Tracks of the Trade: Alby Cohen
Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid – Frank Zappa
The path to the recording studio was anything but a straight line for Alby Cohen. While he studied jazz at Goddard College under both Ernie Stires and Don Glasgow of the Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble, he never attended sound school. He had tinkered with 4-tracks in high school and college and knew basic tracking, but initially had more of an interest in being a musician.
He began his musical career by playing drums and singing in a band in Ithaca called Damn Brandy, which led him to take a field semester away from Goddard. As the story unfolds, the band gained some traction and next thing he knew he’d been living and touring out of Ithaca with Damn Brandy for a matter of years. The band recorded a couple of demos and went to studios to do some mastering, but before long, lives got in the way and the band broke up.
After the band split up, Alby moved back to Brooklyn; finished his last year of college remotely; put himself through grad school; and ultimately fell into advertising. He slugged it out in the corporate world, but eventually fell prey to the credit crisis in 2008. He got laid off. Meanwhile, a gentleman named Doug Martin – now his boss – had asked a few years back if he wanted to be involved in a studio he planned to build. The stars eventually aligned with the studio coming to fruition right and Alby hitting a career inflection point, so he decided to go full tilt. Cohen didn’t have much engineering experience at the time, but after realizing over the course of several rounds of corporate interviews that he had to go with his heart. He chose music.
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