Koehn Manthei

My name is Koehn, and I was born and raised in Northern Michigan. For my whole childhood, I was immersed in the world of fine arts. From 1st through 12th grade, I attended a fine arts charter school, where I took classes in choir, band, music theory, art, dance, and musical theatre. My grandmother on my mom’s side was a watercolor painter and art teacher, and my grandmother on my dad’s side taught music theory and piano, and was an orchestra cellist, so I had plenty of encouragement to pursue creative endeavors at home as well. For as long as I can remember, creating art has always been second nature to me.

I really started to take my art seriously around the time I began high school, and soon my own creative endeavors at home and projects at school naturally overlapped. I began composing and producing my own music around this time, and what started as a hobby quickly became a massive part of my life, and I started considering it as a future career.

I’ve always been deeply moved by music, and my love for other people’s songs inspired me to write my own. It was never just entertainment for me. I found myself invested in the artist’s lives and the stories that inspired the music, always trying to appreciate it for all that the artist intended. Creating my own music was the means by which I further understood the music that I was so impacted by. I began writing short, simple songs, and soon found myself turning to songwriting as my key way of understanding my own life and the lives of those around me.

What I realized early on with my own music is that the final presentation of the song is massively important to the effectiveness of it. I became curious about the more technical side of music production, mainly audio engineering, when I realized how crucial good production is to an industry-standard song. I had so many questions, and such a desire to see my own music reach other people.

I wanted to pursue technical training in the field of audio engineering within a context of community and discipleship, so in September of 2022, I moved down to Black Mountain, NC and began my studies at The Excel College. For the first 15 months of the accelerated bachelor's program, I gained a broad foundation of wisdom through a 15-month intensive study of the liberal arts, with an emphasis in philosophy. Then in January of 2024, I began working in The Excel Creative art studio. My work focused primarily on audio engineering, but it included all aspects of music production, like writing, arranging, producing, mixing, mastering, and performing my original music, as well as producing and mixing music for other artists.

In the future, I hope to use the skills I learned here to empower other artists, bringing their creative ideas to life. I purposely learned every step of the process of producing a song so that I could help anyone with any step along the way.

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EDUCATION

Excel College, Black Mountain, NC

BA in Religious Studies, Integrated Economy, & Critical Thinking

Emphasis: Audio Engineering

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WORK EXPERIENCE & APPRENTICESHIPS 

RESIDENT AUDIO ENGINEER— The Excel Creative: Current 

• Gained proficiency in audio hardware and audio production. 
• Gained proficiency in aural skills and technical aspects of sound. 
• Created a portfolio of engineering work/projects and specialties. 
  

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INDEPENDENT STUDIES 

• Gained more understanding of live sound and performing live.
• Mastered the function and dynamics of a Digital Audio Workstation (Logic Pro X). 
  

MUSIC PRODUCTION IN LOGIC PRO — Online Course Through Udemy: Jan 2024 - Current 

• Gained proficiency in Logic Pro X (more details within the essay) 

MASTERING.COM DIGITAL CONTENT — Independent Study through Mastering.com 

• 25+ hours course in all element of mixing balance, mainly EQ, compression, and reverb 

MUSIC PRODUCTION IN LOGIC PRO: Vocal Mixing Essentials — Online Course Through Udemy: Mar 2024 - May 2024 

• Introduction to basic vocal production elements: editing + comping, bussing, automation, balancing (EQ, compression, and reverb) mixing with stock plug-ins (delay, chorus and other modulators)

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Excel College

Bachelor Degree in Religious Studies, Integrated Economy, and Critical Thinking

— Description of Excel College’s Degree Program —

By Economy (not Economics), we’re using one of the oldest and original meanings of the term derived from the Greek term oikonomia: stewardship, management of household affairs. Specifically, we are drawing from the theological concept of stewardship, leading to what the Greeks referred to as the Good Life — a virtuous life that fulfills our divinely created human nature. Using this definition of economy, our Bachelor degree has opened a pathway for students to integrate their faith into a customized emphasis.

Not confined to the classroom alone, our students are challenged and encouraged in 5 holistic pursuits (intellectual, spiritual, missional, practical, and professional) to become men and women who excel everywhere — in the classroom, home, church, work, community, and in their lives individually.

