and they were like, “Here’s the sound library, here’s a movie. Find things that are making sound on this video and try to find Foley and stuff that would fit, and this is how you put it on a track. This is volume, and this is kind of how you match it.”

Immediately I was like, “Oh, this is cool.” This felt like a balance between my musical side and the technology side I liked about tinkering with computers.

That kind of opened the door for me. I got it. This could be a path for me.

Eventually they had a couple bands coming through, and especially the engineers all had bands, so I got to experience what recording a band looked like. From that point on, I was sold.

I bought a little interface. This was when Mbox was big. I remember getting one of those little Line 6 MIDI keyboards that had a little interface in them. The thing sounded horrible, but I was so happy just being able to track myself and do demos and stuff.

So with that in mind, this seemed more in line with what I wanted to do. Talking with other professional musicians and engineers gave me the perspective that I like to play metal and rock, and they were like, “You can already play that. You’re not going to go to college to learn that. If you wanted to do jazz, or be a session musician, or a concert musician, sure, that would make sense. But if what you’re trying to do is make music that comes from a different approach, then check out what engineers do.”

They kind of saw that I had an inclination for it.

So I found, at the time — this was before every college had an audio engineering degree — that a lot of these programs were called music technology. This was maybe 2005 or so. I found a couple colleges in London, a couple across the U.S., and I ended up going to New Jersey out of all places. I was like, “Well, this works. It looks cool. It’s right next to New York City. I’m sold.”

So I moved there when I was 19, and it was pretty cool.

I got to learn from a lot of different artists there. Because I was an international student, you get one year to do internships. So one day I’m like, “I need to find an internship at a studio.” At this point I’m also thinking, “I need to find a way to stay here. I need to get a job. I want to be very serious about this.”

So I’m going through all my favorite records, researching producers. At the time, I feel like it wasn’t as approachable as it is now, where everybody’s on Instagram and Facebook and you can message Vance Powell and he’ll reply to you because he’s a super sweet guy. Back then, I feel like that wasn’t common at all. There weren’t any of these personal interactions like we see now.

So it was literally finding a name, trying to find a website, trying to find where their studio was, seeing if I could find an email or any information I could find.

I was a big Lamb of God fan, and looking at Sacrament, I saw Machine and saw that he was in New Jersey. He was in Hoboken at the time. So I was like, “Oh, this is awesome. It’s like 15 minutes away from where I am. This is perfect.”

I found the email of his engineer, Will Putney, so I shot him an email and said, “Hey, I’m super interested in being an intern. I just want to be a fly on the wall and learn whatever I can. If you guys have a program or anything like that, I’m happy to clean toilets and just be in the room learning.”

Will was super nice. He said, “Sure, come on over. We’ll chat about it.”

At that moment, they had about two other interns. What was very cool about that, especially compared to my experience as an intern in that area at the time, was that I had mentors. It wasn’t so much a food chain of “the interns help the assistant engineer who helps the engineer,” and as an intern you can’t even be in the room with the artists. There was none of that.

Here, it was like you were part of the family. You were allowed to use the studio and do your own records and learn because they encouraged that. And the only way to advance was to learn new skills, and they would pay you for those skills.

So it was like: figure out how to track drums, how to use Beat Detective, how to tune vocals. They were kind enough to sit with me while I learned. I’d try to tune a vocal, and they’d come in with me, select all the areas that were wrong, color them differently, and say, “Listen to that and go again and go again,” until I developed those skills. Then they’d be like, “Oh, we can start hiring you for these things.”

I was very lucky to have found that, and very grateful to both of them, because I learned a ton.

I landed there about two months before they were moving the studio from Hoboken to Belleville. In Hoboken there were only two rooms. In Belleville, we took an entire building. It was insane. It was a commercial building, but it was almost abandoned. Artists were renting sections, and we rented one that was right next to what My Chemical Romance’s studio used to be.

So it was this huge building with no AC, no heat — just all industrial stuff. We kind of had to build it from the ground up. That was great for me too, because that’s when I started learning, “Okay, so this is how you build a room. This is how we start tuning the acoustics of a room.”

Matt Boudreau:I wanted to ask, how old were you at this time?

Alberto de Icaza:This was 2011, so I was 20 years old. Maybe 21.

Matt Boudreau:Okay. And you were still going to school, right?

Alberto de Icaza:Oh yeah, I was still going to school. It was down the road, but I feel like the high school I went to had been so demanding that even the maximum amount of credits I had to take in college felt like a breeze.

I could do the school hours, go home, and in high school I had to do all these hours of homework, catch up, try to find a tutor, stuff like that. So when I went to college, I was like, “I can do this in my sleep.” I didn’t have to dedicate that much time. I could literally go to class, get out, go to the studio, and if I needed to do anything, I’d figure it out when I came back at night.

Matt Boudreau:Why was high school so much harder?

Alberto de Icaza:I went to a private high school that had this mentality of wanting to over-prepare you for college, so they hired college professors. My trigonometry class, for example, was the same class that somebody in their second year of engineering was taking.

So when I came over here and they did an aptitude or math test to see where they’d place me, I skipped like seven classes. The class I ended up in, I basically didn’t pass the test because I just didn’t know the names in English for the concepts. If you gave me the problem, I could solve it. I just couldn’t tell you what the formula was called in English.

So I was kind of cruising through college.

