By the time you read this, I will have either made a complete fool of myself, wishing that I was dead...

Or I'll be riding the waves of confidence, high-fiving random strangers on the street.

Here's some backstory:

It's been ten years since I graduated audio school at the SAE Institute in Madrid.

And it's also been ten years this week since I met my wife in the same city.

It's a good love story, but I'll leave it for later. All I'll tell you now is that we decided to celebrate the occasion with a quick 10-hour flight back to Madrid.

So, on a whim, I emailed my former professor and said, "hey, I'm in Madrid. I'd love to come by and say hi. Maybe talk to the students?"

My Spanish email skills are still pretty good, so he wrote back, 

"Hi. It's nice to hear from you. We'd love if you came in and talked to our students about your project."

He's talking about Audio Issues. I started it ten years ago as the school project you had to submit for a final grade. Flash-forward, I never stopped writing and now it's evolved into a real online business.

I said "sure, I'd love to talk to your students."

"Ok great," he said, "something short, an hour or so."

...Oh...no problem...I'll just whip together an hour-long presentation in Spanish. No biggie.

Originally, I went to SAE in Spain because not only did I want to learn audio, but I also wanted to learn Spanish. The first few months I looked at the professors like a cow looks at an oncoming train, frozen with fear and uncertainty. Especially the guy from Sevilla whose accent was impossible to understand - people from Andalucia decided long ago that they just won't pronounce S's and D's in their sentences.

But over the next 12 months, I practiced my Spanish just as much as I practiced my audio skills - and I graduated at the top of the class.

However, I feel like the real test is still ahead of me.

To be a real alum, I need to take the final challenge: The 10-year Oral Exam - explaining everything I've done with my audio diploma in the last ten years, in the third language I hardly speak anymore.

So I'll share the evolution of the website and how I've built it into a full-time business with informative products full of practical audio production tips. Books and courses that get reviews such as this one about Step By Step Mixing I just saw from Russell Kirk:

"Really practical and informative book! No BS or time-wasting hype here, just really useful and to-the-point information that helps musicians figure out the difficult work of mixing their multi-track recordings. Highly recommended."

If you'd like to grab your copy of Step By Step Mixing as a way of wishing me good luck with my final challenge, you can do so here:

www.StepByStepMixing.com