“I was cleaning toilets, ordering food, doing maintenance around the studio when I first started,” Young says, recalling his internship days. “But it never felt like a day of work. That’s when I knew I’d found my calling.” An ambitious kid who once DJ’d all-ages clubs, Young moved to New York two days after graduating from Full Sail’s sound engineering program in 2005. Soon, Island Def Jam recording artist Fabolous recruited him to engineer his recording sessions.

Young dishes on 120-hour work weeks, technology and recording studios. He notes with enthusiasm that it’s an honor to record “the greatest singer of our generation.”

When did you find out you were going to work with Beyoncé?

Young: A friend of mine, [BET "106 & Park" associate producer] Omar Grant, who was working at Epic Records at the time, worked with Destiny’s Child years ago. And I guess Beyoncé needed a fill-in engineer for the day. This was April 2010. She’d finished her last album and . . . was ready to get back in. Beyoncé wanted to cut a new song . . . I came in and she told me, at the end of the day, that I did a great job. A few months later, I got a callback to do more sessions.

We pretty much worked every day nonstop. B’s a machine. We recorded more than 70 songs. It was by far the greatest experience I’ve had in the studio. I spent more time with Beyoncé in the last year than I have with my own family in six years [laughs].