Matt Andrews - Alumni Spotlight
Jeremy Alves | July 17, 2026
From OIART to Front of House for Knocked Loose: Matt Andrews’ Live Sound Career
Some graduate stories are worth revisiting.
When OIART first caught up with Matt Andrews after graduation, he was building his own studio, Sovereign Audio, in downtown Windsor. He had gone from touring musician to OIART student to studio owner, using the skills he built in school to create a professional space of his own.
A few years later, his career had taken another major turn.
Matt is now mixing front of house for Knocked Loose, one of the most talked about heavy bands in the world, bringing his background in studio mixing, live sound, touring, and heavy music into some of the biggest rooms of his career.
His story is not a straight line. That is what makes it so strong.
It shows how an audio career can move from the stage, to the studio, to the road, and back again.
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Watch my journey with OIART and see how it changed my life!
From Touring Musician to Audio Professional
Before OIART, Matt already knew what it felt like to be on tour.
He had spent years as a touring musician, chasing the dream that a lot of people have when they first fall in love with music. But over time, he started thinking more seriously about what a long term life in music could look like.
“It was just something I always kind of wanted to do, even as a kid,” Matt said in his first Grad Spotlight. “I had that cliché dream of wanting to be a rock star.”
The older he got, the more he realized how difficult that path could be. Touring was exciting, but it was also tough. Matt wanted a more stable way to stay inside music while building a deeper technical skill set.
“I wanted to have a more solid job in music, and I really wanted to hone in my skills,” he said. “So that’s why I chose to go to OIART.”
That decision became a turning point.
Building Sovereign Audio in Windsor
After graduating from OIART in 2021, Matt opened Sovereign Audio in downtown Windsor.
At the time, the studio represented a major shift in his career. He was no longer only seeing himself as a performer. He was building a space where he could record, mix, and work with artists on his own terms.
He had already been working with some clients while he was in school, but he wanted a real studio space, not just a basement setup.
“I wanted to have my own place,” Matt said. “Somewhere I could bring my clients in.”
Building the studio also forced him to use skills that went beyond recording and mixing. He learned about construction, sound panels, room treatment, acoustics, workflow, and what it actually takes to create a space where people can make records.
He connected that directly back to OIART.
“Everything that helped me prepare this room, I learned about at school,” Matt said, pointing to acoustic classes, studio building, sound panels, and how to properly treat a room.
That first spotlight captured Matt at a very specific stage: early in his career, serious about audio, building something local, and using school as the foundation for the next step.
School as the Final Piece
One of the strongest lines from Matt’s first video is simple:
“I think going to school was probably the best decision I ever made.”
For Matt, OIART did not replace the experience he already had as a musician. It helped organize it. It gave him the missing technical foundation and helped him understand the things he had been around for years but had not fully understood.
“I talked this big game that I knew all this stuff, and I really knew nothing,” he said. “I didn’t even know what phase was.”
That honesty is part of what makes his story useful for future students. A lot of people come to audio school with some experience. They may have played in bands, recorded themselves, mixed demos, toured, worked on local shows, or watched hours of YouTube. But there is a big difference between being around audio and understanding how it works.
For Matt, OIART helped make everything clearer.
“School was the final piece of the puzzle for me,”
he said.
“It brought everything together.”
OIART's Audio Recording Technology Program Includes:
✓ Small Class Sizes
✓ On Site Facilities
✓ Industry Leading Instructors
✓ Post Grad Support & Guidance
✓ Exclusive 11 Month Program
From Studio Mixing to Live Mixing
Years later, Matt’s career moved back toward live sound in a major way.
Today, he mixes front of house for Knocked Loose, a metal band from Louisville, Kentucky. In a live setting, the front-of-house engineer is responsible for what the audience hears. Every venue, PA, room, festival, and show is different, so the job requires technical skill, speed, taste, confidence, and the ability to make decisions in real time.
For Matt, some of that transition came from his studio background.
“A lot of the stuff I started doing when I mixed live was muscle memory from my studio mixes,” he said.
If he knew how he liked a kick drum to sound in a Pro Tools session, he could try a similar EQ move on the live console. If he understood mic selection in the studio, he could bring that knowledge to the stage. If he knew the genre deeply, he could make decisions that helped the band sound like themselves.
That genre knowledge matters.
Matt explains that even if you do not personally love every kind of music, understanding different genres makes you a better engineer. You may be mixing heavy music one day and get offered a country gig later. The job is not just to make something loud or clean. The job is to make the artist sound like the artist.
“I might mix Knocked Loose right now, but one day I could get offered a country gig, and I need to know how to make a country band sound like a country band,”
he said.
Learning the Console Before the First Big Moment
When Matt talks about OIART’s role in his live sound career, he comes back to the basics: signal in, signal out, and knowing how a digital console works.
OIART gave him a technical base that helped him step into live situations without feeling completely lost.
“OIART was definitely, this is how you operate a digital board, this is how you make sound come in, this is how you make sound come out,” Matt said. “That was the most important thing for me.”
That mattered when he walked up to a show where he had never mixed before. He may not have had total confidence in every part of the live environment yet, but he understood the board. He knew how sound moved through the system. He had a starting point.
That is often the difference between freezing and figuring it out.
“You’re never left out to try,” he said. “There’s always somebody there to help you in any regard. Whether it’s at school, whether it’s at a venue, there’s always a tech there.”
