Forgotten Genre Productions

We are finally finishing up our new studio space. As many of you know, due to our desire to keep music creation affordable and our lack of a sizeable benefactor we are often put in a transient position and have had to move and work out of many different locations. We have been working on a new location in Millersville PA on a farm. The views are incredible and it is a comfortable and mellow place. The building served as a  tool shed and who knows what else but we have re-purposed it for a studio space where we can work at least until Mar of 2011. I am already starting to search for a home after this one. This means I can finally finish a couple of these projects that have been on the back burner. I am embarrassed that they have taken so long. But when you are running under the radar sometimes these things happen I have often referred to it as guerrilla recording and this is certainly part of it. Keep posted for upcoming news and events.

It has been a busy Season here at FGP. I have spent the last 2 months getting a studio set up for my friends at Evole2Trust along with tracking for Crossway Church, Wallace & Gina, and David Green, and Mixing for the Lyrebirds and Big Red. I am now in the process of looking for a new studio location and building a new studio. There are many exciting possibilities on the horizon. Stay tuned for news.

Lately I have been on a quest to organize the studio a little, of course my wife’s gentle prodding was a small factor. I have a guitar rig that is on a pedal train pedalboard and is centered around a Tech 21 Liverpool pedal that provides my amp tone direct so I don’t have to lug around an amp. Also included is a TS9 Tube Screamer, a Voodoo Labs Sparkledrive, Boss FDR-1 pedal which is their 65 deluxe reverb pedal. I use it for a bit of verb and a tremolo that I can tap the tempo to. And then a crybaby wah and an MXR Carbon Copy delay pedal which I love. That covers me for now on live gigs that I am using in ear monitors for. I don’t need a loud amp on stage and the liverpool gives me that vox AC30ish tone. When it is dialed in it is workable. The problem was I had a lot of pedals left over that I was not using and instead of letting them clutter up the studio or being shoved in boxes, I decided to build a racked up guitar rig that I could use in the studio for tracking and re-amping. This rig is based around The Egnater Rebel 20 amp head and single 1 x 12″ cabinet. This is a sweet tone machine and boutique amp designed by Bruce Egnater. The cool thing about it is it is just 20 watts and you can variably select between 1-20 watts. This means you can get tone without blowing your ear drums which is important in a small strategic studio layout. The other thing that is flat out genius is the fact that the amp has EL84 tubes (Like an AC30) and 6V6 tubes (Fender etc) and you can also variably select and blend the 2 tube styles together to have the best of both worlds. It is a great amp and I couldn’t be happier with it except the fact that the amp does not have re-verb on board (Egnater now has the rebel 30 head which does add re-verb and 2 channel use. It is also quite tasty) I then have another TS9 tube screamer, a Digitech Hardwire CM-2 pedal that has surprising good tone. and a Frantone Peach fuzz that is a boutique fuzz pedal with some snarl. Then I have an old MXR Stereo Chorus pedal that sounds great, but is a little noisy. I also am picking up a Electro Harmonix Memory Toy which is a killer analogue delay that is reasonably priced. As you can see by the picture I have an opening for another drawer and I will probably put volume based pedals in one drawer and time based and modulation based in another drawer. I have a couple other pedals laying around that need to be added also. At some point I will add a Radial X-Amp re-amp box so I can use the rig for re-amping when I am mixing projects. Also some of you old timers might recognize the ART SGX2000 guitar rack effects unit. This was a terrible sounding guitar effects box from the 90’s that has some really bad distortions and re-verbs delays etc. This I will use when mixing to have another option of effects that I can put my fingers on instead of mousing around in the box, so to speak.

All of this is for a project I am starting in the early spring where I will be producing and playing some guitar and some bass. This is unusual for me since most of the time I just engineer or mix. I am looking forward to the change of pace. Enjoy the pix and if you have some old pedals that are lying around send them my way. I’ll provide a happy home for them.

It has been another busy season for us at Forgotten Genre Productions. We just finished an album for John Gerdy that should see a September release. We also did some mixing for a hip hop project that we came into contact with. These tracks were done for a live show to act as the back up for the MC’s. It was an interesting project. I had a stereo track that they took a classic song and sped up and then put beats over and then each song had about 3 mc’s rapping over the track. Each mc had like 4-6 tracks of vocals from rapping to shout-outs to echos to yeas, boys and other expletives. So it ended up to about 16 tracks of vocals and 1 stereo track of music. This was very unusual for me. I am used to spending hours getting good drum sounds and mixing other musical elements into it. With this I was limited because the music was a stereo track. So it was more of a mastering approach to the stereo track and then spending  hours trying to find ways to let all those vocals sit in the mix in the right place. You use a lot of filtering and different delays and verbs and some distortion to help it sit.

