ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author’s Position Statement
This work is written from nearly four decades of engagement with music, recording culture, and the environments that shape creative decision-making. It does not originate from trends or platforms, but from long-form practice— across changing technologies, shifting industries, and real constraints.
FX Studio first took form in the early 1990s in Brooklyn, New York, as a working studio serving a broad range of musicians and producers. The space hosted rehearsals, auditions, and recording sessions for independent artists and emerging local talent across genres—heavy metal, hip-hop, R&B, and beyond.
The work was informal, collaborative, and grounded in making records rather than documenting process. While the passage of time makes individual credits difficult to reconstruct, the environment itself—raw, unscripted, and experimental—became foundational.
After stepping away from commercial studio work for a period, this trajectory expanded into formal study in economics, along with rigorous coursework in mathematics and engineering. That interval was not a departure from creative work, but a recalibration—introducing analytical frameworks that would later influence how technical choices, constraints, and outcomes are evaluated in the studio.
The current phase of work operates under the name G Sharp Jamz and from a deliberately modest, highly functional production environment rather than a traditional commercial facility. The focus is no longer scale, but control: working with independent producers and local artists while maintaining direct accountability for decisions made at the console.
FX Studio 2 emerged as a continuation rather than a restart—an acknowledgment of the studio’s second life. Initial public work followed familiar patterns of gear evaluation and review, but that format quickly revealed its limitations. Tool-centered content, divorced from decision context, proved both creatively unengaging and educationally shallow.
That realization prompted a deliberate pause.
The material that followed—Behind The Glass, its companion essays, the Research Library, and the Decision First Engineering system—represents a shift away from demonstration toward argument. These works examine how tools influence behavior, how options defer commitment, and how judgment is formed under imperfect conditions.
Decision First Engineering is not a rejection of technology. It reflects long familiarity with analog systems alongside full participation in modern digital workflows. As the work often states:
The interest lies in what those differences do to decisions, not in ranking tools themselves.
This body of work exists to document that distinction—to preserve stories, surface patterns, and articulate a methodology for thinking clearly in the studio when certainty is unavailable and finishing still matters.