Bob Power besides being one of the greatest engineer/producers to ever make records, was an incredibly kind and giving human being. I owe so much to Bob and in so many ways, I’ve tried to follow the example that he set before me. He was a person who created so much beauty through music and yet remained kind, gracious, giving to all around him, whether it was the students at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music or the artists that he worked with and the younger producers that he mentored.
I met Bob in 2009 when my band Comandante Zero was looking to have our record mixed. I asked a friend who the greatest mix engineer in New York City was and he answered ‘Bob Power.’ I was able to get in touch with Bob and he listened to the music and decided to mix the record. He did a great job, as he did with every record that he worked on, and in the process, I would find myself in the studio with him, often just chatting about history. Bob loved history and really enjoyed reading about it, and had studied in school and spent years as a history teacher, so we’d nerd out about different historical eras. In spending time with him, in his typical fashion, he would drop these incredible little jewels of wisdom about music and life. Three that will always stay with me are:
“A good mix is a good arrangement”
“A good mix is one in which you can hear everything”
“The ends of notes are just as, if not more important that the beginnings of notes”
Bob brought me to the Clive Davis Institute to teach Ableton in 2015 and I had the honor of working with him as a colleague. He became to me not only the example of a great producer/engineer and musician but of a teacher. He gave so much to his students and was so loved by the faculty and students.
I had the privilege of working on a record this past year that Bob had recommended me for. He was the mix and mastering engineer for the record so we were in frequent contact. In one of our conversations in August 2025, I told him about how I still remembered his sayings over the year and asked if he had a collection of them. In his typical humble fashion, he said that the wisdom wasn’t really his, it had come from folks that he had worked with over the years. About an hour later, I received a doc entitled “Power’s Laws of Production.” He told me to share them with my students, and I did in the fall of 2025 with several of classes at Berklee. Here they are. Enjoy the wisdom of an incredible producer and human being.