The Sound-O-Mat: Work Samples

Work Samples

Some samples of my work and commentary from the musicians

Ethan WL — "Blood Farm" LP

From the track "Samuel Morey's Amazing Stream Engine" off the forthcoming LP "Blood Farm" being released by Carbon Records in July 2024.

Liam Grant, Grayson McGuire & Devon Flahtery — S/T 10" album

From the track "New Five Cent Piece" off the forthcoming 10" album released in June 2024.

From the track "Kneel at the Cross"

Duncan Park — "Flood Warning"

"Flood Warning" started as an improvised banjo piece recorded directly to cassette using an old Panasonic tape recorder on a day there was heavy rain, with the raindrops hitting the corrugated iron roof above my stoep (porch.) I transferred the recording to a DAW and digitally recorded the melodica using a classic Shure SM57 through a Focusrite 2i2. Next I did a mono mixdown and sent that track to Rob V. at the Sound-O-Mat.

He took that audio and rendered the track to the full, perfectly balanced yet still raw and "authentic" form below:

A piece that would have been nothing more than a muffled, cassette recorded curiosity, now fully realised to be one of my proudest tracks. — Duncan Park

[Here's an A/B comparison where the original sound is intermixed with the final version.]

Liam Grant "Kenduskeag"

"Kenduskeag" came out of a jam session in what seemed to be an abandoned classroom that was not ideal to record in. There was a smoke alarm or something beeping every couple of minutes and a centralized AC that would pop on intermittently. When we sat down to play there wasn't a plan to record anything seriously but we had three Zoom recorders set around the room so we could listen back and re-record in a more thought-out way, hopefully in a better space.

There were five or six of us scattered around the room and about an hour in we fell into this isolated 5 1/2 minute dueling guitar improv with chord organs, a synthesizer, a fiddle and a bowed banjo keeping the drone. It had a real edge to it and had a natural beginning and end and we realized there was no recreating that.

A big problem was with the varied positions of the Zoom recorders, the timing between all of them was not aligned, one of the guitars was way too quiet and there was effectively no bass.