I’m Rob. I’ve spent my life chasing one question — what sound does to us. It has taken me from a basement with a strobe light to festival stages, mastering suites, ceremony spaces, and eventually to writing the code inside the plugins.
I was twelve, in a dark basement, strobe lights going, listening to old-school progressive trance — John Digweed, Dave Seaman — and being carried somewhere else entirely. That was the first time I understood that sound could move a person. I’ve been chasing it ever since.
What followed was a long apprenticeship in taking sound apart. Playing bass in punk bands, and learning Pro Tools in a friend’s dad’s studio so we could record ourselves. Producing breakdance music. Studying early IDM and reverse-engineering it to work out how they were bending sound like that. Loops built in a bootleg copy of Fruity Loops, then chopped and arranged in Acid Pro — whose original developer, as it happens, was a friend’s brother. Fruity Loops gave way to Reason; Acid Pro gave way to Logic; and in 2014 I landed on Bitwig, where I’ve stayed. Reason never left — it still lives in my rack as a VST for sound design.
Somewhere in all that chain-building — stacking plugins, pushing them past what they were built for, listening to what came out the other side — I stopped being satisfied with the tools I could buy. That is what pulled me into DSP, and it is why there are Golden Turtle plugins at all.
Recording bands was how I got to be inside the writing of a song. Running live PA is where I fell in love with holding sonic space for other people’s experience — and the bigger the gathering, the more obvious it became how much rests on whether that space is held well or badly.
The first time I did it for real was a symposium and satsang for the Art of Living at Naropa University. A room full of people had come to go somewhere internally, and the sound was either going to carry them there or get in the way. That was my initiation into holding a sacred sonic space, and it set the direction for everything after.
So the four things I do now aren’t four businesses. They’re four rooms with the same question in them.
Holding the space for a crowd — solar-powered PA, silent event power, and live engineering.
Holding it for a record — a credited human ear, and masters that translate everywhere.
Holding it for a practice — journeys built to carry a room without a word.
Building the tools that do the holding — measurement-first, and yours to keep.
years running sound
artists in the studio
events, and counting
Festival stages at Sonic Bloom, Arise Music and Arts Festival, Unison, Tribal Vision, and the Crestone Energy Fair. Three years as house engineer at Shine in Boulder. Kirtan nights, breathwork sessions, weddings, ceremonies, private parties, and on-location band recordings. As an ecstatic dance DJ I’ve curated music for Rhythm Sanctuary in Denver, and for dances in Denver, Boulder, Santa Fe, and Durango.
In the studio: full-length albums for conscious hip-hop artists Original Currency and Tr9nsfer, and mixing and mastering for Liat & the Sirens, mzTree, mcAD and the Freedom Movement, Mike Wird, and many more.
First rig in 2014. Golden Turtle Sound since 2016.
Most of what I’ve learned in twenty-odd years shows up as things I refuse to do.
The same standard runs through the plugin line: perpetual licences, no iLok, no subscriptions, and pricing that stays fixed and fair.
We came to Taos for our kids. After about six years in Crestone, Colorado, we’d fallen in love with extreme small-town life but wanted a little more going on — and Taos has real cultural and economic diversity, which mattered to us. My partner founded Inspire Roots here, a self-directed, child-led learning centre. I built its website and the software that runs it, because apparently I can’t help myself.
The solar came out of working the Crestone Energy Fair. A vendor there had solar generators on offer and let me run the GTS rig on clean solar power. I worked with them for a few years after that, and eventually got my own.
It turned out to be the best decision in the business. The power is clean — we can run a full sound system and a full band all day with zero dips, and push into the night until two or three in the morning. And it is silent: no generator drone underneath a ceremony, no fumes, nothing left behind. A solar rig plus Starlink also means I can set up a working remote studio in the middle of nowhere, which is about as free as this work gets.
A festival on a mesa, a record that needs to land, or a journey that needs to hold a room. Start with a free call and we’ll work out what it actually needs.
Decades of listening, built into tools you keep. Measurement-first, voiced in gold, perpetual licence — no iLok, no subscription.
