Ryan “Spin” Rodriguez – Audio Engineer, Designer, Web and Flash Programmer.

Tell me a little about yourself.
Well, I’m a 23-year-old, self-proclaimed Californian, with a twinkle in my eye, and a skip in my step – minus the twinkle and the skip. It’s completely cliché, but I love music, cheeseburgers, corn dogs, and I greatly enjoy office supplies (not because they make me more organized, but because they’re like toys that adults can play with without getting strange looks).

Office supplies? Really?
You have to admit that a combination stapler/staple remover package can make an epic battle scene when you’ve got some downtime at work. And large desktop calendars, to me, just end up being extremely large doodle-pads (I keep dates on a computer – the desktop calendar is purely entertainment). And who doesn’t like Post-It’s?

Ok. But how did that bring you into music?
The office supplies didn’t. They’re just the little piece of me that doesn’t want to let go of being a kid. Music on the other hand was almost forced on me as a kid. My grandmother basically shoved piano lessons down my throat, before I could read. I never wanted to play piano (no kid wants to do what they’re forced into), but I really wanted to learn guitar. She eventually bought me a guitar (Progresso, Mexico - $4), and it just took off from there.

So then how did you get into recording and mixing?
Eventually, every musician comes up with a song, no matter how basic it is. Not everyone’s a songwriter, but every musician comes up with a ditty at some point. For some of us, it picks up – whether with a band or by yourself, the songs keep coming, and sooner or later you have to record them.

What was your first recording?
Growing up, I played in a lot of really crappy punk bands. My guitar instructor (I had to move on – my grandmother doesn’t even know the meaning of punk), put up with listening to a couple of the creations I had made for the bands, and lying or not, insisted that they were ‘pretty good.’ So he gave me a four-track tape machine (the kind that runs off of cheap cassettes), and I began attempting to record my entire band with four or less mics.

And web design?
I basically taught myself on a Sunday morning in high-school, because I was bored. The first few I made, were extremely basic, but eventually, I added Flash and sold web pages for extra money to teachers, the school, and a few other people.

If you had to pick, which would you choose – web or audio?
Probably audio. They both have their own pros and cons, of course, but audio just feels right. Code is strict and straight forward, and while you can be creative with it, you are constantly checking syntax, and debugging, and all those other fun computer terms that you can do to code. But with music, there is no specific order, or definitive technique that will get the output that you want; you just figure it out as you go. If you do something in the wrong order with code, it messes the page up, but if you take an alternate route with audio, it just sounds different – and sometimes different is good