On June 21 Switchfoot was in town for a show at the American Music Theater and I got a chance to stop over and catch up with Andrew Shirley who plays guitar for the band. Andrew and I met years ago when he was working with his prior band Alltogether Seperate. He also was close friends with Kevin from Smalltown Poets and we hung out in San Diego with him briefly while we were taking some time off. He is a great guy and also a humble guy. We were able to discuss Switchfoot’s new album and how they did the lion share of the production and recording in their studio and, the fact that with technology today you can take an mbox and laptop on the computer and record or produce while your touring. This is great because with established artists there is a lot of downtime between sleeping and sound check and gigs. It is helpful to be able to do something productive while touring.

We also have met with quite a few people that are looking to do work in the future.

June 27-28 saw the return of the Celtic Fling to the Renaissance Faire and I got another chance to run a stage and do live sound for the weekend. I will post more info on this but it was a good day.

We also saw music released on the Music for Everyone vol.2 Compilation. The Faux Minxhad a song selected that I mixed and engineered. Congradulations to those guys.

Stay tuned there is more to come from Forgotten Genre Productions in the future. Feel free to contact us if you have music that needs to be captured.

This Past Saturday night I spent the late hours on the air with J. Classic at WIXQ. It was a fun night and it took me back to my early days of DJ’ing at WJTL in Lancaster. J. Classic has been a good friend for a while and he has been a good friend of FGP. He has a very eclectic show and this night was extremely eclectic. We played everything from Prince to Raphael Saadiq to the police and Gorillaz.Of course we had to get some U@ in there because J. CLassic has an embarassing obsession with them. We also heard some Fleming and John at the end and some Freedy Johnson. Leigh Nash,Duran Duran, Bryan Adams. It was all over the map. J’s Dad even stopped in and then a friend Mike Keener stopped by. It was a house party no doubt. Hopefully I will get another chance to do it again with just a little more structure. It was a blast. For all you local Lancaster people out there, listen to 91.7 WIXQ on Saturday nights from 10PM-1:00AM. Request a song, as long as it is not U2 that is.

A couple of months ago I tracked a session for a friend of mine John Gerdy. John wanted to track at his barn in Conestoga and after taking a trip down there to scope it out I was very excited about it. I built a “studio” in the barn on Wednsday and we tracked Wednsday, Thursday and Friday nights. There were 3 different musical line-ups; 1 for each night. The first night was a laid back acoustic type set, the second night was a rockin electric set and the third night was a houseparty set with  lots of musicians and friends lending a hand. We tracked 15-20 songs a night and just rolled through them in a live setting. No overdubs, no pitch correction, no tricky editing. It was just a bunch of great musicians having fun and making music. Because we didn’t want to mess up the flow by repositioning mics I needed at least 24 tracks so I opted to track with Reaper instead of Protools since Protools locks you down at 16 tracks. Don’t get me started about Protools limitations here. I used a presonus firestudio with a presonus digimax pre and a Behringer ADA8000 for my interface and pres and of course I used my MPA tube Pres for 8 tracks of tube pre. Things went well and we had a lot of fun. We ran things kind of old school and just “rolled” tape/er ah hard drive. So I had 15-20 songs per session with a session file for Day1, Day2, and Day3. The challenge of this was at the end I had to sort through over 45 tracks and break them into individual project files for mixing. It took quite a while to break everything down. John is currently scouring all the tracks to see which ones are worth taking to the next step of mixing. I am including one of the tracks from the second night that I mixed completly. I love the raw live feal of the song. I must mention that my Heil mics were quite a life saver for this session. Because we tracked it all live I did a lot of close micing and the heil dynamics were just the ticket to capture the music without a lot of bleed. Let me know what you think.

