What would the Trident console at Electric Lady Studios be without its master Eddie Kramer? It’s not like we’re on the same league (at all!), but the facilities and equipment at Nyquist would mean nothing without the creative artistry and technical wizardry of the following experienced professionals, whose incredibly high standards and musical sense of humor, bring them all to life.

And because most of our Staff are musicians, they live and breathe music. Add to that a lethal dose of audio engineering know-how, consummate production skills on the various genres of music, infinite patience, the ability to work long hours without food or sleep, and tolerance to an electric shock from a 30uF tantalum capacitor discharge (stuck into the tongue!), and you get a bunch of guys who hold Geoff Emerick, Alan Parsons, Roger Nichols, Al Schmitt, George Massenburg, Elliot Scheiner, and so many other greats’ works sacred.

Mind you, as you might have guessed already, when it comes to all things audio, these guys are VERY difficult to please!

Aji Coronel        

Mastering Engineer, Mix/Tracking Engineer, Record Producer

Aji is the High Priest and chief audio engineer at Nyquist. He has been involved in music engineering, performance, and teaching for the last 20 years. He also plays wicked shred guitar. He has taken up classical guitar performance and jazz music theory in college. He also plays keyboards, bass, and drums, and has performed in several pop, rock and fusion cover groups, including the Eraserheads locally, and Asleep in Chicago, USA. He currently handles guitar duties for hard-rock band Awake.

Aji has been doing sound-on-sound recording since he was 16 years old, producing songs for school programs and plays, and recording his band practices and gigs. Since then, he has worked part-time as recording engineer at two major commercial facilities in Chicago, U.S.A., for two years, where he has engineered and mixed several indie rock and gospel records. He has also taken up workshops in audio engineering in Chicago and New York, and has visited several commercial facilities abroad and locally, earning rapport and respect from fellow engineers and musicians there. He is an active member of several professional audio forums on the web. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Philippines.

When not involved with music, he works full-time as a technical support engineer at a multinational telecommunications company. He is currently outside the country now.

Selected projects: The Spoons’ Maniwala Ka (production, mixing), Tahimik’s Gising, Gising! (mixing, mastering), Ms. Joy Gain’s Just Thankful (recording, mastering), Spoonful’s Sangkutsara (mixing, mastering), Piledriver’s Santa Rosa City (mixing), Chris Cornelius’ On The Road To You (mastering), Failure’s Death is Just the Beginning (mixing, mastering)

Myko Catindig    

Mix/Tracking Engineer, Record Producer

Myko is the guitar player for ska band The Spenglers. He is both a technician of the guitar and the studio. In fact, he started playing guitar when he was very young, and has been accustomed to studio recording practices very early on, especially during the recording of his band’s demos at several studios in Metro Manila.

Myko is Aji’s first engineering partner at the studio, Aji’s protégé if you will. Looking back at those early days, he has gone light-years forward, and is now highly respected by both his clients and fellow staff.

Myko is also a music business guru, and is pretty much active in the independent music scene. He co-founded 4026 Records, an indie record label based in Santa Rosa, Laguna. He also heads Rude Boy Distro, a distribution outfit catering exclusively to ska music.

Myko has a lot of other talents up his sleeve. He runs an indie video production company in town, which has produced several short documentaries on history and current events, various commercial ads, including a company year-end report for Enchanted Kingdom. He also works as a computer and networking technician for several computer shops and cybercafés in the city. He also does website design.

Lately, Myko has been busy with setting up a print advertising shop in Batangas.

Selected projects: Ammunition’s Final Rage (tracking, mixing), S.O.F.’s full-length album (mixing), Mushroom 5’s self-titled album (tracking), The Rejects’ first album (tracking), Settled Down’s EP (mixing)

Meong Catindig    

Tracking/Mix Engineer

Meong has been a long-time barkada of Myko and Aji. He has played guitar for several rock and metal bands around town. He was invited to the Studio as Myko’s apprentice, and since then has quickly learned the secrets of good tracking practices, Nyquist-style. He is now one hot commodity, i.e., he has recently become one of the most requested tracking engineers here at the Studio.

Meong is a devout disciple of the electric guitar. He spends hours on end learning to play difficult guitar lines from records and tablatures. He is an active member and contributor to several guitar and band forums locally and abroad. If you happen to catch him logged-in at his favorite guitar forum (we won’t tell you which one!), you might get lucky and be able to ask him to teach you some terrifying licks note-for-note via webcam. Talk about virtual GIT, eh?

Meong is currently in the process of forming a session rock band. Try to email him through us in case you’re interested in joining, but beware! His primary requirement is somebody with an unusually high tolerance for alcohol…

Since the beginning of last year, Meong has been on hiatus. He has since been working as FOH engineer for a luxury cruise liner abroad, and has had the privilege of engineering live for Rosie O’Donnell and Gloria Estefan. Wow!

Selected projects: Spoonful’s Sangkutsara (tracking), The Spoons’ Isabel (tracking), Tahimik’s Gising, Gising! (tracking), Nescafe Soundskool 2006 live recording (tracking, mixing)

Niko Barroso   

Tracking/Mix Engineer

Our newest staff member! Niko is no lightweight when it comes to audio engineering, in fact, being another guitar wizard from a very young age, he used to fry his stompboxes with his capacitor and potentiometer mod experiments just like a mad scientist. He also holds a bachelors degree in Electronics and Communications Engineer from the University of Perpetual Help.