And the audio engineering stuff, I felt like I had an edge because I was working on label records while doing this.

Matt Boudreau:Working on label records at the time with the guys in New Jersey from Lamb of God?

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah, with Machine and Will Putney. They were doing all sorts of bands. If you look at Machine’s records, they’re incredible. His work with King Crimson — I’d love to introduce you to him. He’s on Fall Out Boy, Gym Class Heroes. The man was doing so much.

Back when I joined, we did a Clutch record together. He’s an insane engineer. You’ll have a field day talking to him because he’s a very interesting person to me. I’m very attached to him, not only because he was my mentor, but because he thinks of stuff in a very unique way.

He’ll break things down to the one thing that’s going to make a difference, and he doesn’t care to do the experiments to get there. There are all sorts of crazy stories, like recording a metal band one time and he’s like, “I wonder what it would sound like if we made them play the kick drums with their hands.” The kick patterns are such a big part of the sound, so he wanted to try tracking one song where they were playing the kick drums with their hands.

So overnight I had to get two-by-fours and build a stand so we could have a kick drum standing up and the drummer could sit there and play it. Stuff like that — he had a very curious mind and approached things in a very out-of-the-box way.

Matt Boudreau:Somebody like that, who is having that much success and notoriety — were there also business things that you learned about how to survive?

Alberto de Icaza:Yes and no. I learned it later. I feel like that was one of my biggest mistakes doing this. Nobody prepares you to learn the business side.

I feel like especially going through college, they push a lot of audio engineering fundamentals, which are super important, but nobody’s teaching you financial classes or marketing classes or all these other things that surround being able to do records.

I just didn’t have that in my head when I was there. I was more focused on learning the music side and working with whatever I could, trying to find as many musicians as possible and working with bands. Not so much: “Okay, I should probably learn how to keep my books straight, figure out what a budget is, how much I should account for, or how to market myself. Social media is starting to become a thing — I need to figure out how to do a decent website.”

A lot of the time I just thought, “Whatever, you do the records, they’re cool, and you keep going. The rest will sort itself out.”

Matt Boudreau:To me, that’s such a hole in the education. It’s so set on Pro Tools certification and audio engineering fundamentals, which are great and super important, but it’s bizarre that business, survival, marketing, and money are missing.

Alberto de Icaza:Absolutely.

And not just that. Something I learned later in life: working with Machine, I moved with him to Austin because we built a studio here. At some point, I just burned out and didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was like, “This is way too much.” We were recording crazy hours.

Before that, I didn’t care to be in the studio forever. I’d put in the hours because I didn’t really have anything else going on in my life. But at some point I got married. I had a wife I wanted to hang out with. I made some friends here in Austin. I wanted to see stuff. So of course there was friction between wanting that life and at the same time spending 15 or 16 hours in the studio every day.

Matt Boudreau:Can you connect the dots between New Jersey and Texas?

Alberto de Icaza:While we were in New Jersey, Machine had always talked about moving to Austin forever.

It was an interesting time because Will Putney started to get a ton of work. He was Machine’s engineer, and then he got way too busy, and I was kind of the other guy that was always there with Machine. So I was able to fill that void. That kind of threw me into the fire of, “Now you’ve got to record, and you’ve got to be as good as Will, because that’s how you’re going to be judged.”

I was also able to engineer for Will because he had so much stuff coming through the door. So the studio was always full with bands.

Machine kind of saw that too and was like, “Well, this is a good indication that I should probably move and build my own thing if I want to move to Austin. This is the time.”

So I decided to move with him to Austin. I was like, “I don’t have anything to lose. I don’t have anything here. I just want to go for the adventure.”

So we moved down to Austin, and he built that beautiful barn out in Dripping Springs. It’s about 40 minutes outside of downtown Austin. I came a couple months before him to start seeing the barn getting built and organizing stuff. Then he came down.

It took a minute to get built, but it’s an awesome place. I still go there whenever I want to track drums. It’s such a cool place and a great vibe. It’s one of those one-room barns, so you’re tracking with the band in there. It invites collaboration, and it’s a big room so the drums sound great. I’ll always take him up on going there to track.

So yeah, I came down with him. As I was in that process of burning out and trying to figure out my life — because I also feel like my finances were very rough at the time — one of my friends was opening a record label here in Texas. I thought maybe I wanted to explore that, learn more about the industry, and see if there was something there where I could use my skills, learn something new, and still be involved in music.

This was around 2015 or 2016.

At the same time, I had an apartment with another bedroom, so I could put a home studio in there. I thought, “If I can just mix records from there, it’ll be fine, and I won’t have the pressure of needing to pay my rent this month or my wife being upset that I’m not spending time with her.”

I also feel like it was tough bringing bands to the studio because in Texas distances are huge. You drive a lot here and you need a car. Bringing a band was tough because there weren’t any hotels near where the studio was. So bringing a band meant they needed to rent cars and drive like an hour in and out every day. Of course that comes out of a budget, and over time that just gets reduced to nothing.

That, combined with me not learning how to market myself or deal with the business side of things, was just a perfect storm. A recipe for disaster.

So I started working for this label, and that was great for me because I got to see how the industry works and had to learn very quickly. How are contracts done? How are producer deals done? How does the royalty side of things work? I was like, “This is… I’m confused.”

