Mason Hensley

My name is Mason Hensley, and I am a producer, engineer, and musician living in Southern California. I grew up singing in a small church where I learned to read music at a young age. I started playing the trumpet at around nine years old, and because I had some experience reading music, I had a bit of an advantage for the first couple years of playing. By the time I was 11, I was playing trumpet and french horn in the school band, and I had started messing around on my dad’s 1976 Fender Stratocaster, while occasionally pecking away at the family’s cheap electric piano. My grandparents had an organ at their house, and we would visit them every Friday night. I’m not sure how often I would play the organ, but I remember having a great time reading decades-old music that was buried in the piano bench.

As freshman in high school, a few neighbors and I started my first band, Silence Breaks. I had all of my first experiences with that band: playing with a drummer, writing songs with someone else, performing, and recording (also drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes). We performed at the local youth activity center, a couple back yard parties, and a few times at a local venue called The Wire, where I first got the itch for the lifestyle of a performing musician.

As high school went on, I formed a pop-punk band (Midnight in Montreal) with a few of my best friends, and started playing guitar as often as I could. I started learning a bit about DIY recording, and we played about a dozen shows over the course of a couple years. The end of high school was pretty much the end of the band, and so I started bouncing around a few other pop-punk bands, but nothing felt like a creative match for me at the time.

In my first year of college, a coworker took me to see a local reggae band called Inhale, and I immediately fell in love with the genre. The rhythmic syncopation between the guitar, bass, and drums was so interesting. They put on a great show every Monday night at a dive bar down the street from my house, so I started going every week. That’s where I ended up joining my first reggae band, Better Daze. Since then, I’ve played in a handful of different reggae bands, and I currently play with Calvin Banks and the Tellers, and Davy Brown Sound, in addition to Dorian Tide.

After a year and a half of community college, I had an opportunity to audition for a scholarship for Classical guitar. I had very little experience in classical music, but I ended up getting a scholarship to University of La Verne for Classical Guitar Performance. While studying there, I learned new techniques for playing guitar, and I started to experiment with recording. My guitar instructor gave me a few gigs around town, so I started performing as a solo guitarist. One of the most important gigs that I had was performing at a local dinner theater called Candlelight Pavilion. Performing in that setting really helped me to manage my stage fright, and having to perform by myself forced me to learn to focus and improved my practice habits because I was so terrified of making a mistake in front of people. That gig also helped me to learn that many mistakes go unnoticed if you don’t draw attention to them.

While I was in college, a friend of mine connected me with a music producer/recording engineer who needed session musicians. I started going out to his studio on the outskirts of L.A. and I recorded guitar, bass, and keys on several songs for a few clients of his. During the recording process, I saw that he was using the same type of computer that I had at home, and there were a few sweet pieces of hardware that we were running stuff through, but most of the work he was doing to mix those songs was being done with software. I started asking 1000 questions, and got really into watching him work after all the instruments had been recorded. I was (and still am) in awe of the process of recording a song. I asked him to recommend some equipment and software, made a few purchases, and quickly realized that recording a song is just as much of an art as writing the song itself. Since those sessions in 2013, I have been on a nonstop journey to learn about music production. I built a studio in my house and named it Fistpipe, and I have recorded dozens of bands and hundreds of songs. I am addicted to the feeling of spending all night recording something, then playing it in my car the next day, then making 5 tiny adjustments, then listening again; make 3 adjustments, and listen again, etc. Once that song has gone through its multiple iterations, it becomes something that everyone who is involved can be proud of, and that is the mood I always want to be in!