Catalog and Booking for a GRAMMY-Winning Engineer_

Challenge

Angelo Carretta is a two time GRAMMY winning mix and mastering engineer working out of Miami. Fifteen years in the room, three diamond and thirty five platinum certifications, and a body of work measured in billions of streams.

That last part is the problem, not the pitch. When the catalog is that deep, the usual approaches both fail. A curated highlight reel of six records undersells fifteen years. A flat list of everything is unreadable and instantly stale. Neither lets someone answer the question they actually arrive with, which is some version of “have you done the thing I need, on records at my level.”

There was a second, unrelated problem. Studio time is sold in blocks of hours, and the money side was leaking in specific ways:

• Slots held by people who never commit. A request is not a booking, but a naive calendar treats them the same and the week fills with maybes.
• Work delivered before payment lands. Files go out, the invoice goes unanswered, and chasing it costs more than the session was worth.
• Double bookings. Two requests for the same window, approved separately, discovered late.

Off the shelf booking software solves the calendar and gets the rest wrong. It takes a cut, it looks like everyone else’s booking page, and its payment model does not match how studio work is actually sold.

Approach

The catalog

The discography is the centre of the site, not an appendix. One hundred and forty official releases, ranked by play count so the biggest work leads, every one playable in place, and filterable by what Angelo actually did on that record: engineer, mixing, mastering, vocal producer, composer, lyricist, plus GRAMMY winners and nominees.

That filter set is the whole idea. A label A&R and an independent artist are asking different questions, and the role filter lets each of them answer their own without scrolling past the other’s answer.

The engineering constraint worth naming: one hundred and forty embedded video players on one page would make it unusable. The grid renders thumbnails and only instantiates a player when someone actually clicks, so the page stays fast while still being a catalog you can hear rather than just read.

The design

The concept was a glitched control room. Near monochrome black and bone with a single signal red accent, chromatic glitch on the name, film grain and scanlines, brutalist type. Built to Angelo’s direction, pushed toward the raw energy of producer sites rather than the clean minimalism most service pages default to.

One decision mattered more than it looks. The palette, the fonts, and the glitch treatment are all CSS variables in a single stylesheet, and the glitch itself is a reusable class driven by a data attribute. Re-skinning is a one file change. That was not gold plating. It meant the look could be pushed hard during design without every iteration becoming a rewrite.

The booking pipeline

The booking system is a state machine, and the states exist to protect his time and his cashflow.

A client picks a session length and a slot, and the request lands as pending. Pending requests deliberately do not hold the calendar, which is the answer to the maybe problem. Angelo approves or declines from a protected admin view, and conflicts are re-checked at approval time rather than at request time, because the request was never a claim on the slot.

On approval the client receives a Stripe Checkout link for a fifty percent deposit that expires in twenty four hours. Paying moves the booking to confirmed. Letting it lapse marks it expired and releases the slot, and an expired booking can be approved again if the client comes back. Nothing is silently held and nothing is lost.

When the mix is ready, Angelo requests the balance from the same view and the client pays the remaining fifty percent before files are delivered. The card reads paid in full only when it is.

Confirmed sessions and approved-but-unpaid holds publish to a private calendar feed he subscribes to in Google or Apple Calendar, so his working calendar is the one he already lives in. The hourly rate, the bookable hour range, and the deposit percentage are all editable from the admin view rather than being constants in the code.

The architecture

Static pages served from Cloudflare, serverless functions for the API, and D1 for the data. No separate application server and no external booking service.

Outcome

The site went live in July 2026 at angelocarretta.com and runs the studio’s catalog, scheduling, and payments end to end.

We started from nothing. The first pass was market research: studio sites, portfolio templates, off-the-shelf booking platforms. Nothing in it interested him, so we built his vision from scratch instead of bending a template around it.

What he has now is a site one person can run. He updates the catalog, approves or declines sessions, and takes deposits himself, with no developer in the loop. There is no SaaS platform underneath it and no subscription to keep paying — the only cut anyone takes is his payment processor’s.