Matteo Maclean — producer, builder, mentor
Sounds, sites and systems.
For artists, ministries and small teams who’d rather not project-manage five freelancers.
Rather talk first? Twenty minutes, no charge, no pitch — and I’ll tell you if I’m the wrong fit.
Sound · Story · Systems
I'd rather show you the receipts than tell you I'm passionate.
Not mockups — software running in production every day, built and maintained by me.
Sound engineering and performing arts in Cape Town — mixing, mastering and production, properly.
A Next.js app and three WordPress products I wrote run a live membership, ticketing and lessons platform every day.
An album, official music videos and years of stages — written, produced and mixed largely in-house.
I run live mentorship calls on four pillars year-round. The teaching keeps the craft honest.
A multi-day mountain gathering — brand, ticketing, sponsors, comms and front-of-house sound.
Freedom Family Foundation — weekly prayer calls open to all, an abundance pool that carries one family every month.
Most people find me through one of these and end up needing two or three. That's the point of doing it all under one roof — your record, your site, your brand and your launch don't have to be handed between four people who've never spoken.
Cape Town–trained in mixing, mastering and production. Recording that keeps the feeling in, and mixes that translate everywhere.
Not templates. Web apps in React and Next.js, and custom WordPress themes and plugins built from the database up — because the thing you're selling deserves software that actually fits it.
Music videos, live captures, course modules and short-form. Cut to the feel of the track, not to a template.
Identity that holds up across a stage banner, a ticket page and an email at 6am. I build design systems, not one-off logos.
Voice, instrument, songwriting and the technical craft. I've written a 45-module engineering curriculum and I teach the way I wish I'd been taught — hands on the faders first.
Multi-day gatherings, product launches and the unglamorous systems underneath them. Someone has to hold the whole thing — usually that's me.
Every one of these started as an idea with no budget attached. The through-line isn't a medium — it's building the whole thing, end to end, until it works.
A mentorship community and ministry for artists — built the whole stack myself. A custom WordPress theme, a membership layer on WooCommerce with ticketing and member accounts, a lessons plugin with progress tracking, and a separate Next.js application carrying the practice tools, the curriculum, the members’ community and 1:1 booking. Four teaching pillars run live every week.
A full engineering education from signal path to certification — gain staging, psychoacoustics, EQ, compression, saturation, reverb, mixing, mastering for streaming. Each module ships with interactive Web Audio widgets and a beginner/advanced toggle so the same lesson serves a first-time USB mic owner and a working FOH engineer.
A multi-day gathering in the mountains of North Carolina. I run the production end to end — the brand, the ticketing tiers, the facilitator line-up, a six-tier sponsorship program, the email campaigns, and the sound.
Original music with Katrina Lilly — an album, official videos, and years of stages from Florida song circles to Oregon festivals. Written, produced, mixed and filmed largely in-house, which is exactly where the rest of these skills came from.
A chord-chart engine covering guitar, ukulele and piano — movable CAGED barre shapes, generative voicing fallbacks, diatonic charts with Roman numerals, correct enharmonic spelling, and printable PDF output. Plus interactive theory widgets: circle of fifths, scale explorers, ear trainers.
Healing the family story. A regenerative ministry helping families move out of isolation and dependency and into belonging, natural living and shared abundance — food, land, home, birth and health, education, faith. Weekly prayer calls free and open to anyone, an Abundance Pool that lifts up one family in need every month, and a Community Map so intentional communities can be found by the families looking for them. The Freedom Family Village Network is where the vision becomes a village.
You don't have to know the whole scope on day one. Most people start with a session, and it grows from there once we both know what we're dealing with.
Every skill on this page exists because at some point nobody was coming to do it for us.
I trained in sound engineering and performing arts in Cape Town — mixing, mastering, production, the real thing. Then I spent years on the road with a band, which is the fastest education there is in everything a studio qualification doesn't cover: building the website, cutting the video, designing the poster, running the merch, holding the sponsors, and still being tuned up by soundcheck.
So I learned all of it. Not as a hobby collection — as one continuous craft. The instinct that tells you a vocal needs to sit 2dB back is the same instinct that tells you a landing page is asking for too much too early. It's all arrangement. Knowing where a thing sits, and what has to get out of its way.
These days that shows up as Free The Music — a mentorship community I run with my wife Katrina, where artists learn voice, technique, songwriting and the business of a creative life. It shows up as the Freedom Family Foundation, healing the family story — prayer, shared abundance, and a return to natural living. And it shows up as the studio and build work I take on for people making something they actually care about.
I work best with artists, ministries, small teams and founders who'd rather have one person who understands the whole thing than five who each own a slice of it and none of the outcome.
If any of that sounds like the way you'd want your project handled — take the free intro call. Worst case, you get twenty minutes of honest advice and we both move on.
Straight answers to what people ask me right before they say yes.
Fair question, and the honest answer is that I'm formally trained and deepest in sound — the rest I learned because our own projects demanded it, then kept doing because I was good at it. What you're really buying is someone who understands how the pieces fit together, which is usually worth more than a slightly better specialist who doesn't know what the others are doing.
Sessions are $40–$60 an hour and you can book those right now. Projects are quoted at a fixed price after we've talked, so you know the number before anything starts. I've never sent an invoice bigger than the figure I quoted.
That's the best time to talk, not the worst. The free intro call exists specifically to turn a vague feeling into a scope you can decide about. You'll leave that call with a clearer plan whether or not you hire me.
Every project gets a timeline with visible milestones before we start, so you're never guessing where it's at. I take on a limited number at a time precisely so nothing stalls in the middle. Finishing things is the whole job — an unfinished project helps neither of us.
You own all of it — session files, source files, design files, code, everything, handed over at the end. Nothing is built to trap you into needing me. If you want to take it in-house or to someone else later, I'll make that easy.
Revision rounds are written into the scope from the start, so feedback is expected rather than awkward. I also check in at milestones instead of disappearing and unveiling something at the end. You should never see the final version for the first time at the end.
I take on a limited number of projects at a time, so this is an application rather than a contact form. Answer it properly and you'll get a real reply — a yes, a no, or a better idea than the one you came with.
Then don’t. Book time instead and we’ll work out together whether there’s a project in it. The intro call costs nothing and there is no pitch at the end of it.