After Michael Prowda made the decision to get into live sound he never looked back.

“I had no expectations at the time,” he said. “I just wanted to do it. It was like I was driven to be successful.”

Based on that comment, it’s no great surprise that the Syracuse, NY-born monitor engineer counts running among his favorite off stage activities.

He brings the kind of discipline and perspective to his work that’s essential to anyone who takes pleasure from testing their limits over the long haul.

If the company you keep is any measure of success, then Prowda’s drive has yielded stellar results.

Over 30-plus years at the desk, Prowda has mixed for a variety of bonafide musical legends: Taj Mahal, Heart, Grateful Dead, Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, Eagles, Carly Simon, Frank Sinatra, as well as Blue Man Group, numerous VH1 awards shows, the Grammys, and, most recently, David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails.

With a client list of that caliber, it’s clear the experience Prowda brings to the table is an invaluable commodity. “But you’re only as good as your last show,” he cautioned.

Given the fact the people he works for keep calling him back to work, Prowda evidently has very few bad shows. Case in point, his decade plus tenure with Bowie and subsequent welcome into the NIN camp, which he picked almost immediately after the Bowie show went dormant in 2004.

Currently, Prowda has been doing monitors for Reznor and company since the band’s 2005 release, With Teeth, and is the longest serving audio tech on the current tour.

Pro audio wasn’t Prowda’s first career option, however.

As a student at Syracuse University, Prowda studied architecture – a safe, traditional career choice, which came with a safe, traditional lifestyle.

But after watching the load out for The Band after a show he’d attended in the early ’70s, a light bulb went on, he says. “That’s when the realization hit me – There’s a whole different way of going through life. There are no rules.”

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Having said that, his family’s love of music did have an effect on his future; his father, a drummer/businessmen, and his brother, an avid music fan, were huge influences.

“Both our parents worked, which was unusual for the time, and we had sort of a nanny, and her kid was into Elvis and we just listened – we were really into music – Elvis, the Beatles, the vocal bands of the ’50s and ’60s.”

During college Prowda started mixing local acts, but his first full time gig at a pro audio company was with All American Sound in Syracuse, under General Manager Will Perry.

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