Enrique Gonzalez Müller

“As far back as I can remember I always knew I would end up doing something music-related, but it wasn't until I discovered music production and engineering that I truly found my voice. It fits like a glove since it blends a highly creative and philosophical endeavor with a highly precise, tangible, and technical craft, and the convergence of those elements go totally in line with my personality and passions. I’m drawn to understanding people, emotions, and things to figure out how to use and combine elements for an emotional outcome. That’s what I do in this profession: I communicate with musicians as human beings, try to really understand the emotional connection that moved them to make music, and figure out how to capture and bring out 110 percent of their message (and in doing so, also my own).”

“I encourage my students to think outside common-denominator preconceptions of ‘success,’ ‘failure,’ ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ and ‘true.’ I’m a bit of an idealist in that I [disagree] with the notion that, to go into this business, you can only seriously do so in a big entertainment city like New York, L.A., or Nashville. Personally, I feel I’ve enjoyed great success while marching to my own (pretty eclectic) drumbeat. And by ‘success’ I mean putting in the work to find out who you are, what honestly makes you tick and what makes you unique, then taking a healthy and proactive approach towards achieving a lifestyle that keeps you inspired and healthy in a sustainable way. In this way, I hope I can be a role model for my students and inspire original ways of listening, making, and capturing music.”

“I want my students to feel they’re in an environment where their work and demeanor will be held up to the standards of professionalism and real-life communication. At the same time, I strive to create a classroom environment that feels safe, respectful, and cool for anyone to be whoever they are.”

“Teaching and producing share many similarities in that we are trying to convey the intangible and the ethereal in ways that are palpable and usable. In music production and engineering, we work to capture the emotion in someone’s music and distill it into a tangible recording. When I teach, I’m trying to boil down all my professional and life experiences into messages that everyone can understand and hopefully find useful to further their explorations. And while the topics we discuss can get pretty technical, I always try to give my students a reason, an emotional destination to the techniques and choices we are discussing in class. Every decision we make means something and has definite impact, so we might as well strive to make thoughtful choices and really mean what we do.”

“One of my most favorite things to do is travel. If I don’t do it often, I just start to suffocate. Traveling, as I see it, is putting ourselves out there in new situations and cultures, giving us the opportunity to compare and challenge our own understanding of what is true in relationship to others’ versions of truth. It gives us the chance to learn ways that are different—maybe even better—and we’d be missing out on so much of that hipness if we never make a real proactive effort to question what we think we know, be open to all learning opportunities, and get out of our mind cubicles.”