 

 John Gerdy Song: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Wow what a busy time. I’m sorry I’m a little behind in posting. It has been a full schedule. I have been between 3 projects and have just completed mixing 1 of those for the Buskers, That leaves a jazz project for Chuck Ottel and a 3 day session out at the Gerdy Farm. On top of that I just started tracking a Christmas Album for Matt, Monticchio, David Green, and Hiram Ring. They will also have some other special guests like Katy Becker, Cliff b Lewis and Chauncy Stillman and maybe a few others. It is a good challenge for me All these musicians are reaching for something outside the normal Christmas Album box and are going for some transcendent musical moments. It keeps me on my toes and I get to learn a lot from everyone involved. I have also been doing a couple of live sound gigs which are always challenging. I feel like I am learning every day and honing my craft. I will post more specific details as I get a chance. I will also post some photos of the Christmas Album Sessions. On top of all of that I have the privilege of enjoying life with the most beautiful woman in the world, my wife Tracy. On August 11 we celebrated our 7th wedding anniversary. I can honestly say that I love my wife 7  times more than the day I married her, maybe even more. God has been so kind to me. That doesn’t mean our marriage has been perfect bliss. It has had it’s share of conflicts and challenges. In the end however I see God’s kindness in placing me with someone who can push the buttons that help me see areas I need to grow in. Only my wife has been able to do that. I love you Tracy. Did I mention that I celebrated our anniversary by being in the studio for the Christmas Project. Don’t be alarmed we are planning on celebrating on another day. Stay tuned for more Recording and Producing fun.

Wow, what a busy season. We have been to the wire here at FGP and it looks like it will get busier. We are moving ahead with the East Liberty Street Studios. We are finalizing some design issues and getting a floor plan that we like and looking at our equipment lists to see what we have and what we “need”; then we need to build it. We have also been talking to some people in Lancaster city about an intimate live venue/wine bar that we might be involved in. We will keep you updated with this one. We have also been talking to WXPN about some cool ideas and opportunities coming up here that will benefit you and some of our artists. We encourage everyone to support XPN they are doing a good work here in Central PA let’s show them we care by supporting them and letting them know it. On top of that we have been in the studio on Mulberry Street working with Josh Cranmer, Cliff b Lewis, and a host of others. our summer is filling up for recording projects so if you have been on the fence with setting time aside don’t wait too much longer contact us at bookings@forgottengenre.com and we will get you on the schedule.

Oh yeah don’t forget the CD release party for music for everyone. It is Friday June 7th at the Elks Club on Duke Street. $10 tickets. They have been very supporting of us lets share the love.

I have recently been doing some sessions with an amazing jazz ensemble that are friends of mine and part of the Forgotten Genre Community. The Band is David Green on bass, Eric Foster on drums, Ryan Shenk on various Sax, Darrin Pirkle on guitar and Mike Mink on Fender Rhodes and keys. These guys tear it up and you will see them around Lancaster this spring. I will keep you posted with details. It is refreshing for me to be recording jazz and expanding my palette and skills. Because we get together once a week and I record the sessions it is giving me a chance to experiment and play with out the time clock ticking. I have been able to play with different mic choices and positioning to discover what works and what does not. I am looking forward to the vault of music we will have and will pass things on to you as I get the things I like. The consistency of having a weekly gig is helpful in staying focused. It reminds me of the importance of honing my craft. I have been thinking a lot about this lately. There is a shortage of people in the world today that are dedicated to honing their craft, (unless of course their craft is watching TV or surfing the net.) If you feel called to be a musician, artist, writer, wood worker, or whatever and you are not putting the time in to pursue excellence, It is probably a good idea to review why it is you feel called. Now this does not mean completely neglecting your family or other responsibilities that you have. It would not be wise to quit your job so could focus on practicing for 10 hours a day. I think we all have areas that with a little tweaking we could make our time count and grow in technique. So keep on practicing and be encouraged and as always use wisdom for wisdom is to be prized, even over creativity.

It has been a busy time for us hear at Forgotten Genre Productions. We have been working on numerous projects. I have been in the studio with Cliff b Lewis, Brock Lawley, and have done some work for a young band called Simplicity Tribute. I recorded some songs for this band that consists of three members all under the age of 13. It was fun to see them flex there creative muscles and I look forward to hopefully working with them some more in the future. It was a chance to work with my new friend Dean Sell. who is a local producer and part of the Music for Everyone project. By the way for all of you local Lancaster Artists there is still time to submit music to be on this album. For more information go to www.musicforeveryone.net. The Deadline is February 28. I will be in the studio this week with Cliff b Lewis, MAtt Monticchio, David Green, Emily Long and BrockLawley.

I will leave you with a quick song from Brock Lawley that we recorded last week. This was an out take that we snuck in while tracking some scratch vocal tracks. I was using a Rode K2 tube mic that was set up for guitar tracks. Brock moved the mic around halfway between his guitar and voice and we laid a take. I told him to move the mic up 3 inches and we kept the track. Here it is for your listening pleasure and as a gift for valentines day.

 

 LOvers Toast/Brock Lawley: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download