Big Rooms, Big Moments
Matt’s newer spotlight captures a very different stage of his career.
He talks about Madison Square Garden, Coachella, Jimmy Kimmel, arena shows, and stadiums in Europe. These are the kinds of moments that would have felt almost impossible to imagine when he was building a studio in Windsor only a few years earlier.
Madison Square Garden stands out to him.
“With it being a sold out show, it was also one of the best mixes I’ve ever had in my life,” Matt said. “I was just sitting at the soundboard going, ‘Holy crap. This is crazy.’”
After the show, he walked around the empty arena, trying to process what had happened.
Coachella was another major moment. Matt describes the magnitude of that set as a big cultural moment for metal. Jimmy Kimmel also stood out because, years earlier, he remembered watching heavy bands on late night television and feeling how surreal it was for metal to get that kind of mainstream attention.
“Never once thought that Knocked Loose would be playing on Jimmy Kimmel,” he said.
Those moments show the scale of where live audio can take someone. But the work still comes back to the same fundamentals: listen, adapt, solve problems, trust your ears, and understand the tools.
The Creative Side of Front of House
Front of house is technical, but it is also creative.
Matt talks about building moments into the show, like a “snare bomb” where one snare hit in a breakdown sounds like an explosion. He also started doing “tom bombs,” where floor tom hits create that same kind of massive impact.
For a band like Knocked Loose, those moments matter. The set is meant to feel intense. The mix has to support that.
“It kind of adds some atmosphere to the actual set,” Matt said. “I get to kind of perform with the band.”
That is a great way to understand live mixing. A great front-of-house engineer is not just making sure things are audible. They are helping shape the energy of the performance for the audience in real time.
In Matt’s words, part of the set is “full chaos.”
“It’s supposed to sound like the end of the world, basically,” he said. “And that’s my job.”
Why Hands On Learning Still Matters
Matt is direct about how he learns.
He says there is a lot he has learned on YouTube, but there are also things he could not fully understand until he had his hands on the gear.
“You can learn everything you need to on the surface level about a piece of gear, but you will not learn how to use that piece of gear unless you’re physically turning the knob,” he said.
That is where OIART made a difference for him.
He needed to be in front of the equipment, moving faders, twisting knobs, hearing changes in real time, and having someone explain what was happening while he did it.
“Getting your hand on a fader and twisting knobs and just getting your hands on the actual gear is the best way to learn how to use it,” Matt said.
That same idea showed up in his first spotlight too. Matt talked about learning concepts in class, then applying them in labs directly or even that same night. For him, that connection between theory and hands on work helped rewire the way he thought about audio.
“OIART kind of rewired my brain,”
he said.
The Value of Being Open to Everything
One of the biggest lessons in Matt’s story is that the path is not always what you first expect.
In his first spotlight, he was focused on studio work and building Sovereign Audio. But even then, he talked about missing the rush of touring and knowing OIART had prepared him for more than one path.
“You can work in a studio, you can work in a post-production facility, you can work as a band in a touring gig, and everything kind of just applies all together,” he said.
In the newer video, that idea becomes even clearer.
Matt talks about using things from every class, including timecode from Audio for Visual Media and networking concepts from Chris’s class. He says he is constantly doing network and IP related work in live environments.
His advice is not to enter school with a closed mind.
“You don’t want to go, I just want to do studio stuff,” Matt said. “You want to have your mind open to doing everything.”
That is one of the most important parts of the OIART message. The goal is not to lock students into one narrow job. It is to help them build enough of a foundation that when an opportunity appears, they can step into it.
Making Real Connections
Matt also gives very direct advice about networking.
He does not frame it as using people or trying to force career moves out of every relationship. Instead, he talks about genuine friendships, normal conversations, and meeting people because you actually care about the work and the community.
“If there’s someone you want to meet who you think can help your career, and I don’t mean this in a use them kind of sense, because you should never use anybody for your career, do what you can to meet them,” he said.
His advice is simple: act normal, be genuine, and build real relationships.
“Create genuine friendships with people and it goes a long way,” he said.
That kind of advice matters because live audio is a relationship driven field. People recommend people they trust. They call people who show up prepared. They remember people who are good to work with.
From Windsor to the World
Matt’s story is powerful because you can see the progression.
He started as a touring musician who wanted a more solid future in music. He came to OIART to sharpen his skills. He built Sovereign Audio in Windsor after graduation. He worked on studio projects, learned how to treat a room, built client relationships, and kept developing.
Then the path shifted.
The studio skills became live mixing skills. The genre knowledge became an advantage. The console fundamentals became confidence. The hands on training became muscle memory. The willingness to stay open led to opportunities that put him in front of massive audiences with Knocked Loose.
It is not a story about one job title.
It is a story about momentum.
Watch Both Matt Andrews Grad Spotlights
Together, these two videos show Matt’s growth from recent OIART graduate and studio owner to international touring front-of-house engineer. They also show how audio careers can evolve when technical training, real world experience, relationships, and opportunity start to connect.
Matt Andrews Grad Spotlight, Sovereign Audio, Windsor
Matt Andrews Grad Spotlight Update, Front of House for Knocked Loose
FAQs About Matt's Time at OIART
Michelle Hwu’s Career in Sound Designer & Audio Enginee Photos
Video Transcript
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