Faculty Spotlight: Aaron Gandia

Grammy-nominated music producer and audio engineer Aaron Gandia recounts his journey to becoming a Full Sail instructor.

Aaron Gandia sits in a recording studio. He is smiling and wearing glasses and a burgundy shirt. A soundboard is behind him.

Full Sail instructor Aaron Gandia's career path to becoming a Grammy-nominated music producer actually began behind the drum kit of his '90s high school rock band. It was in that band that Aaron started recording demos with equipment from his dad, a former musician himself, to get the band some local gigs.

“At one gig, I met with somebody and he had heard the demos and everything,” Aaron reminisces. “He says, ‘You know, you can do this as a career, right? There's something called recording engineering and you can just get a job just recording music all day.’ And I'm like, ‘Amazing! Love that idea. I want that to be my career.’”

That short conversation changed the trajectory of Aaron’s life. Halfway through his senior year of high school, he decided to make music his career, and he hasn’t looked back since. He went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Puerto Rico and then, in 2003, came to Full Sail to study recording arts. Three months after graduating, he began an internship at Phat Planet Studios, where he had to work his way up the totem pole.

“I just did the normal trajectory that you would do in a studio, started as an intern for two months, then was an Assistant Engineer for two months. Within those two months, as soon as I had keys to the place, I was trying to learn and experiment as much as I could. I started bringing friends to the studio as paying clients to work on their projects. My boss heard the results, and that got me promoted to Engineer,” Aaron recalls.

Aaron also refined his skills and understanding of the studio’s equipment by experimenting with the instruments.

Aaron centers his classrooms around real-world application. To keep his classroom accessible and engaging, he asks himself, “'How can I make my job more relatable to students so they can understand it?'"

“I would throw 30 microphones on a saxophone to figure out what sounded best and why. I would play it back for the boss and we would discuss it. My attitude towards wanting to know every piece of equipment at that detailed level is one of the reasons I got the Chief Engineer position,” he says.

After just three short years, Aaron was promoted to Chief Engineer, a position he still holds after 20 years of working at the studio. But he didn’t stop there, applying what he learned from his experiments in the studio to make his own speaker company, Critical Listening Labs, which he created with Phat Planet colleague and former Full Sail instructor Greg Begland. Now, he uses his own speakers in his home studio, which he also built and designed himself.

This spirit of innovation would become Aaron's biggest asset, and he's served as producer on several critically acclaimed projects, including William McDowell’s Withholding Nothing [Live] and Bob James’ Jazz Hands, both of which received Grammy nominations from the Recording Academy.

Beyond the recording studio, he has held several other positions, including guest lecturer at Daytona State College, and audio roles at local radio stations. It was at one of those stations where he crossed paths with Kathy Craven, the Program Director for Full Sail's media communications area of study. After five years of working together at the station and building a friendship, Kathy urged Aaron to consider teaching at Full Sail in her department.

Excited at the prospect of returning to his alma mater to pass on the knowledge he’d gained from years in the industry, Aaron eagerly applied for a position, and, 16 years after his graduation, he returned to Full Sail University as an instructor.

“I think, for me, having a [recording arts] education at Full Sail – and the school's slogan of ‘real-world education’ – it all really kind of stuck with me,” says Aaron. “From the different professors I had from both degrees, the ones that always stuck in my head were the ones that would tell you, ‘This is how you can apply this in real life.’”

Aaron centers his classrooms around real-world application. To keep his classroom accessible and engaging, he asks himself, “'How can I make my job more relatable to students so they can understand it?'

“The more I've tried to apply that in class, I've [realized] that it works because there’s no difference from a student [learning new concepts] to an artist coming to the studio for the very first time.”