During the Practicum phase of Excel College, students continue to develop holistically, while concentrating on an emphasis that interests them personally. With the support and accountability of mentors and coaches, students design a customized learning experience that develops not only one-dimensional skills and experience according to set and relevant outcomes, but virtuous habits that lead them to become honest workers, family members, and citizens. In our model, we let the experts train our students on a basic skills level, while we equip them for a life of holistic flourishing.

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Discography

Belivr Tears

• “Interude” (role: mix engineer, date: March, 2024)
• “Come Alive” (role: Producer, date: October 2024)

Moah Nathew

• “Mickey Mickey” (role: mix engineer, September 2024)

Kirby Watts

• “Clogged” (Role: Producer, date: October 2024)

Koehn

• “the letters EP” (Role: singer, songwriter, producer, mix engineer, mastering engineer)
• “prom” (March 2025)
• “mid-october” (May 2024)
• “nothing to write home about” (June 2024)
• “indiana, babe” (January 2025)
• “(when it breaks)” (January 2025)
• “filler” (March 2025)

Riversong

• “Waiting for the Old Days” (April 2025)

Craig Walston

• “The Grimoire’s Heir, Audio book (role: assistant mix engineer, date: March 2024)

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Practicum Objective: Created a portfolio of engineering work/projects and specialties.

The overarching project in my practicum was creating “The Letters,” my 6-track EP. While my objectives focus primarily with the mixing/mastering side of music production, I found it incredibly beneficial to work on every step of the process. In music production, as in most things in life, the steps and roles are all deeply intertwined. The final product relies hugely on the quality of the initial few steps. Understanding what key qualities make a great demo or arrangement helps me create a better final mix. The same goes the other way around: I found that I created better demos when I understood what a good final product sounded like. Creating “The Letters” was my way of gaining holistic knowledge in music production, ultimately making me a more rounded artist.

The EP started as three singles: “mid-october,” “nothing to write home about,” and “indiana, babe,” that I wrote throughout the year leading up to the start of my emphasis. While I didn’t initially intend it, all three songs focused on similar themes: distance and tension in relationships, loyalty, growing up, and moving out. After I discovered a throughline, I pieced the songs together in a way that implied a narrative arc. Inspired primarily by relationships I saw around me, with some inspiration of personal events tied in, I composed a story about a high school couple forced to confront the challenges that arise when one of them stays in their hometown, and the other goes off to college. The songs functioned like chapters in a book, each exploring a scene in the main character’s process of letting go. After I etched the basic outline of the story, I wrote “filler” as an outro track for the project. The interlude track, titled “(when it breaks)” was composed to bridge the sonic gap between “indiana, babe” and “filler,” and “prom” was written to give context to “mid-october.”

I started recording and producing “mid-october” in the spring of 2024. I had produced other songs of mine in the past, but this was the first song that I actually produced with the intention of releasing, which meant that it had to be much cleaner than any other project I had made. A good master depends on a good mix, which depends on good production, which depends on good recording, which depends on good arrangement, which depends on good writing. As with trying anything for the first time, I learned a lot through making mistakes. I rewrote, rerecorded and rearranged several parts of this song multiple times. When it came to mixing it, I believe I had two or three full mixes. I found reference tracks to be incredibly helpful when it came to holding my work to an objective standard. When it came time to release it, I learned how to work with an independent distributor, as well as how to manage an artist page on Spotify and a business account on Instagram, where I did all of my promotion for the release.

I released “mid-october” on May 22nd, 2024, and in the first month of release, it was streamed over 3,600 times by around 1,600 people. It’s hard to know how a song will perform without ever having released anything else, but these numbers were certainly higher than I expected. In a hope to keep the momentum going, I produced “nothing to write home about” in the first couple weeks of June, and released it on June 30th. My goal with the production of this release was to challenge myself further, and not just repeat the same decisions I did with my first release, thus the some-what dramatic shift in energy between the two tracks.

