A 29-year-old audio engineer from Mumbai is making LA sit up and take note of his technical sound skills
Farrokh Shroff is currently busy with his own independent releases under the artist name FNS
Growing up in a musically-inclined Parsi Zoroastrian family from Mumbai, Farrokh Shroff was drawn to the “aggressive” guitar tones of classic rock bands Led Zeppelin and Ozzy. He would then recreate the bright, crisp and boomy sounds on his six strings. “This organically led me to record and engineer my own music as a hobby. I have always been more interested in the relationship between chords and melody than rhythms,” says the Peddar Road resident.
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Shroff, 29, is one of the youngest talents getting noticed on the Los Angeles music scene. He was on the production sound team of the Oscar-nominated short, Walk Run Cha-Cha, and was also recording engineer for Calm meditation app by pop singers Shawn Mendez and Camila Cabelo. Shroff is also behind the FOH (front of house) mix for Grammy award-winning American rapper Lupe Fiasco’s live performance of his album, Food and Liquor, at the Nokia theatre in LA. “A month before graduating from Boston’s Berklee College of Music, I visited LA for a few job interviews at local studios and ended up landing one. It [LA] was my first choice because, as an aspiring engineer, I knew about all the historic studios in the city and wanted to work my way up or into those studios.”
It was at Berklee that Shroff first encountered structured learning in music. He was given access to the tools needed to record music, including acoustically treated rooms, mics, pre-amps, equalisers, compressors, and apps. “I received technical knowledge of the gear, a detailed understanding of music theory and ear training, which are exercises to improve your musical ability by developing a more intuitive understanding of what you hear.” It wasn’t just the classroom that became the centre of learning, but also the community and support group that he built on campus. “I made friends with people who shared my interests, and ended up learning an equal amount from the ideas and discussions that we’d have.”
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According to him, being a successful sound engineer involves having technical knowledge and people management skills in equal parts. “While working as an FOH engineer, you have to remain approachable with tensions running high before and during the actual performance. In the studio situation, you are dealing with nerves and ego as much as you are with microphones and gear. The rule is to keep your cool because you are handling the most moving parts.” Working with two renowned studios introduced him to some of the big names in the industry.
At the moment, he is working on a feature film titled, The Mechanic, starring Summer Phoenix, and on an album with American actress-singer Tichina Arnold. He was also the recording engineer for Arnold’s live stream performance on CBS’s internal network for the celebration of Black History Month. “I spend time experimenting and using a piece of gear for things it wasn’t originally intended for. For instance, I send a vocal recording through a guitar pedal.” Shroff considers himself fortunate enough to work with analog gear, unlike most engineers and producers. “The result is that I end up creating sounds from scratch. I work a lot with tape, whether it’s a reel to reel machine or 4-Track cassette tape, which is something 99 per cent of today’s producers seem to have forgotten even exists.”
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