My Voyage LA Interview

Voyage LA runs a Community Highlights series on people building things in the city. They asked how The Business of Mixing started, whether the road was smooth, and what I'd tell someone looking for a mentor. Here's what came up, and where to read the whole thing.

Read the full interview at Voyage LA

Where This Started

I didn't come to this from behind a console. I came to it from freelancing across music, production, and design, where the recurring problem was never the work itself. It was explaining what the work was worth. That's the same problem I now watch engineers run into every week, which is why the answer I gave about my own start is really an answer about theirs.

"…engineers had endless resources for improving their craft, but very little practical support for building the business surrounding it."

— Michael J. Morgan, Voyage LA, August 2026

The other half of the answer was about proximity, and about watching one career unfold over a very long stretch of time.

"One of the biggest influences on that journey has been my 20-year friendship with mix engineer Jon Castelli. I watched Jon build his career from the beginning into working with artists including Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, SZA, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, and Khalid."

— Michael J. Morgan, Voyage LA, August 2026

What that vantage point teaches you is unglamorous: careers get built through relationships and repeated delivery over years. The credits are the residue of that, not the cause of it.

No, the Road Wasn't Smooth

They asked whether it had been a smooth road. It hadn't, and not for the reasons people expect. The slow part wasn't the work. It was getting clear on what I was actually offering and committing to a specific group of people instead of hedging across all of them.

The obstacles I named were internal ones: being uncomfortable with sales, being uncomfortable with visibility, and needing to accept that getting paid well doesn't cheapen work that means something to you. I said the thing I believe most about this, which is that strategy is only half of it — the rest is "comfortable enough with your own ambition to follow through on it."

That's the same pattern I see in almost every engineer I talk to. Overthinking and fear take more careers off the table than any shortage of talent does. It's why the Business Reality Check grades your systems rather than your ears.

What The Business of Mixing Actually Is

The short version I gave: it helps mix engineers, mastering engineers, and producers build careers that hold up, by working on positioning, pricing, sales, and client relationships. The part I care about more is how — it's diagnostic and individualized, built on research habits rather than generic advice, which is why the people I work with range from beginners to engineers with major-label records behind them.

"A healthier, clearer business can change how someone experiences their time, confidence, creativity, relationships, and life."

— Michael J. Morgan, Voyage LA, August 2026

That's the actual argument for doing this work, and it's the reason the Intensive spends its 60 minutes on your situation instead of on a curriculum.

On Mentors and Networking

I've never had a mentor in the formal sense. What I had was a lot of relationships and a long look at how many different careers played out, which turned out to be its own kind of education.

So my advice on choosing a mentor is to go by the quality of someone's thinking rather than the size of their credits. Those two things come apart more often than anyone admits. And the networking advice follows from it: build relationships out of genuine curiosity and stay in contact over time. Transactional outreach reads as transactional, and people are very good at spotting it.

Read the full interview at Voyage LA