How I Got Here
I always knew I wanted to work in sound. For a while that meant acoustics — I seriously looked into it — but the job market pointed me toward computer science instead. I'm glad it did. My background in CS, particularly in theory, gave me a way of thinking about problems I didn't fully appreciate until I started working on circuits. The debugging mindset, the cause and effect, the satisfaction of tracing something back to its root — that was always audio for me first. Coding taught me to think that way everywhere else.
I grew up in Rochester and spent five years building relationships in the music community there before moving to Canandaigua in 2025. That time included working alongside Rob Storms, who co-founded SoundSource, and John Nau of Nau Engineering — probably the most respected amp shop in upstate New York. John took me under his wing. We built amps together, and he's still the person I call when something has me genuinely stumped. That relationship shaped how I approach this work more than anything else.
Why Repair
I've always needed to work with my hands. There's something about using them to solve a problem — and then getting to hear the outcome — that I can't replicate any other way. A circuit is honest. It tells you exactly what it's doing if you're patient enough to listen.
I love Fender-based circuits and I'm deeply fascinated by the transistor revolution — class A/B design specifically. The thing that gets me is how little you actually need to make a great-sounding amplifier. A lot of what I do outside of repair work is messing with component values just to hear what changes, building tools for the bench, and talking to other techs about process. The troubleshooting itself is the thing.