MICHAEL GRAVES
SENIOR MASTERING ENGINEER & AUDIO RESTORATION SPECIALIST
Michael is a multiple GRAMMY-Award winning mastering engineer. Working with clients worldwide, he is one of the foremost audio restoration and re-mastering specialists working today, earning 5 GRAMMYs and 14 GRAMMY nominations.
His main focus is historical audio that now resides on deteriorating or obsolete media. His work has often been compared to that of an archaeologist because of Michael’s similarly painstaking process of cleaning and restoring old and often damaged archival material.
Michael first became interested in audio restoration after receiving an early CD recorder as a gift in 1998. In the course of digitizing some rare records in his vinyl collection, he discovered the possibilities of digital audio restoration. In 2002, Michael founded Osiris Studio, initially working with private collectors to digitize and restore their music collections, then later with institutional archives and record labels. Since then he has established himself as a top tier mastering engineer, mastering hundreds of albums from a wide variety of musical genres with clients around the world.
He works with such record labels as Omnivore Recordings, Numero Group, Analog Africa, Candid Records, Dust-to-Digital, Rhino Records, Ostinato Records, and Discodelic. With those labels he has mastered recordings by Hank Williams, Blondie, Ray Charles, Big Star, Orchestre Poly-Rythmo, Richard Hell, Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Charles Mingus, Nina Simone, Erroll Garner, Buck Owens, Bobby Rush and many others.
Beyond his studio work, Michael enjoys sharing his knowledge and experience with fellow engineers and music enthusiasts. He is affiliated with the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) and the Audio Engineering Society (AES). He is also a board member and technical advisor to The Dust-to-Digital Foundation, an organization dedicated to the preservation of large, rare 78 rpm collections.
Additionally, Michael is a member of The Recording Academy, and The Recording Academy's Producers & Engineers Wing. He has also served multiple terms on the Board of Governors in Atlanta and Los Angeles.
GRAMMY NOMINATIONS & WINS
2009 GRAMMY Award for Best Historical Album for Dust-to-Digital’s Art of Field Recording: Volume I: 50 Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum (the 51st GRAMMY Awards)
2013 GRAMMY nomination for Dust-to-Digital’s Opika Pende: Africa at 78 RPM (the 55th GRAMMY Awards)
2014 GRAMMY nomination for Dust-to-Digital’s Pictures Of Sound: One Thousand Years Of Educed Audio: 980–1980 (the 56th GRAMMY Awards)
2015 Two GRAMMY nominations, one GRAMMY Award. Graves received a double nomination for Dust-to-Digial’s Longing For The Past: The 78 RPM Era In Southeast Asia and Omnivore Recordings’ Hank Williams: The Garden Spot Programs, 1950 with Hank Williams ultimately winning the GRAMMY (the 57th GRAMMY Awards)
2016 GRAMMY nomination for Dust-to-Digital’s Parchman Farm: Photographs And Field Recordings, 1947–1959 (the 58th GRAMMY Awards)
2017 GRAMMY nomination for Dust-to-Digital's Music of Morocco: Recorded by Paul Bowles 1959 (the 59th GRAMMY Awards)
2018 Two GRAMMY nominations, one for Dust-to-Digital's Washington Phillips And His Manzarene Dreams and one for Ostinato Records' Sweet As Broken Dates: Lost Somali Tapes from the Horn of Africa (the 60th GRAMMY Awards)
2019 GRAMMY Award for Dust-to-Digital's Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris (the 61st GRAMMY Awards)
2021 GRAMMY Award for Omnivore Recordings’ It's Such A Good Feeling: The Best Of Mister Rogers (the 63rd GRAMMY Awards)
2022 GRAMMY Nomination for Dust-to-Digital's Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music (the 64th GRAMMY Awards)
2023 GRAMMY Nomination for Numero Group's Blondie - Against The Odds: 1974-1982 (the 65th GRAMMY Awards)
2024 GRAMMY Award for Craft Recording's Written In Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos (the 66th GRAMMY Awards)