Former WHS student wins Grammy

Hans-Martin Buff, who was an exchange student from the country of Germany at Waseca High School from September to December of 1985, recently won a Grammy Award for his sound engineering  “Best Immersive Audio Album” while working on Peter Gabriel’s newest record, titled “I/O.”

He currently works for MSM Studios in Munich, but Buff began his music work in a small studio at Paisley Park that belonged to none other than Minnesota’s sound artist Prince. Buff’s career began in 1995 as a studio tech in Paisley Park, where he worked on the Prince albums: “The Gold Experience,” “Chaos and Disorder,” “Emancipation,” “The Vault: Old Friends 4 Sale” and “Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic.” Said Buff in a guitarplayer.com article, “One of the reasons I got the gig with Prince is because I was young and I was hungry and I was kind of unformed. And Prince had a specific way of working. It was always, ‘I have an idea that I want to put out. You help me capture it.’ And that’s kind of how it was. 

“With a lot of people I work with these days, I offer sounds that help start the ideas for how a project is going to come together, but with Prince it was never that way.”

Of his local connections, Buff recalls “I attended Waseca High School as a German exchange student in 1985, and I can honestly say that the visit changed my life. My hosts were the Rynders family; my host father Tom Rynders then worked at Brown Printing, my host mother ran the library of the U of M Waseca campus, my host brother Tom Jensen went to high school with me and my host sister Linnea Rynders was a middle-schooler at the time. The Rynders family and I stayed close in the years after, with various mutual visits, and in 1991 I actually moved to the Twin Cities, because Minnesota life seemed so much more desirable to me at the time than my then current life in Berlin, Germany. I learned my initial recording engineering craft at Music Tech school in Minneapolis (which later became McNally Smith in the old St. Paul science Museum and is now defunct), and I started my career at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls and got my first big break from Prince at his Paisley Park Studios in Chanhassen.”

Buff also mentioned, “Most important of all, I met my wife Patti in Minnesota. We’ve been married for 30 years now. Patti’s from Mankato, and through her, I have lots of wonderful family around Mankato, in the Twin Cities and throughout the United States. One of our children was born in the U.S., both of our children hold German and US citizenship, as does Patti at this point.”

Peter Gabriel, who’s had number one hits like “Sledgehammer” and "Steam,” has also worked with Pixar when he sang for the movie Wall-E in 2008. Gabriel’s latest album, “i/o,’ was released on December 1 of 2023, becoming his first album to top the UK charts since his “So” album in 1986. The credit for one of the two Grammy trophies Gabriel’s album won went to a German exchange Waseca High School student, even if he only attended for a single semester. Wayne Brady presented Buff’s Grammy award on February 2, 2025, at the podium he thanked Peter Gabriel and named Prince as his mentor.

Before the release of “i/o,” Gabriel said about Buff, “The music began with this meditative, repeated sequence. The essence of all these sounds was trying to create a sensual palette. With the work that Hans-Martin Buff’s been doing on the immersive mix too, you’re getting this sense of being touched in many places and it should be a place just to drift off into. That was my aim.”

Buff has also worked with notable acts like the Scorpions, No Doubt, Chaka Khan, Larry Graham and Joss Stone. Immersive music or audio is a listening experience that goes beyond the limited left-to-right span of traditional stereo. It provides the sensation of three-dimensional sound where audio sources can be perceived all around the listener, including behind, above and elsewhere.

When asked what the highlight of his career has been, from immersiveaudioalbum.com:

“I think it would have to be Prince because he allowed me to take a huge step forward in my career. To this day, he's still kind of the VIP rockstar for the VIP rockstars. And that'll never go away, you know?” More information about Buff and his work are available on his website http://www.buffwerk.com/.