Recording Engineer · Mixing Engineer · Mastering Engineer · Live Sound Engineer

Randall L. Squires is a Grammy-winning recording, mixing, mastering, and live sound engineer with more than twenty years of professional experience. An Apple Digital Masters Certified Engineer based in Austin, Texas, he has built a career at the intersection of classical production and choral music, working alongside some of the most celebrated vocal ensembles in the United States. His work spans concert halls and recording studios, from intimate chamber recordings to nationally toured oratorio productions, and has earned him recognition across both the studio and the live sound world.

Grammy Nominations

Squires has worked on three records that received Grammy nominations across two of the country’s most distinguished choral organizations. 

As recording and mastering engineer on Roomful of Teeth’s Rough Magic (2023), he earned a nomination for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards — a nomination the album converted into a win. 

As producer on Conspirare’s House of Belonging (Delos, 2023), he received a nomination for Best Choral Performance at the same ceremony. Most recently, his work as producer, recording engineer, editor, and mastering engineer on Conspirare’s advena: liturgies for a broken world (Divine Art, 2025) earned another Best Choral Performance nomination at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards — Conspirare’s twelfth nomination and Divine Art’s first.

Nomad Sound

Squires’s return to professional audio engineering was catalyzed by Damon Lange, founder and owner of Nomad Sound, Austin’s preeminent boutique live sound company. Lange brought Squires back into the world of music after a period away from the industry, and it is a debt Squires readily acknowledges as foundational. Beginning around 2013, Squires joined Nomad Sound as an engineer and systems technician, working across Nomad’s wide portfolio of live music events in Austin and beyond. Nomad Sound has been a cornerstone of Austin’s live music scene since its founding in 2005, providing full-service production for concerts, festivals, corporate events, and private productions of every scale. It was through Lange and Nomad Sound that Squires was introduced to Conspirare and, subsequently, to Roomful of Teeth — the two ensemble relationships that have come to define the arc of his career.

Roomful of Teeth

Since 2015, Squires has served as Head Audio Engineer for Roomful of Teeth, the Grammy-winning vocal octet founded by Brad Wells. His role encompasses recording, mixing, mastering, and live front-of-house sound design — a rare combination of studio and stage responsibilities that reflects the ensemble’s commitment to seamless audio across every performance context. Concert critics have consistently cited his contributions as foundational to the ensemble’s live experience. Writing in the Chicago Classical Review, reviewer Daniel Hautzinger described Squires as effectively the ninth performer in any Roomful of Teeth concert — the engineer at the mixing board manipulating a palette of amplification and reverb effects alongside the eight singers on stage, with the integration so tight that it was frequently difficult to tell how much of each effect was due to the singers versus the engineering. Reviewer Stephen Marino, writing for Classic Melbourne following the ensemble’s February 2026 appearance at the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, described Squires’s presence as not incidental but foundational, and praised his sound design throughout the evening as demonstrating refined musical sensitivity.

For the recording of Rough Magic, Squires employed an innovative recording approach at MASS MoCA, positioning DPA d:facto microphones in a 360-degree spatial configuration and incorporating the performance space’s natural acoustics — including live reverb feeds built directly into the room — into the recording. The result is an album that captures both the intimacy of the ensemble and the architecture of the space, earning widespread critical acclaim and the Grammy win for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.

Conspirare

Squires has been the live sound engineer for Conspirare, Craig Hella Johnson’s Austin-based Grammy-winning professional choral ensemble, since approximately 2013 — a partnership spanning well over a decade of concert seasons. In that role he has served as front-of-house engineer for Conspirare’s complete live operations, translating the ensemble’s complex acoustic and amplified choral sound to stages across the country. His work encompasses a broad range of programming, from intimate recitals to large-scale staged productions with soloists and chamber orchestra.

Among his most significant live sound achievements with Conspirare is his front-of-house engineering on all tours of Considering Matthew Shepard, Craig Hella Johnson’s landmark three-part fusion oratorio responding to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard. The work premiered in Austin in 2016 and subsequently toured to venues including Boston’s Symphony Hall, Ravinia, the Ford amphitheatre in Los Angeles, and the University of Wyoming in Laramie, drawing sustained national critical attention. Named one of the Chicago Tribune’s Top 10 classical concerts of 2018, the production pairs Conspirare’s choral soloists with a chamber ensemble of strings, piano, guitar, clarinet, and percussion. Squires’s front-of-house engineering across those tours required bringing the full emotional and sonic weight of the work to audiences in venues of widely varying acoustic and architectural character — a discipline that sits at the heart of his live sound practice.

His studio partnership with Conspirare has yielded two Grammy-nominated albums. House of Belonging (Delos, 2023), on which Squires served as producer, was nominated for Best Choral Performance at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards. Fanfare reviewer Ken Meltzer, whose “Feature Review” of the album appeared in the March/April 2024 issue, wrote that the recorded sound showcases the artists in ideal fashion, calling it a very beautiful recital indeed.

