Meet Gene Williams

We recently connected with Gene Williams and have shared our conversation below.

Gene, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

I began this journey as a visual artist. Drawing, inking and painting were the pursuits I followed most in my young years. I worked in the graphic arts world to pay the bills, doing everything from T-Shirt designs to painting signs. When I worked on my own solo creative projects I often played music in the background for inspiration. However, the music choices I had access to generally weren’t exactly what I wanted to provide my “soundtrack” for my creative work.

I grew up around music, many members of my extended family and friends played instruments and would often play music at events and get togethers. Thus I thought, “I could do that too!” I decided to take a shot at making my own music and creating my own soundtracks for creating visual art. It actually worked out better than I expected. I’m not exactly sure when, but sometime in those early days I found myself doing music more and more and doing the visual art less and less.

I moved to the Boston area in the early 1990s to finish college. At the time I was studying archaeology, and while attending college I was introduced to a lot of new music and sounds as well as a host of new musicians. Near the end of my degree program, I shifted my focus away from academia and started doing music full time. In that first year of focusing on music I got into sound engineering and within the first year of sound engineering I was doing mastering for artists and bands, mainly in the electronic and dark ambient scenes that were flourishing in the Northeast at the time.

That brings my story to the late 1990s early 2000s and the next time I raised my head up to look around I was running a commercial music studio. I was mainly concentrating on being a mastering engineer, and without really having a conscious roadmap of how I got there, I knew that for the foreseeable future my purpose was to help people finish their records. I’m still doing that today and still enjoying it as much… no, not AS much, definitely more, than I ever have.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I finish records and I bring peace of mind, full stop. I am the intersection of the artist, the art, the audience and the marketplace. I have a great sense of responsibility to insure the artist, their art, their audience and their marketplace all realize the greatest potential possible. I take that responsibility very very seriously. Here’s how:

I bring peace of mind to the artists I work with by helping them fully realize the vision they have in their head and their hearts. I help them to get their records over the finish line the way they imagine. In a small way I help dreams become reality.

I honor the art created by the artists I work with (and that includes myself). I insure that the treatment of every aspect of the musical presentation is as fully realized as possible, that every essence of feeling, every bit of visceral heart and soul that has been poured into a creation has it chance to shine at its very best.

I respect the audience that is going to hear these pieces of music. I insure there are no unnecessary distractions, that the music hits the way it should for the genres and media that it is reproduced on, and that the listener has the optimal listening experience, immersed in the music as fully as possible.

Finally, I make sure that the final delivery of the music is ready for the marketplace, whether the final destination is streaming, vinyl, CD, cassette or all of the above. I am the final quality assurance before the music goes public and I insure everything is correct with no technical glitches to hamper reproduction in whatever form it will take.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Being kind is the first and foremost quality that anyone in a creative business can hone and work toward fully realizing, every day with every client and that includes yourself.

Listening with an open mind and open heart. Really listening. With respect to musical productions that means listening closely to everyone involved with a project. Listen with intent and really hearing what someone is saying or expressing.

Finally, being willing to try things and go all in. This one ties into the other two in a perfect golden mean so to speak. If you’re kind and open, listening with real intent, you’ll tend to be open to new ideas and possibilities. Give it a shot, whatever it is. It may be the thing that changes someone’s career, lifts up someone out of depression or helps a scientist focus on their next discovery that could save our world or take us to the stars someday.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

I believe that if you have a strength, exploit it. I’m not implying that working on a weakness can’t be useful and sometimes it is absolutely necessary. However, being well-rounded usually happens on its own over time anyway. If you spend too much time working on those weaknesses, you might lose out on what your strength can do.

We all have finite energy. You can choose to spend that energy however you may like, but the time it takes to do whatever you choose cannot be recovered. Your energy can be recovered perhaps, but not the time. Thus if you spend all your time working on weaknesses, that will be how your time is spent. I would rather spend time working on things utilizing my strengths, really enjoying that time I spend and not always in a constant struggle working on weaknesses.

I also often find that while pursuing something with my strengths I need to work on a weakness to really put all the pieces together. I take the time to do that, but only the time I need to, then I shift back to my strengths as quickly as possible.

Bruce Lee has a great quote that kind of ties into the above and that I’ve found hugely inspiring in my life:

“Research your own experience. Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.”

When you research your strengths, you learn to understand the potential and the pitfalls in that strength, you recognize and reject what in that equation is weak, and from that you add something to the equation that is truly and uniquely your own.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Photography by Michael Van Auken and Glenda Benevides

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