Gebre Waddell (born November 28, 1981) is an American entrepreneur, author, and record producer from Memphis, Tennessee, whose work focuses on strategy, technology, and governance in the music industry. His engineering and production credits include Grammy-nominated recordings, with work featuring Stevie Wonder, Public Enemy, Lil' Wayne, Ministry, and the Jacksons. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Sound Credit.
He is the author of Complete Audio Mastering: Practical Techniques, published by McGraw-Hill Professional in 2013. He has served as Secretary/Treasurer of the Recording Academy/Grammys Board of Trustees, one of its four national officers. In 2023 he also drafted the initial version of Tennessee's ELVIS Act, enacted in 2024 as the first U.S. state law to protect individuals from unauthorized use of artificial intelligence to reproduce their voice or likeness.
Early life and education Waddell was born in Memphis, Tennessee. His father, James Waddell Jr., was a sculptor who created the first sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. His uncle, Lucious Matthews, is depicted in National Civil Rights Museum exhibitions related to the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike.
Waddell attended the University of Memphis, where he earned a degree in accounting and music.
Career Audio engineering and production In 2003, Waddell established Stonebridge Mastering, a mastering studio in downtown Memphis.
Keyboard magazine featured Waddell's sampled software instrument ReasonRhodes, modeled on the Fender Rhodes piano, on its cover in 2006.
His early engineering credits include a 2005 project produced by John Tesh and Public Enemy's 2006 album How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul. He has also worked with Ministry, Lil' Wayne, Rick Ross, and The Bar-Kays. Waddell mastered David Porter's The Classics, a set of new recordings of Porter's Stax-era hits tracked at Royal Studios by engineer Boo Mitchell. Waddell worked on Tito Jackson's 2021 album Under Your Spell, which features Stevie Wonder, George Benson, Joe Bonamassa, Marlon Jackson, Bobby Rush, and Kenny Neal. The following year, Waddell co-produced Neal's blues album Straight From The Heart, released on Ruf Records, which features Tito Jackson and Christone "Kingfish" Ingram. Waddell also engineered Sean Ardoin and Kreole Rock & Soul's Full Circle, a nominee for Best Regional Roots Music Album at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards; he had also worked on Ardoin's nominated album in the same category the previous year.
Waddell created The Frequency Domain in 2010, a printed chart documenting standardized spectrograms for common musical instruments, built from recordings of each instrument playing each note of its range. Copies are held at Stanford University and Harvard University, and one was held in the office of Rupert Neve.
In 2013, Waddell wrote Complete Audio Mastering: Practical Techniques, a textbook on audio mastering published by McGraw-Hill Professional. The book's final chapter features contributions from mastering engineers and audio-industry figures, including Dave Hill of Crane Song, Scott Hull of Masterdisk, and Brad Blackwood of Euphonic Masters. It was reviewed in Recording Magazine in January 2016.
That same year, Waddell developed Refinement, an audio processor for controlling the sensation of harshness in audio signals. The software translated to digital form a harshness-reduction effect Waddell had been achieving in his mastering work using multiple tube-based analog units, rather than emulating any specific hardware processor. Refinement was licensed to Brainworx, which released the commercial version, bx_Refinement, in 2014 through Plugin Alliance and Universal Audio. It was the first audio plugin released simultaneously across every major plugin format (UAD-2, AAX DSP, AAX Native, RTAS, AU, and VST), and the first dedicated specifically to reducing harshness.
Sound Credit In 2016, Waddell co-founded Soundways, a Memphis-based, venture-backed music-technology company now known as Sound Credit, covering credits, rights, and royalty collection.
Porter's 2026 memoir describes Waddell as a leader of the music-technology wing of Porter's Consortium MMT talent-development program. Soundways was the first music startup funded through Start MMT, a Consortium MMT program operated in partnership with the Memphis accelerator StartCo. Soundways entered a partnership with Avid in 2017 that allowed Avid users to integrate Soundways tools into their workflow.
Waddell won the 2018 Memphis pitch competition on Steve Case's Revolution Fund Rise of the Rest tour, with Soundways receiving a $100,000 investment from the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund matched by an additional $100,000 from Innova Capital. That year, Inside Memphis Business named Waddell its Innovator of the Year. Waddell also served on the board of directors of the Smithsonian-affiliated Memphis Rock 'n' Soul Museum from 2018 to 2019.
In August 2018, Waddell co-organized a vigil at Aretha Franklin's Memphis birthplace on the day of her funeral.
On March 17, 2019, Waddell and Soundways were featured in a 60 Minutes segment on Revolution and Rise of the Rest, in which CBS News described Waddell as having developed "a better way for fellow musicians to get paid for their work".
Waddell was paired with Karlie Kloss in November 2020 as the two speakers of the "Close the Gaps" segment at the CSforALL Commitments Showcase, which addressed gaps in computer science education.
In February 2022, a letter from Peter Leathem OBE, CEO of UK performance-rights organization PPL, to Waddell was entered into the United States congressional record as part of a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the American Music Fairness Act.
In February 2023, Waddell announced a $30 million advance facility and a partnership with PPL at the 65th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. The partnership allows American performers to collect neighboring-rights royalties internationally through PPL. By that time, Sound Credit's services were used by over 15,000 labels, publishers, administrators, and independent artists, connecting to more than 150 music-industry organizations.
Recording Academy Waddell was elected to the Memphis chapter Board of Governors of the Recording Academy in 2016, and was a co-chair of the chapter's Producers & Engineers Wing. He was elected president of the Memphis chapter in 2017.
In 2020, Waddell was elected to the national Board of Trustees of the nonprofit Recording Academy, on which he served through 2025. During this period the 40-seat board included Yolanda Adams, John Legend, and PJ Morton, among others.
In June 2023, Waddell was elected Secretary/Treasurer of the Board of Trustees, a role he held through 2025. He served as one of four national officers alongside Tammy Hurt (chair), Chelsey Green (vice chair), and Christine Albert (chair emerita), jointly responsible for the Academy's strategic direction, governance, and fiduciary oversight.
Tennessee state service In 2017, Governor Bill Haslam appointed Waddell to the Tennessee Interactive Digital Media Council.
Governor Bill Lee appointed Waddell to the Tennessee Entertainment Commission in late 2019. He was later appointed chairman of the commission.
ELVIS Act In March 2024, Tennessee enacted the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act, known as the ELVIS Act. It was the first U.S. state law of its kind to protect individuals from unauthorized use of artificial intelligence to reproduce their voice or likeness. The bipartisan bill updated Tennessee's existing right-of-publicity law to include protections against the misuse of artificial intelligence against the voices of songwriters, performers, and music-industry professionals.
Waddell drafted the initial version of the legislation in 2023, proposing to add artificial-intelligence language to Tennessee's existing right-of-publicity statute, and convened a series of Zoom meetings through which support for the bill was built. Governor Bill Lee unveiled the bill at a press conference at RCA Studio A in Nashville on January 10, 2024. Waddell attended alongside artists and songwriters including Steve Cropper, Lainey Wilson, and Matthew West.
References Boone, Joe. "Kick Out the Jams." Memphis Business Quarterly, September 2013: 55–56. Print.
Dorsey, Scott. "Complete Audio Mastering: Practical Techniques." Recording Magazine, January 2016: 72. Print.
Waddell, Gebre. Complete Audio Mastering: Practical Techniques. McGraw-Hill Professional, New York, 2013.
Vail, Mark. "ReasonRhodes Sample Set." Keyboard Magazine, August 2006: 78. Print.