Sanchez’s expertise in audio postproduction was acquired after a long sojourn in the music industry. When he settled in California, after taking classes in 16-track music recording, he found a job as a go-fer at LA’s Record Plant. It was 1975, an era when the studio was “really at the top of its game,” he reports. “It was an exciting time to be at Record Plant. We were doing 10 percent of the Top 100 every week. I was able to learn from the best producers, musicians, engineers and administrators. It was a great experience.”

He moved up to assistant engineer and often worked on the company’s two
remote trucks gaining important on-the-job training in live recording
techniques from Jack Crymes, Armin Steiner and Ed Greene, who mixed Academy Awards and Grammys shows.

In 1979 Sanchez transferred to the Sausalito Record Plant where he worked with chief engineer Tom Flye and chief of maintenance Tom Scott and amassed numerous album credits for Bay Area bands and visitors. By 1984 the company had changed hands several times, and a number of staff had departed. An infamous drug bust threatened to close the facility but the studio’s employees talked the Feds into letting them run it. “It was an amusing period -- we sent the profits to the Department of Justice,” Sanchez chuckles. “Through ups and downs we kept going.”

Sanchez opted to become an independent engineer later that year, and he also started touring, mixing live sound for KBC Band, an offshoot of the Jefferson Starship.

During this period Hot Tuna’s Jack Casady and Jorma Kaukonen resumed touring with an acoustic blues format and asked Sanchez if he’d mix concert sound for them. Sanchez was a little apprehensive. “Casady said, ‘How hard can it be? There’s just the two of us,’ he recalls. “Little did I know the problems of acoustic instruments in live sound.”

Sanchez rose to the challenge and did two nationwide tours with the duo. He also had engineer, mixer and producer credits on Hot Tuna’s electric “Pair A Dice Found” album for Epic in 1991. The next year he accompanied the band on a US tour which culminated with the reopening of the Fillmore in San Francisco.

Shortly after, Sanchez moved back to Los Angeles to work as an independent engineer. “The music business was getting a little slow, and I was looking for a job at a facility,” he says. “The digital revolution was beginning to take off, and I wanted to get into a studio which had digital technology.”

Sanchez discovered old friend Lenise Bent and composer Alex Wilkinson at Burbank post house GVE. “Lenise was one of the great female engineers to come out of The Village Recorders in LA,” he notes. “She was now a Foley mixer at GVE and said ‘come on down.’ I really had no idea of what Foley was.”

Sanchez quickly found out and began editing, mixing tracks and recording Foley and sound effects for clients such as Buena Vista International which needed to reformat TV shows for foreign markets. “It was my first post-production experience,” he points out. “Working to picture was very different for me, but it was a lot of fun.”

In the summer when the TV business was slow, Sanchez picked up touring gigs with Hot Tuna and live sound work at the Fillmore. “So I got equal amounts of studio time and live touring,” he recalls.

Sanchez recorded Hot Tuna’s “Live At Sweetwater” in 1992 at the intimate Mill Valley, California club using Record Plant’s remote truck. He combined his talents as a live recordist and his new skills working to picture for the band’s live performance video. A year later Sanchez engineered their “Live At Sweetwater Two” album.

Sanchez remained at GVE for about three years then signed on as a Foley artist at Laser Pacific where he “was assigned a specific role as a Foley artist in a much larger crew” at the union shop. “I saw a whole different end of the spectrum where you really concentrate on and hone your skills on one specific task.” Sanchez worked on Movies of the Week, HBO and Showtime original programming and “lots of Aaron Spelling shows with lots of glasses clinking.”

When Sanchez became “bored with not actually mixing,” he left Laser Pacific and worked his way back into the studio. His music work today tends to be for “personal enjoyment.” He is recording and mixing the second CD for LA band The Fontenelles and records percussion ensembles whose work may be used as sound effects.

After 25 years in the business the versatile Sanchez hasn’t stopped acquiring knowledge or new skills.

“One of the new challenges is audio sound-file compression for the Web,” he reports. “I try to maintain as much control over the audio post as I can for as long as I can.” Sanchez forecasts more audio restoration projects and perhaps movie trailers designed for the Web. He sees installation of a 5.1 mixing room “in the not too distant future.”

In order to keep up with rapid technological changes Sanchez tries to “network as much as I can, attend seminars and ask lots of questions when I see a new piece of gear. A million new things come out every year. You have to be constantly learning. You can’t rest on your laurels.”