Forgotten Genre Productions

Ronan takes some time to talk to Larry Crane and John Baccigaluppi from Tape OP Magazine. Tape OP is hands down my favorite magazine and when it comes I read every single page. This is an interesting interview about how they got started.

It seems Daniel Lanois has a little side project operating under the name of Black Dub. He has teamed up with Brian Blade Daryl Johnson and Chris Whitley’s Daughter Trixie Whitley It is some cool stuff. Trixie is a powerful voice and has some of her dad’s spooky soulful bluesy vocals. As time goes on Daniel seems to get more and more wacky. I’m not sure if it’s the drugs or just his ego drug but even his interactions with Brian are awkward and they have been working together for years. It is also freaky how he ghosts around Trixie while she is cutting her vocals. Enjoy this video of him mixing a track.

“Black Dub” in the studio - MIXING - “Love Lives” from Daniel Lanois on Vimeo.

On December 5th I had the privaledge of hooking up again with my friends in The Waiting. The Waiting was the first band I toured with. They hired me as a monitor engineer and stage manager. I started off making $700 a month and just couldn’t imagine life getting any better.( Of course this was way before I met my wife). Out of all the bands I toured with, which I love very much, (with 1 exception who shall remain nameless) the Waiting was the band that was most like family. We had an incredible time together touring through wins and losses. For much of our time together we traveled in a 24 foot Isuzu box truck that we bunked out. Half of the truck was equipment and the front half was our living space. we built 2 bench seats and 5 bunks and had a dorm fridge and a TV and VCR for entertainment. We laughed a lot and tried to figure out how to survive in the music business. The one thing I loved about the Waiting was that they never played a bad show. They worked the hardest out of any band that I toured with to entertain the fans. I never saw a Waiting show where people were not on their feet dancing or pogo’ing. They were not the most naturally talented band I toured with but that never stopped them from working hard for their fans. They were also the most engaged with their fans. It was great to reunite with them. This was the first show they played in maybe 6 or 7 years and it was a lot of fun.

WJTL was very kind to ask these guys to get together for one more gig for their 20 year anniversary. When we were touring the band always looked forward to playing in Lancaster and had many friends from the Lancaster area. It was fun to see so many of them out that night. Of course The Rainchildren opened up for the Waiting and if you have followed this site you know my love for those guys too. I will try to refrain from fawning over them even though they played another amazing set. Seeing them play is like going to school. I just take notes. Steve Bridgeman was even better than the last time I saw them.  The whole band was so good together. I honestly cannot get enough of them. I hope they can overcome the challenges and bless us with new material some time soon.

Do yourself a favor and look up some of the Waiting’s music and see for yourselves what a gifted band they were.

We are excited to be moving into a new studio space in Lancaster. It has been awhile in the making but we are finally moving forward. We will be teaming up with an organization by the name of Evolve 2 Trust. These guys have been working with Urban Gospel and Inspirational artists in the Lancaster area and had many of the long term goals that FGP aspires to. They were in need of some technical advice and engineering help and we were looking for a home in Lancaster city so we teamed up. Look for a grand opening in January or February. We will be adding a control surface from our friends at Euphonix. The MC Control and MC Mix system will be installed and we will have 16 faders and full control of Pro Tools and Logic. Look for an upcoming review of the system once we get it up and running. Since we are mixing primarily in the box and it is 2009 the Euphonix artist series seems to be the perfect choice for us. The room is an adequate 15 x 20 and will be a control / live room. In it’s formal life it was a walk in freezer for a produce company so it is sealed pretty tight with no bleed from the outside. We are looking forward to upcoming projects for Doug Plank and Crossway Church in January and finishing up mixes for “Big Red” from here in Lancaster and “be lyrebirds” from Canada and points beyond. We will also be having some classes available for recording and mixing in the near future. Contact us at bookings@forgottengenre.com if you are interested in more details or have any other production needs.

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.