Matt Boudreau:Which label are we talking about?

Alberto de Icaza:This was when my friend was opening a label, so I left Machine and my friend opened a label here. It was called Independent Label Alliance. The idea was to do an artist-friendly label.

If you think about it, it was kind of like what AWAL was doing. We wanted to offer artists a deal that was like a 50/50 split, but we wanted the artists to basically create their own label. The goal was: we’ll educate you on how to work a label and work your own career, and then after a couple records, we can convert into a distribution system for you. We’d deal with some of the business side and you’d deal with your own career.

So of course I was learning a lot about how the industry works so we could put together a program like that and sit with artists and say, “This is how you should manage your career as an artist.”

Not just like me, where you just grab a guitar and say, “I’m a guitar player,” and hope everything sorts itself out. Because of how the industry works now, you’re a business, and you have to operate as such to be proficient.

That put a lot of things in perspective for me. That’s when I was like, “Okay, I’m going to start my own studio. I want to do mixing and mastering, and I know now that I have to set up a business around the skills that I have.”

I feel like I’m a slow learner, but I got there. I was able to start this, and it started growing. Thankfully I was able to get more into the mastering side of things.

As time was passing, a lot of artists were learning to produce themselves, and that was very helpful for them, but they also needed somebody to finish their things. So I kind of became that person for them. You can send me your mix, I can finish it up, I can master it for you, and it’ll sound better than what you had in your bedroom. Those relationships ended up transitioning into: “Okay, well, I’m their mastering guy now.”

Matt Boudreau:You graduated from the program in New Jersey?

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah.

Matt Boudreau:Okay. You leave New Jersey, you come to Texas. Do you have any thoughts about the affordability of Texas versus New Jersey?

Alberto de Icaza:Oh yeah, that was a huge thing too. It was painful in New Jersey seeing that at least at the time, I was like, “I’m never going to be able to afford a house here. This is insane.”

Rents for apartments were crazy. You had to live with roommates. I was in old buildings that were not cool at all. Coming to Texas at the time, it was like, “I can get a beautiful apartment for myself here that has a pool, and it’s super cheap.”

Everything around here was cheaper — food, gas. My monthly expenses got super reduced, which was part of the goal of moving here.

Matt Boudreau:And your wife — you two met in New Jersey or Texas?

Alberto de Icaza:We met in Texas. I met her in the first couple months after I moved here.

Matt Boudreau:I’m just trying to fill in some of these missing pieces so the audience understands the story a little better. Once arriving, was making a living tied to working for Machine?

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah, I was working for him, and I had some clients that I would do mixes for remotely too. So while the barn was being built, I could still do some work on my own.

Matt Boudreau:Was there a particular reason that you… because the way you phrased it, you said that you left Machine and started working for this label with your buddy. But was that literally a clean cut?

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah. I was getting pretty burned out and one day I was with Machine, and what happened was I was driving toward where the studio was, and I flipped my car. I ended up in a ditch and the car was lit on fire.

It was a big realization for me. Things like this can derail my life because I didn’t have savings. I didn’t have anything around me. I felt like I was unhappy at the moment. I was struggling. I needed something else in my life right now. It was driving me crazy. I needed some sort of change.

Part of that was me having to explore the business side of life. You can’t just live in the creative world. You have to supplement it if you want to be successful.

So yeah, school of hard knocks. That’s how I learned my lessons.

At least with the label, I felt like, “Okay, I can get a salary here, so I can learn how to budget myself better.” A big thing for me is any job or work I do, I kind of want to better myself. I want to learn and get something out of it. I’ve never been a person who does a job just because I’m going to get a paycheck and then at 5:00 it’s over and now I can be me. That goes against my nature.

So I had to do something I believed in. Working with this label, they kind of wanted to do that with artists — develop artists. They had a budget for it. Part of the plan was they were going to build a studio, and they ended up buying one downtown. It’s finally done now. I ended up leaving in 2017, so it took them a long time. It sucks I never got to track there, but that label kind of aligned with what I was doing.

I saw that as an opportunity to maybe learn a new skill and maybe a different career path and see what happens. But I still felt like I needed to keep doing records. There’s something that calls me about that. It’s a strength I have that I really enjoy, especially finishing records. The mastering side is so cool. Mixing a record is awesome. It’s inspiring. There’s just something about that that I can’t abandon.

So it was cool to be able to have a check, separate that, fall in love with it again, and naturally let that start developing. Me learning how the business is run and how to sort my life out around that made it so much easier.

I’ve always tried to keep my studio in the second story of my house. It’s Texas, and especially at the time we were able to buy a really big house. I have a huge room here where I can have cabs in a separate room. There’s a guest room where I can bring artists, and if they want to sleep there, we can have a singer here for two weeks and there’s no hotel bill. He can stay here with us.

It’s pretty comfortable to be here. I can spend time with my wife. The moment I’m done, I can power down and literally walk ten steps and go hang out with her.

Matt Boudreau:Let’s talk about that because the studio you’re in now did not exist when you were at the label, right?

Alberto de Icaza:Right. I had a two-bedroom apartment at the time, so I was able to set up a studio in one of those bedrooms. That’s kind of how I was discovering this works a little better for me, because I could literally take a break and go hang out with my wife for half an hour, and that’s valuable time.

