Built by someone who's lived it.

I've been on almost every side of the studio equation at this point: client, engineer, manager, designer, builder, partner, owner, and when I was 20, I literally lived in the studio. It's where I learned how to make music, how to run a business, and also was exposed to the chaos of a shared calendar with no accountability, the fallout from no-shows, a backlog of invoicing, and don't get me started on Uniport. All of that is just a distraction from music.

Ultimately, I'm an engineer before anything else. In 2015 I co-founded a commercial recording studio in New York City and ran it for years before doubling down as a mixer. I've also worked as an MD and touring consultant, booking rehearsal studios, and even as Technical Director across an entire portfolio of hospitality properties, where I learned what it takes to scale business processes sustainably.

But most importantly, I love technology. I've watched automation transform audio workflows and seen restoration, editing, session prep, stem bouncing, all get faster and smarter every year. We've automated the craft, but the worst part of running a studio, the admin, was still being done by hand. I've done my 10,000 hours in Pro Tools, and it feels like just as many in QuickBooks, and I can say confidently that we don't need any more technology to make art.

We need technology to do admin, so that humans can make art.

The market is rich with studio technology for everything except business operations, so I built Headroom. As someone who's been obsessed with software since Windows 3.0 on an IBM laptop, I knew what it needed to look and feel like. As a business owner, I knew nobody wanted another booking widget bolted onto a generic Google Calendar integration. Headroom is an operating system for music studios running real volume.

And that's what the name really means. In audio, headroom is the space between where you're working and where things start to distort, the breathing room that keeps everything clean. That's what this gives back to studio people: their headroom. The room to stop drowning in admin and get back to what actually matters, in the studio and in their lives.

- Dylan McDougle