In the months following my second release, I worked as a camp counselor, which delayed the production of the rest of the EP. Then in September, hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina, and I was prevented from working in the studio for a month or so. It wasn’t until early November that I began working on the third single, titled “indiana, babe.” Between its first draft and then, I had rewritten it two or three times to get the exact feeling that I wanted out of it. In an effort to continue to challenge myself as a producer, this track was another dramatic shift in energy to a rock-inspired song, which proved to be harder to produce than I imagined, as it seriously strayed from the singer-songwriter-bedroom-producer genre I was comfortable with. In between frustrating sessions where I produced and mixed the third single, I composed “(when it breaks)” within the same session as a fun creative side-project for me. Inspired by movements like “The Rush” by Kings Kaleidoscope, where one track seamlessly bleeds into another, I wrote “(when it breaks)” as an interlude to extend “indiana, babe.” I released both songs together on January 10th, 2025.

I began working on “prom” immediately after that release. I had another intro track that I had written about a year earlier, but by the time I got to releasing the full EP, the original intro didn’t really fit as well as it used to. I wrote “prom” as a way to give context to “mid-october,” and to introduce the characters, setting, and tension that plays out in the rest of the EP. Once I was most of the way through producing that track, I began working on “filler,” the outro track of the EP. “filler” most closely follows the instrumentation of “mid-october,” so working on it offered me an opportunity to apply a lot of wisdom that I’d gained through producing the rest of the EP, and to redeem some of the mistakes that I had made in previous mixes. After “prom” and “filler” were produced, I began mixing and mastering both tracks, this time using iZotope’s mixing and mastering suites, which had been recently purchased for the studio. Using these advanced software alongside the knowledge and experience I had gained over the 15 months in practicum resulted in the most professional sounding mixes so far. The entire 6-track EP was released on March 14th, 2025, marking the end of one of the longest running projects in my life.

Throughout the course of creating “The Letters,” I learned every step of the process of making an EP. I can conceptualize, I can cast vision, I can write lyrics, I can craft melodies, I can compose instrumentation, I can record and compile recording, I can arrange tracks, I can create plug-in chains and auxiliary bussesI can clean and enhance the mix, and I can master. I learned how to work in a studio space, and how to set up the necessary hardware (microphones and desk gear, such as interfaces and monitors). My hope is that I can use the knowledge I gained in the first 15 months of studio work to assist other artists with any step of the process of creating their music in the future.

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Practicum Objective: Live Music Performance

One of my favorite things that I got to do during my practicum was playing live gigs. I grew up playing on worship teams in my home church, but it wasn’t until my practicum that I started playing solo sets. Throughout the course of my practicum, I played 21 shows across 7 different venues in and around Black Mountain.

It began in the summer of 2023, when I got a job at a bar in Black Mountain. While I don’t intend to be in the food service industry for a while, I took the job because I figured it’d be a great place to make connections with other local artists and venue owners. Sure enough, a couple months after I started working there, my boss approached me and offered me an opportunity to play live music there. It took me about 40 hours to prepare an hour and a half set, but once I was close, I nailed down a date to play. My first show was on December 2nd, 2023. Like anything goes the first time around, it was rough. But I was offered a second chance, so I took it. A couple of months later, one of the near-by restaurants started doing open mic nights, and for a month and a half, I played once or twice a week almost every week. These gigs were short, and they weren’t paid, but I learned so much through them. I didn’t have any close friends that played live music, so most of what I learned was through my own trial and error. I made a lot of mistakes at first, but I learned from them and eventually got a lot better.

For most of the beginning of my practicum, there were few outside sources giving input to my music. Playing live was really my first glimpse into the business of music. While it wasn’t as consistent as a typical 9 to 5, it was my first real job in music, where my art was judged by all kinds of people, most of which weren’t other artists. There are certain aspects of running a business that aren’t learned best from a textbook but from actually living. In my experience playing live music, I learned how to offer something of real value to a business owner, how to market my skills, how to follow through and follow up, and how to be constantly looking for areas to grow and provide more value to the owners of the venues I would play at. While I didn't figure out all the secrets of playing live music, I think it’s safe to say that after 15 months of this, I’d be able to give advice to someone that’s never done it.

While playing live shows isn’t as closely related to audio engineering as other roles in the greater music scene, I found that doing both gave me a deeper understanding of the whole process of music production. There is probably no greater pressure on a songwriter than to play their music live. Once I started playing live, I started considering how my music would translate to a live setting, and this challenged me to write better music. An amazing mix can’t fix a bad song, so learning how to write and play excellent songs helped me to better understand my role as a mixing engineer.