As opposed to going to the studio in the middle of nowhere and then driving 40 minutes back to where I was living. I was spending four hours of the day that I could have used for something else — spending quality time here, doing chores, whatever I needed.

So I was able to have more time to myself. That allowed me to go to the label, do that job, do cool stuff, but also come home and mix a cool record if I wanted, or master ten songs in a day without losing sleep or derailing my life.

Matt Boudreau:So your work at the label wasn’t necessarily audio related?

Alberto de Icaza:It was and it wasn’t. I would say it was more A&R, and I had to learn how to wear multiple hats, which was the best lesson I got there.

I had to figure out budgeting for an artist, how to maintain relationships with managers, how to deal with angry managers screaming at you — stuff like that. Before, I feel like I was only dealing with the artist. So I didn’t have that perception of business talk and how different relationships need different ways to be nurtured.

So yeah, working for that label was a really good learning experience for me.

Matt Boudreau:What was the name of the label?

Alberto de Icaza:It was called Independent Label Alliance, and then it got rebranded to Big Indie.

Matt Boudreau:And they’re still in business?

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah, yeah. We opened one here, and we ended up opening an office in London. One of the biggest acts we signed was Yola. It was a pretty cool thing to do at the time. I feel like I was pretty happy.

Toward the end, things got a little more complicated. I had a fallout with the owners and kind of wanted to separate. We had that fallout and it was done. But yeah, it was a great experience for me.

Matt Boudreau:What was the timeline between leaving the label, getting this house, and setting up shop at home?

Alberto de Icaza:I had this house while I was at the label. I bought it around the same time — maybe about two years into being at the label. I was still working there, and I started setting up here.

Coming from an apartment bedroom studio to a big room, if you see pictures of this room early on, they look ridiculous, especially learning how to treat it and whatnot.

I was very lucky that while we were building the studio for that label, I became friends with the acoustician working there. He would come sit with me and say, “Oh, you should try this,” or “Maybe move some panels and build something over here,” and kind of help me start tuning the room.

That definitely helped a lot.

And just having producer friends — Machine is still one of my closest friends. Anytime he’s around, he’ll come to my house and we’ll jam records in here. So I still get a lot of external input on how to tune my studio.

That was a huge thing — being able to gradually get it better and better sounding, better gear, etc.

I would say maybe by 2019 the studio was in very decent shape, where I was making good sounding stuff out of here and had a good mastering setup. I had the good speakers, the sub, the room was very well tuned. I could hear things super clearly.

That’s one of the best things. Anybody that comes in here gets blown away by how good this room sounds now. It’s awesome. At the same time, it’s so clinical sometimes that I’ll listen to some of my favorite records growing up and hear things that make me go, “Why didn’t they fix that?” It drives me crazy. But I guess that’s part of it.

Matt Boudreau:How did you fare during the pandemic?

Alberto de Icaza:That was actually a pretty cool thing that happened. I’m very lucky — not the pandemic, of course — but I was working with this indie artist and their management, and they had a white-label services company. They started getting into soundtracks.

Out of nowhere, she met somebody and said, “Hey, I have a record for a soundtrack. You do hip-hop?” And I was like, “Well, no, but I’ll try it.”

They sent me a track and told me the producer was going to approve it. If they liked it, I’d get to master the record.

I was like, “What’s the worst that can happen?”

So I did the track, sent it over, and they told me the producer was Timbaland. I was like, “Oh, okay. This is a thing.”

It was for the soundtrack of a YouTube Original series called Step Up, and it was produced by Lionsgate, which was the label side she was managing.

He ended up liking the masters I did, and I got that record. That kind of started a relationship with Lionsgate where every soundtrack that would come through, they’d be like, “Here’s a soundtrack. You master it.”

It’s a very interesting gig because I never know what’s coming. It’s very fast turnaround. A lot of times it’s just like: the soundtrack is going to come out in like three weeks or two weeks and we need everybody on board now.

So I’ll get 20 tracks, and the moment I get them, either that same day or the next day, they have to have it. I had to tune my workflow to be super fast and super accurate.

It’s also very different styles. Today it could be classical music, tomorrow it could be hip-hop from Atlanta with crazy subs, and the next day it could be a collection of indie artists.

So I definitely had to learn how to make a process and use my tools in a way where it’s not like I can just have a template. I see it more like I have a toolbox, and I know exactly what every tool is going to do. I can tweak depending on what I get because one layer could be completely different from the next.

That was great too because during the pandemic, that’s when TV shows and streaming exploded.

Matt Boudreau:Oh yeah.

Alberto de Icaza:So it was the perfect gig to come at the time because now there were shows coming left and right, soundtracks coming left and right.

And the other thing that was happening at that time is attended sessions kind of disappeared. Mastering didn’t used to be that common remotely, but now it was like, for sure everybody’s working on the internet and it doesn’t matter that I’m not in LA or New York or London. The producer can send the tracks, I can do it, send it back to him, and he’ll listen in his studio. We can jump on a FaceTime or he can send me notes over email, and we can work very efficiently that way.

That also helped a lot because I can work from Austin, which — I mean, it’s not as affordable as it was when I moved because all the tech companies moving here made it more expensive — but I got here when it was still cheap. I got my house and mortgage very cheap. A gig like that was great because I could keep my expenses low and keep all this work coming in.

It kind of made for a good situation for me.

