Peter Wang

It took Peter a decade and a half and quite a few "happy little accidents" to discover his passion as a Sound Engineer. Classically trained from the age of 4, Peter Wang was quite determined to pursue a career as a concert pianist as a 17-yr-old. However, after his classical career peaked in the summer of 2016 with him winning 2nd and 3rd place in the Canadian National Music Festival and the Canadian Music Competition at the national level, respectively, Peter felt his enthusiasm waning. Firstly, it became apparent to him that there isn't much of a market for concert pianists, yet in spite of that, for some bizarre reason, there didn't ever seem to be a shortage of determined classical-pianist-hopefuls—low demand, high supply. Because of this, secondly, the long and narrow path of a concert pianist required a dogmatic, almost single-minded commitment to the craft that Peter had a hard time justifying, especially when he had, and excelled in, other interests in life. (Not even to mention the subjective gatekeeping done by classical competition judges, competitions being almost a necessary hurdle to jump in kickstarting a young classical soloist's career, but that's a rant for another day.)

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By the time college apps came along, Peter had a couple options: he could pursue a career as an orchestral trombonist, which he picked up in middle school for band class, and went on in Grade 9 to join the Calgary Youth Orchestra, which he thoroughly enjoyed playing in; he also had a passion for the drum set, which he played in his school jazz band and his church's worship team for a couple years. He could've even pursued his interest in nuclear fusion, which he had learned about in his senior year of high school, by going to a traditional liberal arts college. In spite of all these options, Mama Wang still insisted he audition to music schools as a pianist, and Peter ended up going to Berklee College of Music as a half-classical, half-jazz pianist, hoping to use the open-ended nature of this non-conservatory-style music school to transfer his 14-year-long skill investment into something else more marketable.

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Having believed himself a performer for the majority of his life at that point, Peter's initial inclination was to stick with a performance degree and just transition genres to jazz and other more contemporary styles. But something else caught his eye, and not for reasons you might suspect: the Music Production and Engineering program was one of the few majors in Berklee that had a separate application process, and among those few, the most selective. As someone who was eyeing Ivy League schools for his college apps, to Peter, selectivity=quality, naturally. (Obviously, not always true.) So, with no prior experience and armed with only his good grades and his gut, Peter somehow ended up in the major.

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Little did he know, Peter had found the perfect outlet to repurpose many of his previous accumulated skills. His tech classes felt like a breeze, as the signal flow of consoles and patch bays clicked in his brain like physics equations from high school; the emphasis that his classical mentors put on sound and projection, and his time spent in well designed acoustic spaces, both as a performer and an audience member, gave him a critical ear and a unique perspective on mixing; and his knowledge in advanced music theory and analysis that he learned while pursuing his Performers Diploma in Piano Performance in high school transferred into his production classes, where he was able to communicate with songwriters and composers as to specific chord structure or arrangement adjustments that would improve the piece of music in question.

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In the fall of 2019, 2 years into college, Peter asked his classmate, Miguel Soto (professionally known as Mike Soto), to be the feature artist on his production project for one of his classes. His first published production and engineering credit, I Keep Falling, released under Mike's band Taller Than Trees, was the result. Mike was so pleased with how this song turned out, after the first rough mix that Peter sent him, that he asked Peter to permanently join Taller Than Trees as a producer and engineer. In Mike's own words: "this mix is [so far] the closest I've ever gotten to realizing the sound I want to have as an artist". Thus began a long and fruitful partnership between the two, Peter going on to engineer and mix 5 additional Taller Than Trees songs as well as 6 singles released under Mike Soto as a solo artist after Mike was signed to Warner Chappell Music Mexico.