For advena: liturgies for a broken world (Divine Art, 2025), Squires served as producer, recording engineer, editor, and mastering engineer — a full-cycle production role across sessions at St. Martin’s Lutheran Church in Austin. The album was nominated for Best Choral Performance at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards. In a Fanfare interview about the making of the album, conductor Craig Hella Johnson described the recording sessions as a fluid, evolving conversation, noting that composer Mark Buller spent most of the sessions in the booth with Squires offering thoughtful comments, with Johnson checking in throughout to refine things. On the considerable challenge of balancing the guitar against choir and chamber ensemble, Johnson spoke of a tremendous amount of back and forth between Buller, himself, and what he called “our extraordinary producer Randall Squires,” adding: “We are fortunate to be able to work with such sensitive and thoughtful colleagues.” The album received three separate reviews in the same Fanfare issue. Reviewer William Kempster, awarding it a “Strongly Recommended” verdict, wrote that the recording is quite lovely, with nice space around all of the performers and a particularly warm and inviting choral sound, that the balance of the guitar against the other forces has been impeccably handled, and that the various solo vocal contributions are especially well caught in believable perspectives. Ken Meltzer, in a second review, described Conspirare’s singing as embodying radiant beauty, affecting dramatic involvement, and clear, precise diction. Feature reviewer Colin Clarke called the album well performed, recorded, and annotated, and recommended it without reservation.

Discography & Broader Work

Squires’s recording credits span a wide range of genres and artists. Verified credits include work with Grimy Styles, Atash, Panoramic Voices, McPullish, Micah Shalom and the Babylonians, Sgt. Remo, Athens vs. Sparta, f for fake, Kalu James, Frightened Rabbit, Afrofreque, The Motet, Tom Ovans, Human Digital, Afrika Heartbeat, Patton Oswalt, Legendary Gospel artist Walter Hawkins, the Asylum Street Spankers, and platinum-selling hip-hop artist E-40.

Current Projects

Squires is currently in post-production on Piedra del Sol, a 70-minute choral work by composer Joby Talbot based on the epic poem by Octavio Paz, commissioned and performed by Conspirare. The work, for choir and marimba and sung in Spanish, is slated for release in 2026. It represents the continuation of his long-running production partnership with Craig Hella Johnson and Conspirare.

Technical Philosophy

Squires operates Stillmastering.com, and RLS Audio, LLC from Austin, Texas, working primarily in Reaper and Wavelab on Apple Silicon. His engineering philosophy centers on transparency and non-intervention — an approach oriented toward serving the music without leaving a fingerprint. The spatial recording strategy he employed on Rough Magic exemplifies this sensibility: rather than imposing a studio aesthetic, he constructed a recording environment that allowed the singers’ own acoustic instincts and the room’s natural character to shape the sound. He has applied this same philosophy to his live work with Conspirare, where the challenge is not simply amplification but faithful translation — preserving the organic character of world-class choral singing across the unpredictable acoustics of touring venues.

Background

Squires trained at Berklee College of Music and grew up in a household that was, in every sense, a working classical music production environment. His father, Gregory K. Squires, is a Grammy-nominated classical producer and engineer, founder of Squires Production in New York, and an eighteen-year faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music, where he earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in French horn. Gregory K. Squires performed as principal horn of the Buffalo Philharmonic under Lukas Foss and has accumulated more than 3,000 productions across classical, jazz, Broadway, and film.

His mother, Phyllis Lanini Squires, was a professional oboist, English horn, and oboe d’amore player. She was a member of the Boehm Woodwind Quintette, the chamber ensemble that recorded American Winds, Volume One (Premiere Recordings, 1990) — a celebrated survey of 20th-century American woodwind quintets featuring works by Walter Piston, Elliott Carter, Irving Fine, Elie Siegmeister, and Vincent Persichetti. That album was produced by Gregory K. Squires, making it a genuine family production with his mother performing and his father behind the glass. Phyllis Lanini Squires also performed with the Washington Chamber Symphony, the Kennedy Center-based orchestra that was one of Washington’s foremost chamber ensembles from its founding in 1976 until it disbanded in 2002. Growing up in a household where both parents were deeply embedded in the world of serious classical music — his father producing it, his mother performing it — Randall Squires absorbed from an early age the craft standards and values that define his work today: rigor, musicianship, and an uncompromising commitment to serving the artist and the music.

Randall is a PROUD union member of IATSE local 205 in Austin, TX.

Press

Selected Reviews & Links

advena: liturgies for a broken world (Divine Art, 2025)

“The recording itself is quite lovely, with nice space around all of the performers and a particularly warm and inviting choral sound. The balance of the guitar against the other forces has been impeccably handled, and the various solo vocal contributions are especially well caught in believable perspectives.” — William Kempster, Fanfare (Strongly Recommended)

“Conspirare sings Mark Buller’s music with radiant beauty, affecting dramatic involvement, and clear, precise diction.” — Ken Meltzer, Fanfare (Recommended)

“A very moving album, well performed, recorded, and annotated.” — Colin Clarke, Fanfare Feature Review (Recommended)

“Conspirare carries this appealing interpretation above all with their exquisitely balanced sound, which brings the necessary emotionality and intimacy to the works.” — Guy Engels, Pizzicato

“Conspirare, led by founding Artistic Director Craig Hella Johnson, respond to all of Buller’s emotional gestures with utmost cohesion and flexibility.” — Donald Rosenberg, Gramophone

House of Belonging (Delos, 2023)

“The recorded sound showcases the artists in ideal fashion. This is a very beautiful recital indeed.” — Ken Meltzer, Fanfare (Feature Review, March/April 2024)

Roomful of Teeth — Live Reviews

Chicago Classical Review (October 2024): chicagoclassicalreview.com/…/roomful-of-teeth-opens-uc-presents-season

Classic Melbourne (February 2026): classicmelbourne.com.au/roomful-of-teeth/