Matt Boudreau:I want to ask you a bit about cash flow, because what I find troubling with some of the bigger companies — and I don’t know if you have this issue with Lionsgate, and I certainly don’t want to get you in trouble with Lionsgate — but companies like that come at you and it’s like, “Hey, we need this now.” It’s a lot of stuff, a lot of work. You get it done and then you don’t see the money for like 90 days.

Alberto de Icaza:Oh yeah. It’s very different with them because every show or every movie sometimes is its own LLC, so it’s a different person managing that.

So yeah, I could get paid within weeks, or I could get paid… I think the longest one has been like maybe five or six months.

But the beauty of that is I’ve learned how to budget myself. Also, being able to work with a lot of indie artists and people that self-release records helps. Those guys, the moment you’re done, they pay. At least that’s how I work.

I don’t like to push people for money before I touch anything. Usually my approach is: send me the files, I’ll master it, here’s what it’s going to cost you, and we’ll deal with the money once you’re happy with your masters or your mixes.

I don’t want people being like, “Well, I kind of don’t like it and now I want my money back.” I’m like, “Screw all that.” I want to make sure you’re in love with the product. We’ll get the creative thing out of the way, and then we’ll sort out the money. It’ll be fine.

Maybe I’ve been burned once or twice, but it hasn’t been enough of a problem to make me want to change that. I feel like it sets up trust, and artists feel that trust. They’re happier to sort it out once it’s done.

That helps keep cash flow in a better state. I know I have all these open invoices coming in. I know it’s probably going to take three months, four months, whatever.

I’ve also been trying to do this thing where I have this crazy Excel sheet that I created, and a couple of producers have taken it from me because it tracks every single budget, every single payment that comes in, by month. It tracks how much work was there, how much income came in, and then compares year to year.

The whole idea was: I want to know which months I’m going to be the busiest, which months have the most money coming in, and try to find a trend. Because if I can find that trend, I can plan my vacations around it. I can plan any remodels I want to do.

There’s always stuff that we have to do in studios. Maybe you start buying gear and now you’ve got gear up to the walls that’s all wired in the worst possible way, and it’s not comfortable to work in there. You’re going to have to stop your studio for a couple of days to rewire the place.

If you’re able to know that maybe April is a bad month and there’s not a lot of work coming in, then you can plan those kinds of things. Same thing if I want to go on vacation for a week or disconnect for two weeks.

That was the goal of the system I made, and also just being able to budget. You’ve got to pay your taxes. You’ve got to make sure you have money for when the taxman comes around.

Now I’m able to see these big spikes. It’s really weird how it happens. There are usually two or three spikes when everybody pays. For me, the biggest one is usually between July and August, and it’s significant versus other months. The first couple months of the year — February and March — are usually a big dip.

So I know that’s just the nature of it. It’s also crazy because it happens across industries — with movies and with all these indie artists I’m doing. For some reason, that’s just how my workflow works.

Matt Boudreau:I love that you track it. Do you ever see, “Okay, these months are bad,” and ask yourself how you could counter that?

Alberto de Icaza:Absolutely. I try to figure out a marketing strategy for those months.

Maybe for those months I’ll try to figure out booking. I’m not booking too much ahead. I got used to fast turnarounds, so I usually don’t book myself out a month or so. People give me a heads-up whenever they can that they’re finishing a record around certain dates, but for the most part, people just send me stuff and within 24 to 48 hours I’ll have masters for them.

So it’s hard for me to estimate those things. I’m trying to figure out how to book, especially now that I’m getting a lot more mixes. I can at least book those ahead. People know when they’re going to be doing that.

On the mastering side, it’s still very chaotic to me. Either mixers take their time and then send you stuff while freaking out because the record is due, or they just don’t know. You start getting a song at a time and it’s kind of open like that.

Matt Boudreau:I know this is not the sexiest thing to talk about, but what do you use to bill people in terms of how people pay you? Credit card, cash, check? Have you ever dealt with any credit card fraud?

Alberto de Icaza:I haven’t had fraud.

I used to do everything through PayPal, but the fees were killing me. Once I had these soundtrack things going, I was like, “Oh my God, it’s just money coming out the door.”

One thing I realized very quickly was that I could literally tell people, “Hey, you can do PayPal or you can do Venmo,” and every single person that is 33 and under is going to say, “Cool,” and send you a Venmo, and there are no fees. So I was like, “Oh, okay, let’s do that.”

For big projects, everybody has their own system. Some companies send checks, so I can deposit the check. Old-school, in the mail. The new thing I’m seeing is single-use credit cards. SunTrust Bank does this. You get two emails: one is a credit card with a number, basically authorized to what your invoice was, and then you get a second email with the PIN and confirmation numbers.

I can just run it as a regular credit card, so I’ll use a PayPal terminal for that and take the hit on whatever fees I get. Those are becoming super common, at least in the movie world.

Matt Boudreau:Interesting. So it’s like a single-use card specified only for the amount you authorized for that invoice.

Alberto de Icaza:Exactly. And it’s all digital, so you’ll get an email with basically a picture of a credit card.

Matt Boudreau:What’s that called again?

Alberto de Icaza:SunTrust — that’s the bank that does it.

And I love it because before, accounting at all these places would literally have to write a check and mail it to you, and you’re waiting forever. I’ve had checks get lost in the mail. I’m like, “Come on guys, we can figure this out.”

