experience counts

From there, he continued on to Los Angeles and began to work as a runner at Ocean Way Recording. Surrounded by world renowned talent in artists, musicians, producers, and engineers, Justin also played in different bands of his own over the years. While his role in the bands changed from bass player to lead vocals and guitarist to writing, producing, and singing on his own project, he stayed rooted in the studio, working his way up to Office Manager. A rebranding to the original name United Recording also brought with it a larger role as Assistant Studio Manager. Justin has continued to make advancements within the company. He has since been promoted multiple times, and now is in his current role as Senior Manager of Studio Operations.

Prior to his current position at United Archiving, which is housed within Hollywood’s renowned United Recording Studios, Mr. Smith spent thirty-five years as a successful and in-demand Grammy-nominated recording engineer and music producer. During that time he recorded and worked on numerous Gold and Platinum selling album and film projects, many of which also went on to become Grammy-winning and Grammy-nominated records and film soundtracks.

Few audio archiving facilities have the advantage of an engineer with such a broad and extensive background as Mr. Smith. His experience with vintage and current day analog and digital technologies, audio archiving and sound restoration is comprehensive and unparalleled in the industry. From such diverse operations as restoring and archiving entire tape catalogs for individual artists such as Natalie Cole, to preserving and organizing immense record label libraries, his knowledge and hands-on experience is key to the prominence of United Archiving as one of the top facilities in the world for audio archiving, restoration and asset management.

Smith began his career in New York City in 1985, working at many renowned recording studios such as The Hit Factory, Quad Recordingand Todd Rundgren’s Secret Sound Studios. He worked on albums for artists such as The Violent Femmes, Lou Reed, Leni Stern, C&C Music Factory and Grandmaster Flash before moving to Los Angeles in 1990. Upon his arrival in LA, he secured a position as staff engineer at Capitol Studios where he remained for several years before transitioning into freelance engineering.

During this period he engineered and worked on albums for Barbara Streisand, Toto, Whitney Houston, George Benson, The Manhattan Transfer, Chris Botti, Steve Lukather, Natalie Cole, John Fogerty, YES, Queen Latifah, Diana Krall, Trevor Horn, Christopher Cross, Al Jarreau, Quincy Jones & Sammy Nestico and countless other top name artists. Some of the numerous film scores he has been involved with over the years have included “Forrest Gump”, “Midnight In The Garden Of Good & Evil”, “Payback”, “Godzilla”, “Wyatt Earp” and “Grace Of My Heart”.

Mr. Smith spent eleven years working as personal recording assistant, co-engineer and ProTools operator alongside 23-time Grammy-winning recording engineer, producer and music industry legend Al Schmitt. During those years Smith and Schmitt traveled both nationally and abroad working together on a sizable number of highly regarded album projects for some of the best-known names in the music industry.

Among his numerous record, film soundtrack and television credits in both the stereo and 5.1 surround sound formats, Mr. Smith has also contributed engineering work for many multifaceted corporate marketing and advertising campaigns. He has been involved with product and preset development for both the hardware and software versions of the award-winning Lexicon PCM96 Stereo Reverb/Effects unit and TC Electronic M6000 Multi-Channel Processor platform. Additionally, he has been instrumental in artist relations programs for both of these companies, as well as for Sennheiser and Neumann.

Mr . Smith has been the subject of feature interviews for Pro Sound News, Music Connection Magazine, Working Class Audio and other notable publications. He has been featured in press campaigns for TC Electronic, Mackie, Summit Audio and has been a featured lecturer on audio engineering at The Musicians Institute in Hollywood.

With such a lengthy and diverse background in both analog and digital audio technology it’s easy to see why Bill Smith was a natural choice for the position of Chief Archiving Engineer at United Archiving. Having spent over three decades working with virtually every recording format available, his knowledge of how to revive, recondition and restore every format of audio tape, including vintage computer-based tape systems, is a rare and valuable skill.

This led to editing several successful 45 single releases, one yielding his first gold record in 1976. In 1977, Mike joined the engineering team at Criteria Studios and continued on in the early ‘80’s as an independent engineer working in Birmingham, Nashville, Memphis and Atlanta. He relocated to Jensen Beach, Fl in the mid ‘80’s to begin studies in Electrical Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology, later moving to the Northeast to complete a B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Technology at U. Mass. in 1989. He made the transition to full-time electronic maintenance engineer for the recording studios, edit suites and mastering rooms in the Capitol Records Tower that same year. In the later ‘90’s, he held positions at The Village and Conway Recording Studios.

She is also the founder of LA Urban Farms — an urban farming company created to help the Los Angeles community (and the world) grow their own food using sustainable, vertical aeroponic gardening technology. In her free time Coleman enjoys surfing, art, dancing, baking and modeling. She has loved playing the guitar and listening to music all her life and is now thrilled to be a part of the United Recording team.

While a student, he interned and assisted for Ocean Way veteran Alan Sanderson at Pacific Beat Recording. Upon graduation, Johnny was offered a runner position at United Recording. When he’s not in the studio, he’s scratching records or doing yoga.