Daily Inspiration: Meet Andres Gonzalez-Cardona

Today we’d like to introduce you to Andres Gonzalez-Cardona.

Hi Andres, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
At age seven, I saw a real-life drum kit for the first time. Everything I remember is connected to music since that day. My dad was a computer engineer, and my house growing up was always filled with technology and computer parts. At around age nine, my dad was already giving me simple jobs assembling computers and troubleshooting simple software issues. That’s how I paid for my first couple of CDs and a boombox. Around that same time, thanks to one of my uncles who plays piano, I discovered Cakewalk, an old piece of software that then was replaced by Sonar, a popular Digital Audio Workstation. Everything made sense for me that day. I realized I could combine music and technology. Skip forward a few years and at age 15, I started my first recording studio with my cousin, and that turned into my first official business in music. At age 18, I got married and formally established my music production company in Medellin, Colombia, where I am from. I operated my studio for almost six years, learned a lot of important lessons and produced a couple of hundreds of songs. Some were even recognized in famous awards like the Latin Grammys and some others never left a hard drive. I had my first child and then… another one, then at age 23 I was offered a scholarship to study abroad and attend Berklee College of Music, from where I graduated with a Music Production degree. Nowadays, I work as a producer and mixer for many amazing artists and also for Berklee, my Alma Mater and I still like some of the songs from the CDs I bought when I was seven. Don’t tell anyone, but there was a couple of Britney CDs in that collection.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Looking back, I have to acknowledge and be grateful for how fortunate I am to get to do music for so many years now. Has it been a smooth road? No. But it’s the only road I could have seen myself taking. In fact, I do not even remember thinking about other possibilities. There was no Plan B. Since that day I told you about when I discovered music software, I cannot stop thinking about how to make the music I am involved with more meaningful, more intentional, more relevant to the life of the listeners. And I keep challenging myself with more and more creative and technical puzzles that I spend my days trying to solve until I do and then there is another one, and another one.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I consider myself a facilitator for the artist’s ideas. My work is as a producer and mixer, but really what I do is help artists ask themselves questions they sometimes can’t ask because of how loud things like technical minutiae or the hurry for commercial success, or what their peers are saying is. I like to think that I am able to help focus someone’s music so that through the production process, to the final master, the audio that ultimately reaches the listeners is as conceptually clear and artistically articulated as it can be. And I think that is what allows me to work with some many different musical backgrounds and aesthetics.

Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
After God, my wife deserves most of the credit for the career I have had the fortune to had to this day. It was my wife who stayed at home for eight years taking care of the kids so I could develop my craft. While she was ALSO completing a master’s degree and becoming the amazing therapist she now is. Big shoutout to my parents and grandparents, who sponsored this loud drummer despite making their lives miserable playing drums for 6+ hours a day for years. Thank you also to my father-in-law for challenging my business skills and then supporting me so beyond any other father-in-law I have ever heard of.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: andresgonzalezcardona

Image Credits:
Elizabeth Joy Sanders