Isaiah Marshall, audio engineer and producer in Silver Spring.

An audio engineer near you in the DMV

Isaiah Marshall is an audio engineer, producer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer, recording professionally in the DMV since 2012.

Empowered Recordings started in February 2012, while Isaiah was still in high school at Sidwell Friends, out of the practical need to record his own band properly. That first EP turned into other bands asking, and the other bands turned into a business. By 2014 the studio was cutting records for The Obsessives, whose Manners was reissued by Near Mint Records before the band was signed. By 2015 it was Bleary Eyed's Cherry Blossoms, released on an independent label. Both bands have since recorded Audiotree sessions.

The live years

Running parallel to the studio was a decade in live production across the DC scene. It started with an internship under Dennis Manuel, the house engineer at the Rock and Roll Hotel, while Isaiah was still in high school. It turned into touring the East Coast running production and lighting for DC post-rock band Black Clouds, later We Were Black Clouds, whose record was produced with J. Robbins and pressed to vinyl on Australopithecus Records.

That meant a national run supporting United Nations and bills with The Dillinger Escape Plan and O'Brother, in rooms including the 9:30 Club, the Black Cat, the Rock and Roll Hotel, and Saint Vitus Bar in Brooklyn. What that schedule teaches you is that the show starts whether or not the gear is cooperating, and somebody has to make it work anyway. That is still the most useful thing about a session here: problems get solved instead of becoming your problem.

It started while he was still finishing a diploma at Sidwell Friends, hauling gear on school nights. It is also why nothing in a studio session becomes a crisis. Live production teaches you to solve a signal problem in ninety seconds with a room watching, and that habit does not leave.

In the same period Isaiah co-founded Bethesda Youth Shows, a volunteer-run concert series at the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Community Center giving under-18 artists a real stage. He hauled the gear, built the PA, and mixed a dozen-plus shows for hundreds of attendees, for free.

Training

Formal training came from the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences in Arizona, completed in 2017, along with Pro Tools certification. Out of a long list of applicants, Isaiah was selected to intern under a Grammy-winning engineer working on major-label rock records. That internship is where the standard for what a finished record should sound like got set.

An engineer who also builds the tools

Isaiah is also a working software engineer with a computer science background, currently developing audio signal processing software including plugins for digital audio workstations. That matters in practice, not on paper. When something in a session sounds wrong, the diagnosis happens at the level of what the signal is actually doing. It is also why the restoration work here goes considerably further than a one-click denoiser.

How sessions run

Plainly. Decisions get explained in language you can act on, and questions are welcome at any point. Clients here consistently mention two things: that the technical side was handled precisely, and that they understood what was happening and why.

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