With this thing, the moment they authorize it, boom, it sends you the emails and you’re done.

Matt Boudreau:Is it challenging in terms of authorization?

Alberto de Icaza:No, you just go to your PayPal tools and charge it through there. It runs like a regular credit card. It just asks for the zip code, so make sure you get the billing zip from them and you’re good.

Matt Boudreau:You seem to have a diverse income stream. I know you do some consulting work outside of your audio work, for a company we can’t really mention, and you’ve got mastering, and you still mix, right?

Alberto de Icaza:Yep. I still mix.

On a very rare occasion, I’ll do a record from beginning to end. I just had one come out today for my best friends in Butcher Babies — sorry, not Butcher Babies, I’m talking about another band of close friends — and they decided to take the reins of their own career. I’m super proud of them for doing that.

They just got a distributor. They’re doing everything from marketing to radio campaigns. It’s been very interesting to see them do this and be on the artist side, pushing like, “We have to do this and we have to pretend we’re a label, and I need you guys to do this because we’ve got to push the record.”

So I did a record from beginning to end with them, and I loved it. It was so much fun, such a cool thing that I don’t get to do every day now.

Matt Boudreau:How busy are you? Do you have days where you’re like, “When’s the phone going to ring?”

Alberto de Icaza:Yes. It comes and goes in waves.

There are some times when I’m getting bombarded and I’m like, “Oh my God, now I have to really push for it. There are going to be two weeks of punishment.” And then sometimes there’s just a week where nothing’s happening and I’m freaking out, like, “Is this it?”

I remember hearing in an interview with Andrew Scheps that he did the Adele record, it came out, and then he didn’t get a phone call for three months.

That was the biggest comfort for me, because I was like, “Okay, it’s not a death sentence if you don’t work for a week. It’s just that we’re in a business that comes and goes.”

Of course I would love to be busy enough where every single day I have a ton of work. But maybe I’m not getting that yet.

It also could be that I don’t schedule myself, so I’ll do these things where I drive myself crazy for a week, and then the next week is super chill because I did the amount of work of two weeks in one week.

Matt Boudreau:Do you feel that you’re fully taking advantage of the possibility of the market south of the border? You speak Spanish, you grew up speaking Spanish, and you work on a lot of U.S. records. Do you feel like you’re taking advantage of that market?

Alberto de Icaza:Definitely not. I’m so bad at that, and I’ve been thinking about trying to get better at it.

There are only a couple artists I’ve worked with there. When I was doing heavier records, I used to get more of that. There were bands from Brazil, a band from Chile, bands from Mexico. But kind of as I moved to mastering and just living in the U.S. and making relationships here, that naturally became my focus.

So no, I definitely haven’t fully explored it.

Also, one of the big things for me — and I’ve hit my head against the wall trying to figure this out many times — is marketing. It’s tough because the best things for me have been word of mouth and just making relationships and nurturing them.

I’m the guy that makes friends with people easily. I make friends with guys like Steve, for example, and I don’t push my services. I’m not going to be like, “Hey, I want to master whatever you’re doing.” I’m sure everybody that listens to this podcast gets those emails and those Facebook messages like, “Oh my God, I have mixes to master for you.” That doesn’t work for me.

I kind of want stuff to happen naturally. If you trust me, you trust me. So I tend to make relationships and I’m happy to do favors for people. I know that eventually, because I’m top of mind because we chat and we’re friends, if you need something, you may reach out to me. Or if you hear somebody needs something, you’ll send them my way.

That never fails, especially if you’re having authentic relationships with people. So many people have work they don’t know what to do with, or they don’t feel like they’re a good match, and they’ll send you work. I’ll do the same. I have engineer friends where a lot of times people hit me up with stuff and I’m like, “I could do it, but honestly this guy will kill it, so you should definitely go with him.”

Because I’ve been in the U.S. for so long and all my relationships are around here, I feel like that side has fallen off. I don’t stay in touch with a lot of producers in Mexico.

Matt Boudreau:Far be it from me to tell you what to do, but I’d be all over that if I had your ability to speak Spanish. There’s so much there.

That said, what I find really interesting is if you’re on some of these services where people shop around and find mastering or mixing engineers, the rates people charge in different parts of the world can be quite low. Not just Mexico or Central America. The rate can be really low because of cost of living and what the market will bear.

Then you put that in a global marketplace, and it becomes frustrating because as a U.S.-based mix engineer charging what I feel is appropriate rates for our market, then I see people charging like, “I’ll do your mix for 25 bucks,” or, “I’ll master for 50,” and you’re like, “How do I compete with that?”

Alberto de Icaza:The other thing that’s pretty crazy — and it’s not talked about — is the standard or the expectations of those mixes.

You see people saying $25 for a mix, but then you see the kind of files they’re getting and the kind of stuff they’re getting. It’s like a beat ripped from YouTube and a rapper with one vocal. So “mixing” means you’re moving two faders.

Then some guy in a band is going to see that and think, “Oh, 25 bucks,” and then send you 200 tracks because they overproduced everything and can’t commit to stuff. They send you the same guitar take with five different mics, so now you have to sort all that out. Then it’s like, how can I charge you even a decent price for a mix when I literally have to produce your record because you don’t even have guitar tones or drum sounds?

