A free, all-day gathering of Grammy-winning producers, mixing engineers, and music software makers is coming to North Miami Beach on Saturday, August 22, offering local songwriters and audio engineers a rare shot at direct feedback from some of the industry's biggest names. The event, IMSTA Festa Miami, takes place at SAE Institute and is open to professional and semi-professional musicians, songwriters, producers, audio engineers, students, and educators alike.
The convention is organized by the International Music Software Trade Association, or IMSTA, a nonprofit whose members include music software manufacturers, distributors, retailers, media outlets, and other industry organizations, according to Miami New Times. IMSTA is dedicated to representing the interests of the music software community through educational and empowering initiatives, and the Festa is its flagship vehicle for reaching creators directly. IMSTA Festa is structured as an international traveling convention series held annually in major creative centers including New York, London, Toronto, Atlanta, and Miami, pairing regional industry panels with global software developer exhibits and masterclasses.
North Miami Beach is one stop on that circuit, and it is not the city's first. Hoodline reported on a similar edition of the tour held in Atlanta back in 2019, also hosted at an SAE Institute campus.
Grammy Winners Headline the Lineup
The marquee names this year include Jimmy “The Senator” Douglass, a five-time Grammy Award-winning mixing engineer whose 50-plus-year career spans classic rock to hip-hop. He engineered Justin Timberlake's number-one hit “SexyBack” and has collaborated extensively with Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, and Aretha Franklin, according to the same report. Douglass began as a teenage tape duplicator at Atlantic Records in the early 1970s before becoming Timbaland's primary mixing partner in the late 1990s.
Also on the bill is Dwayne “Supa Dups” Chin-Quee, a Miami-based Jamaican record producer who has won three Grammy Awards for his work on Drake's “Take Care,” Bruno Mars' “Unorthodox Jukebox,” and Eminem's “Recovery,” while also co-producing Drake's multi-platinum hit “Controlla.” Chin-Quee got his start at age 13 as a radio DJ on Miami's Power 96 before co-founding the Black Chiney sound system. Rounding out the guest speaker list are mix engineer Javier Valverde, mixing engineer and producer Quaz Deville, and Latin Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter Drea Tomé.
Valverde is a prominent recording and mixing engineer whose credits include commercial track work for pop, R&B, and Latin music stars such as Pitbull, T-Pain, Timbaland, and Lil Wayne, active largely within South Florida's commercial recording facilities that specialize in vocal processing and modern urban production. The pairing of internationally decorated engineers with locally rooted talent like Valverde reflects how open-access events like this one plug South Florida's hip-hop, Latin, and dancehall production scene into major-label standards.
Hands-On Demos and a Synth Playground
Beyond the panels, IMSTA Festa Miami offers one-on-one product demos, expert panels, master classes, song reviews, a songwriting competition, networking opportunities, and giveaways. A standout attraction is Modville, an interactive exhibit showcasing modular synthesizers, guided by Dave Kerzner and Matt Horner. Kerzner is a progressive rock musician and sound designer who co-founded sample development firm Sonic Reality and partnered with IK Multimedia, having collected and sampled rare vintage synthesizers since the early 1990s; he has also designed sounds and produced music with members of Genesis, Yes, and Keith Emerson.
The event unfolds across a full day, and organizers are providing a complimentary breakfast to the first 100 attendees. Registration is required and must be completed online in advance, with IMSTA Festa billed as free with RSVP.
A Wild Card Into the Songwriting Finals
For songwriters hoping to turn a free Saturday into something bigger, the afternoon Song Reviews carry real stakes. Aspiring producers and songwriters who receive a “Wild Card” from reviewing industry specialists advance directly into the regional songwriting competition finals, according to IMSTA. Regional winners then move into a global year-end judging pool competing for a grand prize that includes an all-expenses-paid four-day trip to a songwriting camp at Black Rock Studios in Santorini, Greece, complete with airfare and hotel accommodations.
That prize comes with strict strings attached. IMSTA requires all songwriting competition entrants to verify that their compositions were created using legally purchased software, explicitly disqualifying tracks produced with pirated audio software, under the association's core “Buy What You Use” initiative. The rule underscores IMSTA's origins: the trade group was established by software manufacturers to combat widespread digital audio piracy through education rather than litigation, a mission that runs through the entire Festa format.
Why North Miami Beach, and Why It Matters
SAE Institute's North Miami Beach campus, located at 16051 W Dixie Hwy #200, has served as a hub for sound engineering education since it opened in 2002 as a purpose-built audio center featuring Dante-networked digital rooms, 5.1 surround-sound suites, and analog consoles. SAE Institute was founded in Australia in 1976 and now operates campuses across North America, Europe, and Asia. Hoodline noted this week that Magnolia-raised hit producer Pi'erre Bourne studied sound engineering at SAE Institute during his own career development, a reminder of the kind of trajectory this campus can help launch.
The stakes for creators extend beyond one convention. The global digital audio workstation and music creation software market was valued at $4.4 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $4.7 billion in 2026, driven by an expansion of independent creators, home studio setups, and AI-assisted plugins, according to Grand View Research. Software tools represent nearly 58% of total DAW market revenue, with North America generating over 30% of global sales — context that helps explain why an organization built by software manufacturers has an interest in courting the next generation of bedroom producers before they ever pick up a pirated plugin.