Niko used to be a guitar renegade in the Santa Rosa area, playing with one band one time and jumping to the next one shortly after. He currently holds lead guitar duties for Mushroom 5, one of our pet projects in the Studio when we initially opened in 1994.

Following the temporary departure of Myko and Meong, Niko was very quick to learn the secrets of the craft as soon as he was called by longtime buddy and guitar colleague Aji. He was at once given some unusual recording duties: to record the various brass pieces of The Spenglers. Following that, he was given pressure cooker tracking duties for the Nescafe Soundskool sessions. And the mixing duties all went to him too!

Currently, Niko is also in temporary hiatus, working as engineer for a mega TV station in Quezon City.

Selected projects: The Spenglers’ full-length album (tracking), Nescafe Soundskool 2007 live recording (tracking, mixing)

Cocoy Tan   

MIDI Guru/Orchestrator

Cocoy shakes the engineering ranks of Nyquist! On one hand he can take you on a romantic ride by playing you pop standards like James Ingram’s “Just Once” to Fra Lippo Lippi’s “Beauty and Madness” note-for-note and just leave you breathless. But to fellow musicians, he can also be quite intimidating and scary to listen to, for he has the keyboard chops to match the virtuosos who eat Vladimir Horowitz and Sergei Rachmaninov, and leave you mesmerized just the same.

Cocoy has studied playing the piano at a very early age, not because he liked it, but more because his dad wanted him to (LOL!). But soon after, he became more than interested with the instrument, and music in general. In his teens, he was player for many bands that played standard top-40 stuff, attesting to his mastery of so many standard and comtemporary tunes.

Like the prototypical keyboard player, he is never restrained by theory. Orchestrations and arrangements therefore are standard fanfare for him. He joins the Staff and fills in a considerable gap with the current services the Studio offers, filling the need of musicians and composers with great songs but no technical facility on instruments or with musical arrangements.

Selected projects: Orchestral arrangements for Joel Tahimik’s Sound of Praise

Liloy Alojado   

Record Producer

If music as a talent can really be passed on from one generation to the next, then musical blood must truly be flowing in Liloy’s veins. The grandchild of Santa Rosa’s celebrated orchestra conductor, maestro Mario Alojado, he is the lead vocalist for rock band Awake. He got immersed in classical music since a child, and can play virtually any instrument you can think of, though not virtuosic, but with agility and class. (Did somebody say “violin”?) As a performer in a band setting, his vocal lines soar and inspire. And because of his deep appreciation for the various styles of music, he can jump from one genre to another with stunning ease. He does not discriminate and has a deep understanding and appreciation for every musical style.

Liloy has been the driving force behind the Mushroom 5 sound. Here is one talented record producer that you can count on and be confident of in terms of knowing what he really knows and needs to do! If you like what you heard on the CD (and may be wondering about all the weird stuff going on with the music), chances are you’re hearing some of Liloy’s “tantrums” translated into the production.

Liloy also runs a small restaurant and catering business in town. Recently, he has been deeply involved in the livestock business too. Did we mention that he is also an excellent cook? In fact, it is here where he coaches Aji on… This other “mixing” field, get it?

Selected production projects: Mushroom 5’s EP and self-titled album, The Chester Conde demos

Tanits Robles    

Mastering Engineer

The sorcerer of the bass guitar has transformed himself into the wizard of the multiband compressor and the linear-phase EQ. It is so ironic that a bass player would still have the ears sensitive enough to excel in mastering after all those years of playing heavy metal music with his band Awake! Seriously, Tanits can identify the subtlest nuances between recordings, and can easily tell you problems only he can identify, including the major releases, even if he was just referencing on cheap Altec Lansings!

Tanits is also a black-belter in music theory. He can jam on a melodic-minor vamp as easily as he would on a standard blues progression. Don’t ask him to play bebop lines if you’re not prepared, or he would blow your brains out faster than you can spell “kamote”. Let’s spell that, k-a-m-o-t-e! Kamote!

When not in the Studio, Tanits works full-time at a print advertising company next town. He is also works as system and network administrator for Leklek’s (Awake’s drummer) internet cafe.

Together with Aji (and other responsible mastering engineers), he is currently launching an awareness drive amongst fellow engineers, producers and recording artists against the excessive use of the Waves L2 and other loudness maximizers. Oh, didn’t the L3 just come out!??? Darn!

Allan Villanueva   

Studio Technician

Our coolest and hardest-working staff member! Allan has visited the Studio even before it started operating commercially, just to listen to Aji and the guys jam one night. Now, his brain is in the process of being overloaded (read: deep-fried) with a crash curriculum of Audio 101. While he cannot play any musical instrument, or even set up a preamp for tracking, the Staff believes that Allan can quickly and easily adapt to the methods of the craft, given his considerable appreciation for music. In fact, Allan is now a master of basic miking techniques, and guitar tuning.

Allan has been an avid music fan since birth. Here’s one guy who “lives” rock ‘n’ roll! Also, he knows quite a lot about music trivia. Artists and bands, discographies, career histories, even quotable quotes, the guy seems to know it all. In fact, he has been called a walking encyclopedia of rock music in the Studio. Try beating Allan in a game of musical Jeopardy! Aside from this, Allan is also a frustrated band leader. He wants to someday form a band he wants to call “Hoping Against Hope”.

Allan has also recently started to acquire skills needed to produce the best rock album in the world.