Why Mastering Feels Like Home: A Personal Reflection
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
— Carl Jung
I’ve always worked better in the quiet.
Not just literal silence, but the kind of spaciousness that lets you think clearly, listen deeply, and stay with a task until it feels complete. That might be why I found my way to mastering—and why I’ve stayed.
This isn’t a traditional origin story. There’s no big break, no viral moment, no shouty social strategy. Just a long, steady rhythm of refining things: myself, my process, and the way I serve other people’s music.
I was born in Frankston, Australia in 1993, but I grew up across a constellation of landscapes—Melbourne, Bordeaux, Fiji. My early years were shaped by contrast and motion: a quiet, overly aware child in loud environments. A kid with the intellect of an adult and the sensitivity of a poet, not sure where to put either. I loved music. I loved silence. I loved details most people skipped over. And I felt the world too strongly—too much, I was told, in ways I couldn’t quite fix.
By the time I reached adulthood, I was already masking heavily—high-achieving on the outside, often the quiet overthinker or class clown, but inwardly isolated. It wasn’t until much later that I began to understand the spectrum wiring beneath it all. I wasn’t broken—just different. Just tuned to a different frequency.
I came to music not by decision, but by pull—naturally, urgently, with reverence. I studied Music Production and Engineering at Berklee College of Music and graduated in 2020—right in the thick of COVID. While much of my class scattered or pivoted, I quietly began building. I didn’t chase a flashy studio job or move to LA. I didn’t want to become a cog in someone else’s machine.
Instead, I focused on mastering.
Where it started — the Berklee mastering studio that showed me what listening could really mean.
It suited me perfectly. The solitude. The precision. The way it required both sensitivity and detachment. Mastering, at its best, is not about ego—it’s about perspective. And that’s what I’ve tried to cultivate ever since. Not just a service, but a philosophy.
Over the past few years, I’ve mastered over 1,700 tracks. Some on major labels. Some for bedroom artists just starting out. But regardless of scale, I approach all of it with the same care: searching for balance, depth, clarity, and restraint. “The Wright Balance Method,” as I’ve come to call it, isn’t a gimmick. It’s my way of finishing things well.
Finalization isn’t just technical—it’s emotional. And if I’m doing it right, the artist hears their work clearly and completely for the first time, without anxiety or confusion. Pure clarity.
Behind the console—and behind any public-facing stats or Apple Digital Masters certification—is a much more complicated reality.
I’m a dual citizen now—Australian by birth, American by marriage. I live in Seattle with my wife Maya, who lives with chronic illness. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, jugular compression, a feeding tube. It’s been an intense and often isolating journey, one that’s forced us into a rhythm many people wouldn’t understand.
It’s not the life we pictured when we met. But it’s ours. And I meant every word of my vows. Through sickness and health.
There’s a steadiness that’s come from it. Not the kind that comes from ease, but the kind forged in responsibility. Days at home. Nights editing waveforms while she sleeps. Walks with our dog Ozzy—an Aussiedoodle who somehow contains both comic relief and spiritual grounding. A couple of gin and tonics each night. Always the music. Always the quiet.
I’ve built a life not from performance, but from principle.
The AW logo—designed with my dad—is a stylized waveform. A symbol of both lineage and intentionality.
“Monk mode,” I sometimes call it—the introspective rhythm I’ve kept while the industry has gotten louder and faster around me. I don’t do hype. I don’t chase virality. I still believe, as I wrote in this piece, that sound has the power to move us in ways no algorithm can predict. So I’ve spent years refining the small details of my craft, from the practice itself to my order process, my communication, my site, my logo, my tone.
In 2025, I finally felt like my public presence matched what clients had long told me privately: that I’m not just technically strong—I care. Deeply. And that emotional trust is why people come back.
I’m not hiding in the quiet. I’m rooted there.
I don’t think of mastering as a transaction. I don’t think of myself as a brand. When you hire me, you’re not getting a preset chain or a junior engineer. You’re getting me. My ears, my taste, my pace, my calm.
Clients bring me their vulnerabilities—unfinished tracks, insecure mixes, strange decisions, big feelings—and trust that I’ll help them hear what matters.
It’s a responsibility I don’t take lightly. I treat mastering as a form of care. A way to finish things not just technically, but psychically. The last 5% can be the most human part of the process.
My mastering studio. Minimal, intentional, and silent—this is where the final 5% of music takes shape.
Outside the studio, my life is fairly minimal. I gravitate toward timeless menswear (CDG, Folk, APC). I collect titanium EDC tools and I practice the ancient Japanese zen tradition of Kōdō. I curate playlists obsessively—one every few months to capture a season, each one its own 200-song journal.
I read a lot—Jung, Rimbaud, Hemingway. I rewatch films that feel like slow dreams: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Persona. I walk Ozzy. I stay off Twitter. I think a lot more than I talk. But I’ve come to see that quiet doesn’t mean unfeeling.
I’m autistic. I’m highly sensitive. I obsess, I ruminate, I idealize. These used to feel like defects. But I’ve started to understand them as the engine behind everything I do well.
Mastering is a refuge for people like me—for people who’ve been told they’re “too much,” or who feel the world too sharply. People who need structure, solitude, and the dignity of doing things precisely. If that sounds like you too, you might relate to what I wrote here.
In my best work—writing or mastering—you’ll hear the same philosophy: that consistency is a form of love. That refinement isn’t soulless. That sensitivity is a strength. That solitude can be sacred.
“Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.”
— Carl Jung
I’m still integrating. Still balancing ambition and acceptance. Still learning how to stay in rhythm with who I really am.
A photo I took somewhere beautiful, silent, and deeply special to me.
But what I’ve built—my mastering practice, my voice, this quiet life—is proof that you don’t have to shout to be heard. You just have to be true.
I didn’t become someone else to succeed.
I became more myself.
And I’m still becoming.