SOUNDS
OF
GENKI
About
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Ross McCafferty is a sound engineer, producer, drummer, and DJ with over 25+ years of experience in the music industry.
Growing up in musical household, Ross was immersed in music from early childhood. At the age of five, he took to percussion and never looked back. He has an extensive background in jazz studies as a drummer and percussionist. Ross was mentored by drummer Andy Weis, a disciple of legendary big band drummer and bandleader Louis Bellson. He also received mentorship from San Francisco “first call” drummer Vince Lateano (Cal Tjader, Chet Baker, Stan Getz) and clinics with Berklee professor and vibraphonist Gary Burton, violin virtuoso Regina Carter, master saxophonist Wynton Marsalis, and pre-eminent vocalist Kurt Elling.
Elected as the principal drummer for the Monterey Jazz Festival All-Star Band, Ross toured and performed alongside a twenty-one-piece orchestra, opening for Juilliard jazz trumpeter Dominick Farinacci on a multi-city tour of Japan. The ensemble had top billing at the Noto Jazz Festival and headlined Los Gatos’ Jazz on the Plazz. The ensemble also performed at the Next Generation Jazz Festival, and the Monterey Jazz Festival.
Ross McCafferty holds two associate degrees from Shoreline Community College for Digital Audio Engineering & MIDI Music Production. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism & Media Ethics from California State University Monterey Bay, and a master’s degree in Music Recording Arts & Technologies from Middle Tennessee State University. For his master’s thesis, Ross explored production, recording, and mixing techniques for multichannel and binaural reproduction. The thesis also investigated immersive audio formats including Ambisonics and Dolby Atmos.
He has studied under the guidance of prominent engineers including John Merchant (Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, Celine Dion), Daniel Pfeifer (B.B. King, ZZ Top, Albert Collins, Al Green, and Jerry Lee Lewis), and GRAMMY award-winner John Hill (Michael Daugherty).
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Florian Angerer is a singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and audio engineer from Vienna, Austria.
Introduced to music at an early age, Florian developed a passion for musical instruments, first learning to play the piano at the age of three. Initially self-taught, Florian later started formal training in primary school. Over the following years, he continued exploring various instruments including tuba, trumpet, saxophone, recorder, drums/percussion, accordion and singing.
In 2010, at the age of 17, Florian joined the Lower Austrian Youth Jazz Orchestra. During this time, he began his career with the Lower Austrian Youth Jazz Orchestra originally as a keyboard player, but later also as a singer. The following year he won first prize in the “Star.t” competition.
Later in 2011, Florian formed the vocal group “4 Unlimited”, which was featured multiple times on national television. During this time, Florian, together with Helmut Karmann, co-wrote the musical “Estelle, aus dem Leben eines Superstars”, which was premiered in November 2014 at the Ronacher, one of the most renowned locations for musical theater in Vienna. For this occasion, Florian put together a 40-piece orchestra as well as a choir. This led to him working in the field of orchestral crossover (as composer, arranger or conductor) on numerous occasions in subsequent years, working with artists such as Josh., Pecoraro & Pecoraro, Kana Shimanuki, among others.
Blind since birth, Florian has always relied on echo-localization and acoustics in order to acquire information about his surroundings in the natural world. This has lead to an interest in audio engineering, surround sound, and 3-D audio. In 2010, he started experimenting with homemade dummy-head microphone systems for music and speech recording. Overtime, Florian also explored surround sound techniques and theory, along with various types of sound field reconstruction approaches and methods including Ambisonics, with a primary focus on music production.
Together, Ross McCafferty and Florian Angerer have crafted immersive mixes for artists such as Avery*Sunshine, Jamison Ross, and Richie Goods & Chien Chien Lu from the group Connected.