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Notable Productions

Daniel Cantor

Daniel Cantor

DANIEL CANTOR - NOTABLE PRODUCTIONS
Producer, Composer, Drummer, Mixer, Mac Audio Guru.

Dan started life as a musician's son. He began playing drums in jazz gigs with his dad in NYC as a kid. He studied drumming with Alan Dawson, Frankie Malabe and Kenwood Dennard. As a student at Middlebury College, Dan studied electronic composition/Synclavier under George Todd. His first real studio job was working as an assistant for Deodato in NYC with Roberta Flack on the White Nights film Soundtrack. After serving as chief engineer at First Take in Boston and completing his studies at Berklee College of Music, Dan founded Notable Productions. He wrote music and produced recordings for rock, rap, world and jazz artists such as Thomas Mapfumo, Jiggle the Handle, Group Saloum, Yat-Fu, BMG 44, Fatim, Atlas Soul, Luther Guitar Johnson, Brandon Patton, Fox Trot Zulu, Hipbone, Rick Berlin, Jackson Jills, Persiflage, Hummer, Closet Fish, Skavoovie and the Epitones, Robben Ford, Les Nubians, Tracey Bonham, Farid El Kenitri, 1AChord, Omzo, KRS-One, Peggy Seeger, K'naan, Abass Abass, Ouzman, Infrared Band, Natalie Fernandez, The Curtis Brothers, Akili Jamal Haynes, and Jim's Big Ego. He has composed multimedia scores for Warner Bros' artists like Aerosmith, Biohazard, Allman Brothers, Hotei, and Cracker. His commercial clientele includes IBM, Microsoft, A.R.T., Al Gore, M.I.T., Motor City Museum and Staples. Dan is also an integral team member of the Nomadic Wax Records production staff, writing and producing tracks with international artists as well as doing post-production and scoring for NGO's and government agencies that hire Nomadic Wax worldwide.


Dan's disdain of MIDI timing fueled him to write an expose on poor sequencer construction for Midi Magazine. He designed an exhibit for the Computer Museum that demonstrated how to use computers to compose music. The exhibit led to an abundance of multimedia work. Dan has since been sought out to help design, beta test, setup or tweak computer-based recording rigs. Some of these clients include: MOTU, JL Cooper, Kurzweil A.I., Dexter Media, School House, Underground Productions, Virtual Music, Cakewalk, Clear-Perception Studio, Notable.com, SuperMacMan.com, Nappy Roots, M.I.T., Jonathan Katz, Steve Martin, Boston University Film Unit and the Vagina Monologues.


Dan plays drums and provides vocals for the Boston-based band, Jim's Big Ego. He and his bandmates were honored to sing the National Anthem at Fenway Park for the Red Sox. He's also been featured on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Dan is at once seduced by the vintage iron sound of his 33 channel Neve and glowing vacuum tubes - he is formidable with a Lynx (n) Aurora fronted Protools rig. Dan built the Nomadic Wax guerilla recording rig and eagerly traveled to the African country of Senegal with cousin, Ben Herson (label owner/global hip-hop maven), to record the first Nomadic Wax release: African Underground Vol.1. Nomadic Wax calls on Dan to contribute tracks as a multi-instrumentalist, as a mixer, or to use his ASCAP-award-winning songwriting skills 14 awards to date. The cousins have embarked on a sample CD with Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace of Burning Spear. They were honored to be featured in the November 2005 issue of TapeOp magazine. In 2008, Dan produced a cut for the album, In the Name of Love:Africa Salutes U2 on Shout Factory. He also recorded parts of Free*, the new Jim's Big Ego record. He composed the soundtrack and mixed the film Democracy In Dakar, directed by Magee McIlvaine and Ben Herson.

Dan during a Zoom meeting

Dan records and assists production of the Trinity International Hip Hop Festival held at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He's been working on the annual festival since 2005. Additionally, Dan produced and recorded the First Annual African Music Festival, which was held at City Plaza in Boston in the summer of 2010.

Dan was the recipient of the Berklee College of Music Fly Grant. A prestigious grant to fund his year-long Global Hip-Hop initiative at the Boston Campus. It helped bring Omar Offendum, The Narcysist, Poetic Pilgrimage, Ben Herson, and Shokanti to the college for lectures, performances, and recording sessions on and off-campus.

When this was written, Dan was working on records with artists Thomas Mapfumo and Group Saloum. He's also doing postproduction work and scoring for the United States Institute for Peace. Dan has helped establish the "Music for Social Change" scholarship at Berklee College of Music. The scholarship recipient is awarded a day of production at Notable to support their cause.

More recently his Notable Productions work has contributed to:

Akua Naru's features on a few upcoming singles and her upcoming record

Terri Lynne Carrington and Social Science's Waiting Game - nominated for 2021 Grammy

Retro Jazz's Albums, One that won the Soberano for best album of the year and the second which was nominated again.

Issa Bibbins "Undiagnosed" single which Won the Independent Music Award in the Hip-Hop Category

Juan Luis Guerra's work on a film in 2020