I think part of that is because we’re all working for ourselves and it’s hard to be transparent with pricing. Everybody keeps it very quiet until you inquire about it.

I feel like part of it is we should be more open about prices and what they include. What are the expectations?

Matt Boudreau:And I guess what I need to keep in mind — and remind the audience — is that the people you want to associate yourself with do not buy $25 and $50 services. They’re serious about their career and hire professionals to do a professional job. They’ve done a professional job themselves, so they’ll send it to you professionally ready to mix, hopefully.

Alberto de Icaza:Right. The other thing is that we have a responsibility to educate our consumers. Every business has that.

A lot of times the people reaching out to you with those kinds of things are just misguided. They read something online and are coming to you because that’s what they think it is.

For example, I was talking yesterday with an artist who messaged me saying they wanted me to do a test master for them. I was like, “Okay, cool. Who’s the artist? Can you send me anything they’ve released? What are the plans for it?”

Because they told me they were test mastering with a bunch of different people. So I was like, “This sounds like something that’s just getting shopped around and everybody’s going to get messed with.”

So I poked around and tried to figure out who it was, and they were like, “No, it’s unreleased.” And it was some rapper in his bedroom doing a beat.

It’s like, you’re wasting everybody’s time.

Part of me wants to just say, “Delete.” But on the other hand, I don’t think it’s coming from a mean place. It’s just ignorance. They just think that’s what you do. You kind of have to see that there’s leverage and you have to be able to negotiate.

Right now, you don’t have leverage because you’re an artist. So you’re going to have to figure that out.

That’s something in our industry we’re not taught — how to negotiate. It’s a speech I give to every band that is unsigned because they think, “I’m going to get signed and they’re going to give me money and it’s going to be great.” I’m like, “Dude, you’ve got to think like you’re a business and you’re going into Shark Tank.”

If you don’t have your numbers straight, if you’re not coming to them saying, “I do this many streams, I sell this many records,” you’re going to get a terrible deal. They’re going to take advantage of you because your music is good and you’re going to have zero ownership.

Or the opposite happens: you have your stuff together, you can tell them this is how the business is structured, we make a ton of money in merch, if you’re interested in a 360 we play this many shows, if you want to do tour support, our past two records sold this many copies, we’re streaming here, our social media is doing this, etc.

Then you have leverage. Then you’re a business. Then it’s funding, and that’s what a label does, really.

I’d say it’s the same for artists going to producers and trying to leverage what they have. If you can pay their fee to get a mix, cool. What else can you do? There are many things you can offer.

If you’re a medium-sized band that gets attention from magazines, for example, leverage publicity. “We’ll make sure your name is in there and there’s a little paragraph about you,” or maybe you can get royalties on the back end. There are a million things you can talk about and negotiate as an artist.

But I feel like we’re taught that negotiation is part of business, and we don’t want to deal with that because we’re creatives.

Matt Boudreau:The other frustrating thing is that in audio, once you hear quality audio as you’re coming up, your expectations and your professionalism grow. It’s also the same with the people you work with. Once you experience a quality client in a professional situation, you don’t want to go back.

Alberto de Icaza:Oh yeah, absolutely.

It’s crazy. Newer artists will nitpick with recalls like, “Turn it up. No, turn it down. Put it here. Put it back.” And the more experienced people you work with, it’s either, “The record makes sense,” or, “No, that’s great. Thanks. Love it.”

Matt Boudreau:And the more experienced client, if they do have recalls, they’re purposeful and focused. Like, “The guitar solo really needs to come up,” or, “For this aesthetic, I like the vocal really loud or really quiet,” or, “Dry it up a little.”

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah, it’s usually stuff that makes sense. They trust you and they hire you because they like what you do, versus someone who hires you because they see you as a service person.

Matt Boudreau:Do you ever fire yourself from a project?

Alberto de Icaza:What do you mean?

Matt Boudreau:Meaning you get into it and realize, “Oh my gosh, I’m not enjoying myself here. I’m chasing somebody else’s vision and not actually doing what I do best.”

Alberto de Icaza:Yes, it’s happened a couple times. It’s not fun.

A lot of times you kind of have to learn when to call it quits. I don’t have a problem having the conversation: if we have different visions and we’re going different ways, and you’re not going to get there with me, that’s fine.

Usually I’ll listen and try to figure out if it’s something where I missed the mark. I’m like, “Cool, let me try what you want.” But if we keep trying and trying and it’s still not what you want, I might not be the guy, and that’s fine.

We have such a subjective product that we’re giving, especially when it comes to mixing or the more creative side of records. It’s hard because it’s not quantitative. You can’t say, “Oh yeah, this is a 9.5.” It’s just how everybody experiences it.

So if the artist or whoever hired you just isn’t there, then I’m just wasting my time.

There was a record not too long ago where we went through his “reference masters,” which were basically just slammed. Somebody put a limiter and a clipper on it and just slammed it. I was like, “It doesn’t sound great to me, but if that’s the vibe you’re going for, I can kind of go for that while trying to fix the things I’m hearing.”

But we just kept going in circles, and at least I think he just wanted what he had already done. In the end, they ended up doing their own thing. So it was like, cool, but we just did this for nothing.

Matt Boudreau:The range of client professionalism — when you get a good one, you wish you could clone those people.

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah, yeah.

Matt Boudreau:Do you have a brother? Do you have a sister? Because I could do this all day.

