My guest this week is mastering engineer Howie Weinberg, who has 20 Grammy Awards and 76 Grammy nominations, 4 TEC awards, 2 Juno awards, 1 Mercury Prize award, 200+ gold and platinum records, an unbelievable 19,000 total credits, and 91 billion streams.

Howie started working in the mail room at Masterdisk in New York City but soon became the apprentice of mastering legend Bob Ludwig.

Within a few months Howie began mastering tracks for hip hop stars like Kurtis Blow, Run DMC, Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy. Since then he’s mastered projects for legends like U2, Nirvana, Sheryl Crow, The Clash, Madonna, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, John Mellencamp, Ozzy Osbourne - the list goes on.

During our interview Howie talked about mastering at the beginning of hip hop, the tremendous volume of work that he does, why he thinks vinyl is a fad, why he creates both an analog and digital master, and so much more.

I spoke with Howie via zoom from his home in Santa Monica.

On the intro we look at Universal Music’s patent to be able to embed binaural beats in label songs, and a look at the different eras of modern music that show when rock died.

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