Kurt Ballou (Engineer: music / biomedical)
Bachelors in Engineering, Boston University 1997.
Record on March 16, 2020
At GodCity Studios in Salem MA
https://www.isolatecreate.com/

• Playing Sax at Andover High School marching band. 
• Wanting to be involved in the creation of things. 
• "White Boy Rap attack."
• “I knew that basic principle of life is: Start out by imitating something you like, and What you see is what you get.”-V.  Vale
• Starting college at Boston University in 1992 and having a full stack in your dorm room. Changing majors from electrical engineering to aerospace engineering.
• Writing The Saddest Day in your dorm room alone out of frustration and procrastination.
• Taking a semester off and dropping classes. 
• Boston Scientific: making a pressure valve for stent deployment. 
• College is not so much about learning the material, as it is about demonstrating that you have the ability to learn the material. 
• Most research and development ends in failure. 
• Moral conflicts with animal testing while working as a biomedical engineer. 
• Wanting to learn to record because of the desire to want micromanage converge’s sound. Eventually an apprenticeship under Brian Mcternan. 
• Recording Fit For Abuse ‎– Mindless Violence EP in 1996 with Matt Kelly
• Recording Until your Heart Stops in 1998. 
• Not trusting yourself (yet) to do a record on your own. Recording When forever comes crashing with Steve Austin in 1998. 
• The making of Jane Doe with Mathew Ellard. Berklee College of Music talk. 
• The importance of being “Peer Reviewed” in music writing and recording. 
• Potentially recording Jane Doe with Steve Albani. 
• Analog versus Digital Sound recording and Audiophile nerds. 
• Jake Bannon’s rank your records, and the importance of ‘Axe to Fall'
• Tone searching with effects and always finding new ways to be creative with gear swapping over the years.
• Being discouraged by electronic theory but being pulled into the study by making your own guitars.
• Making the Brutalist Jr. PCBs into business cards based upon The Providence Stampede pedal and the birth of God city instruments