Is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you’re excited about or wanted to mention?

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah. I think AI is a huge thing that is going to impact this industry. It can be for good, it can be for bad. I think we are in the starting stages of it, and as audio engineers, it is very easy to understand once you get under the hood.

So I definitely encourage everybody to start poking around and learn about it, because for good engineers it’s going to be an amazing tool. For the dudes mixing the $25 beats, it’s going to suck.

Definitely learn about it. It’s pretty cool and it’s definitely here to stay.

I feel like there are always going to be humans behind it for it to work. So you want to be that human.

Matt Boudreau:Yeah. Don’t bury your head in the sand and scream that the sky is falling.

There are some really interesting advancements. Even just toying around with ChatGPT alone — if you struggle with marketing yourself, for example, or social media posts, you can get on ChatGPT and feed it some information, train it about who you are and what your aesthetic is, and say, “Give me a Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram contextual post that mentions the following.” Then you can keep tweaking it until you arrive at something that makes sense to you.

It can complement what we do where maybe we’re not so great.

Alberto de Icaza:Absolutely.

If you get an email from a client that infuriates you but you want to keep diplomacy, it’s great for that too. You can say, “Hey ChatGPT, I just received this email. I’m furious, but I need to respond diplomatically. Can you help me craft an email that keeps the peace and gets the point across?”

It’s great for stuff like that.

And like you said, that’s just the starting place for it. We’re watching the beginning of the internet. So you want to get in right now.

Matt Boudreau:Is there anything on the engineering front — mixing or mastering — that you think we should be paying attention to regarding AI?

Alberto de Icaza:Of course. We deal with audio and usually think in terms of waveforms. A lot of how I see the future going is with spectrograms.

You can see how powerful of a tool that is. To give you an idea, all of AI music works with spectrograms. All the generation is based off of that. So that’s definitely something people should learn.

It’s an incredible tool for mastering, for fixing stuff, even for fixing tracks. We’re in a time where everybody is producing in their bedrooms and not in ideal places. The best tools for cleaning audio are going to come through spectrogram-based tools.

That’s definitely a blind spot for a lot of people.

Matt Boudreau:Do you have any specific products on the market that you’re into?

Alberto de Icaza:I love RX. RX has such a good collection of tools that I can pretty much do whatever I want with it, especially for music production. You don’t need more than that.

There’s great stuff in there.

Gates are becoming really cool too. There are a lot of plugins starting to learn how to gate drums in smarter ways. So it’ll understand the transients and not kill them. You’ll hear the ring, but you won’t hear the hi-hats all over the snare, for example.

There’s a lot of stuff like that where we’re seeing these new technologies, and don’t be afraid — jump in headfirst and learn it because this is going to be a game changer for us.

Whatever makes your job easier. If typing emails is a pain in the ass, ChatGPT can help with that. If you spend so much time cleaning gates or cleaning tracks, there are tools for that now that are incredible. Just spend some time researching what’s out there and try stuff out. Don’t get boxed in.

Matt Boudreau:I couldn’t agree more. For example, when the record labels were faced with MP3s and what Napster brought to the table, they all freaked out. Instead of embracing it and figuring out how to harness it for their benefit.

I think AI is the same way. We as audio professionals — and those of us who blend being artists and audio professionals — need to not bury our heads in the sand. Don’t think the sky is falling. Embrace the technology. Learn it. Figure out how it can benefit what you’re doing and push it. Because if you run from it, you’re just going to get behind, and then it’s going to bite you later.

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah, and it’s not a new thing.

If you think about the beginning of the 1900s, you had all these musicians and that was their job. There weren’t really recordings. Musicians would literally go to public places and perform, and that’s how they made their money.

Then somebody made a player piano. For people who are too young for this, it’s a piano that plays itself. It looks like a ghost is playing the piano. You just put these rolls in and it plays whatever songs.

So all the musicians that were going to bars thought they were out of a job. Everybody was freaking out because they were going to be replaced by machines.

That created what we now know as mechanical royalties, because it was a mechanical thing playing music. That’s what started how you get paid for records. A lot of what happened later with vinyl, CDs, tapes, and all of that came from mechanical royalties.

That came from somebody having the fear of being replaced and somebody else having the idea, “Well, how about we make money from the songs we made?”

I think that’s how we have to start shifting our mindset. Let’s get over the panic stage and move on to, “How can we use this to make a career and make ourselves more comfortable than we are right now?”

Matt Boudreau:Historically, that’s always been an issue. Every new technological development faces resistance. The camera faced great resistance from painters. Drummers thought drum machines were going to replace them. Time and time again, every time some new thing shows up, there’s a faction of people who embrace it and a faction who freak out.

Then there are people who take advantage of it in ways you never thought of. Can you imagine Nine Inch Nails without drum machines? There are so many cool things you can do if you just embrace technology and get creative with it.

Alberto de Icaza:Yeah.

Matt Boudreau:Well, that’s a great note to end on. Alberto, thank you so much for making time for me. And again, we have to thank Steve Chadie for introducing us. I look forward to staying in touch with you and maybe having you back in a couple of years and seeing where you’re at in the journey.

Alberto de Icaza:Absolutely. Thanks for inviting me. This is awesome.

Matt Boudreau:All right. Well, you take care.

Alberto de Icaza:You too. Thank you.