Mario DiSanto Subverting the 21st Century of Music by Fusing it with Mechanical Engineering and Idolizing Analog Equipment

Many musicians are now becoming multi-faceted and adding producer and recording engineer to their list of talents, but Mario DiSanto takes it a step further with mechanical engineer being a part of his diverse persona. His interest in both music and mechanical engineering began at a young age, which were both influenced by his father. As a child, he could be found helping his father fixing things around the house and working on machines and cars in his father’s garage. His father was Diesel Mechanic that worked on numerous vintage cars, and after completing the job they’d drive around listening to Beatles CD mix, which DiSanto remembers being played on a constant loop. The music of the British rock band became one of his favorites and sparked his musical interests. He began learning drums at age 11, and afterwards expanded his musical horizons by being a part of his middle school band playing trombone and later transitioning to instruments like guitar, bass, and piano in his later years. Once he gained these instrumental skills, he began learning about production, but instead of opting to the more traditional route that many musicians follow in the 21st century through a digital audio workstation such as Logic, Ableton or Garage Band, he decided to produce music like his 1960s and 1970s idols did—using analog equipment. And with his mechanical engineering background this journey was made simpler.

“They definitely intersect in a lot of ways, especially [in] the way I choose to record music [which is] in the physically analog realm instead of on the computer. I think the exact type of equipment that I’m utilizing for my needs as tools are very [much] mechanical engineering devices,” said DiSanto. “Like a tape machine is a great example or any electric audio equipment, I mean that’s mechanical engineering, so understanding the basics of how those things work, how you can fix them, how you can use these tools to shape a better sound helps.”

DiSanto has always had an affinity towards technology that’s now considered antiquated. The old way of things requires working with your hands and that follows suit to many of his other interests, which includes hand-tool woodworking and repairing broken items around the house. And when it comes to analog equipment, you’ll constantly be fixing things—especially in a homemade studio, like DiSanto’s, where the equipment isn’t well taken care of, not well maintained, all in bad need of service, which leaves him constantly tinkering.

“If you’re a guitar player and you have an old tube amp, you’re going to have go in there and fix things. You’re going to have to replace tubes, to test tubes, you’re going to have to solder,” said DiSanto.

Even though his deep knowledge of how machines work is beneficial to him, he doesn’t believe that those skills are necessary to produce music using an analog approach, but he warns that no one’s going to come to your house to fix this stuff, so you do need to know how to fix things to a minor extent.

“If you are working in the analog realm you need to be somewhat of handy person to fix things that are going to happen while you’re recording. And on the fly and stuff like that. So, you have to be a little bit handy, but I don’t know anyone [else] who is [both] a mechanical engineer and a musician,” said DiSanto.

DiSanto demonstrates how to use analog equipment and produce rock music on his YouTube channel.

Typically, musicians that do cross the bridge to the producing side of things would fall under the audio engineering umbrella, which would require a different kind of schooling then DiSanto went through. But even then, there’s a distinction between producers and audio engineers according to DiSanto.

“Say you’re a big producer, recording all the big rock acts right now and you’re the producer, doing all the final mixes, making sure that everything is exactly how you want it to sound. You’re also kind of like the manager. I wouldn’t necessarily consider that person a recording engineer,” said DiSanto. “A recording engineer is the people who are doing the tracking to record the instruments and knowing where to put a microphone, knowing how the microphones are going to be in relationship with each other, knowing which compressor to use for this specific instrument and the producer doesn’t necessarily do that.”

He used Phil Spector as an example of this. Phil Spector was famous for the wall of sound in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but he himself didn’t know how to record instruments, instead he would tell the audio engineers what he wanted it to sound like and they would accomplish that under his direction. Comparatively, we can look at a producer like movie director.

“If you take some great directors like Stanley Kubrick where he wasn’t necessarily the one using the film camera all the time, he wasn’t the one necessarily setting up the lights, but he knew exactly what he wanted and he knew the right people that would make the job happen,” said DiSanto

But on the other end of the spectrum, you could have someone like George Martin, who was considered the fifth Beatle.

“He was extremely important to the end product to how these songs would come out. He did all the orchestrations for every single song with strings on it. He played the piano a lot. Those types of decisions that producers make is what makes the final result the perfect art of what it is.”