It has become increasingly common for YouTubers and other online creators to pivot to music—some for a brief season, to sing their heart’s song and experience the joy of bringing an original composition or two into the world, and some for a long-term shift (Addison Rae being, perhaps, the most famous example of someone pursuing this path). In many of these cases, the common, perfectly acceptable practice is to find a producer to work with who can midwife songs along with each artist to help them to live out their musical dreams. But this is not how Gabi Belle does things.

Thea Gustafsson currently records emotive alt-pop as Becky and the Birds, a project which released its debut album Only Music Makes Me Cry Now on November 8th, 2024. As recent as this seems, she has a rich background in audio, from her days at Stockholm’s famed Musikmakarna Songwriters Academy to a later internship with Aviici. In 2025, Gustafsson was awarded Producer of the Year at the Swedish Grammis and in April, she released the single “Should’ve known better (choices),” on which her accordionist father contributes some accompaniment.

Though British singer-songwriter Rosie Lowe has sustained a career as an artist for over a decade and has been recording her own music since her college days, it is with her August 2024 release Lover, Other that she took the lead on production, songwriting, and tracking. The result is a musical tapestry that crosses genres, spanning influences from R&B and electronic music to choral compositions. Her collaborators have included Little Simz, Jay Electronica, and Duval Timothy, with whom she released an album called Son in 2021.

When I began blogging for SoundGirls in January of 2022, I had hoped to interview various audio professionals from marginalized genders, but none more so than Greta Stromquist. We met at WAMCon Los Angeles 2019. We were both early to the conference at Walt Disney Studios, struck up a conversation that morning, and reconnected throughout the day. Whereas I was new to the very idea of recording and mixing my own projects, Greta was established, having already developed a partnership with mentors to record audiobooks.

Annlie Huang is a Los Angeles-based music editor for streaming content at Marvel Studios and an independent mix engineer. She began her journey by obtaining a B.F.A. in Performing Arts Technology and a B.S. in Sound Engineering from the University of Michigan, and she has since become a consummate professional with vast experience ranging across the spectrum of film sound production and post-production. Her credits include Mulan, Frozen 2, Avengers: End Game, and most recently Moon Knight and She-Hulk.

Kia Shavon is an audio engineer whose extensive resume includes tracks by Foxy Brown, A$AP Rocky, Lil Pump, the NBA and NFL, and hundreds of indie artists. Professionally, she goes by The Mix Artist. She obtained her Bachelor of Science in Music Engineering Technology from Hampton University, and now lives and mixes audio in NYC.

Ashley Ann Lambert is an actor, vocalist, and partner with R.A.W. Voice Casting out of Los Angeles, CA. She describes herself as “passionate about sound and all of its forms.” In her role at R.A.W., she uses her well-trained ear for acoustic direction and sound mimicry to cast accurate sound-alikes, direct voiceover actors individually or in groups, and lead ADR sessions to hone many of the performances we hear in our favorite big and small budget films. A professional voiceover actress herself, at times you can even hear her own voice among them. With remote work having risen

Lexi Jackson is one of the most inspiring, generous, and vibrant musicians/audio people I’ve befriended online. She not only writes and produces music as eye.elle and creates playlists to feature other artists, but she is also forging a career in music licensing. After obtaining a certificate in Music Production at the Community College of Baltimore County in 2021, and interning at both Maryland Public Television’s Content Department and Women’s Audio Mission, she began work at The Sync Center. She has since landed a job as a Music Licensing Assistant at ESPN.

Lisa Machac is a musician and entrepreneur based in Austin, Texas who, in February of 2020, founded the audio education platform Omni Sound Project. Through Omni’s virtual member mixers and other educational opportunities, she has brought together women+ artists, engineers, and producers from all over the globe while maintaining an essential intimate quality.

Caridad Espinosa is a Quito, Ecuador-based mix engineer and producer as well as founder and lead instructor of Mix Like a Girland co-founder and coordinator of the Beats by Girlz chapter for the city in which she resides. She earned her degree from Berklee College partner Universidad San Francisco de Quito College of Music in 2021. While there, she was awarded the Audio and Engineering Society AES (2020), API Saul Walker Memorial Scholarship (2020 & 2021), and was honored by Berklee College of Music for her work as a producer, composer, mixing, and recording engineer — while there, she also began the organization Mix Like a Girl.

In the audio landscape of Northern California and beyond, Dana Jae has done it all these past 30 years: live sound, film sound (production and post), purchasing, studio recording, mixing, mastering, and education. She began as a purchasing agent for Leo’s Audio in the late 80s, acquiring extensive knowledge of audio equipment through brochures and spec sheets as she researched manufacturers and their offerings. From that time onward, she became proficient in live sound, serving as a house sound engineer at the San Francisco nightclub Bottom of the Hill beginning in 1991, touring the US and Europe with the band Medicine as their sound mixer from 1994 to 1995. From 1999 to 2004, she also partnered in and presided over the record label and commercial recording studio called APG Records/APG Studios, which has evolved into Portero Post. She then explored film audio through the creative visual media production company Films on 45 in 2007. She also runs her own sound company called dcj Productions, though that has since taken something of a backseat to her work as an audio educator — she is currently Broadcast Electronic Media Arts Department Chair at City College of San Francisco.

Through a virtual workshop she led in 2020, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Lisa Kacos helped me to understand music theory in the most practical terms I had ever heard. This is a specialty of hers, honed through decades of musicianship as well as academic study. She holds both a Bachelor of Composition in Music Theory as well as a Masters in Music Theory with a pedagogy emphasis from Michigan State University. She currently leads interactive online workshops such as the forthcoming Music Theory for Producers Workshop held April 30th through Omni Sound Project, where she is a core faculty member for 2022, as well as a popular Rhythm for Songwriters course. Previously, she has taught at her Alma Mater MSU, Grand Rapids Community College, and at SAE Institute – Nashville. As a musician, she writes and records her own music and has played with Outer Vibe, Samuel Herb, Violet LaVelle, and Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls. For the 2021 Omni Sound Project “Four Track Challenge,” she contributed tracks and stems from her original song “Losers Club” to be manipulated and remixed by fellow audio engineers, both established and aspiring.

I’d love to go back to school for audio, but I owe a lot of money to the federal government. Okay fine, it’s student loan debt. For a long time, I felt like that huge and haunting sum meant that I could never pursue an education beyond the degrees I already hold. Debt, lack of funds, an overabundance of responsibilities: they all present very real barriers for many of us wishing to acquire new skills.

Banished. That’s where my kids would be when I recorded at home pre-pandemic. Not banished to their knowledge, just hanging with their grandparents for at least an entire day, at most overnight. The point is they would be gone, and I’d have sent our dog with them, too, if I’d had my way.

There are two songs that I remember having written at age six: a rock n’ roll wonder called “Thunder and Lightning” (thunder and lightning/ yeah yeah/ thunder and lightning/ oh yeah) and a narrative style ballad about a little cat that emerged from a mysterious magical flowerbed to become my pet.