StudioPros

When I was a kid, I started playing guitar, and along with playing guitar inevitably came reading guitar-themed magazines. As a guitar neophyte, I began devouring publications on playing guitar and writing music, delving into interviews with famous artists who talked shop about writing guitar parts and recording albums. One day I was reading an interview with Sting, who mentioned the name of the person who mixed his album.

Mixed? What did that mean, I wondered? So I asked the nearest person to me at the time, which happened to be my mom. “Mixing is when they take the recordings of each instrument and adjust the volumes to make the sound you hear in the recording,” she explained to me.

“Wait,” I asked, “you mean they record everything separately?”

This was my introduction to mixing, starting with the revelation that songs weren’t just recorded live in a studio by a whole band standing around a few microphones (at least not anymore–my mental picture of recording may have been shaped by years listening to early Beatles records which did involve much more “live” recording). After all my years of listening to music, I had never known. With that revelation in mind, I knew from then on what “mixing” meant.  Well, sort of.

There was much more to it than I thought

For the next several years, I thought mixing was simply a search for the right volume levels.  While that’s not completely untrue, it was still a very incomplete picture. It wasn’t until I started interacting directly with professional mixing engineers that I finally began to fully understand how important–and complex–mixing really was.

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Tim and Christopher Allen decided to use Studio Pros to breathe a little life into their recordings.  In the end, they ended up getting a bit more than that.

Along with Brad Ackerman (drums) and Kristin Allen (vocalist), Tim and Chris Allen form the band Allenton Hill, who cite influences as diverse as Owl City (on the song “Fireworks,” listen below) and Switchfoot.  ”Truthfully, most of our music has been influenced by three main bands: Hillsong, Phil Wickham, and Coldplay,” says Tim, who plays lead guitar, does some singing, and is the principal songwriter of the group.  He’s been playing music with his brother Chris, who sings and plays acoustic guitar and piano, since they were kids.  ”When we were young, we were always around music,” Tim remembers.  ”Most everyone in my family plays an instrument or two… Eventually the music fever hit Chris and me.”

“Dad always turned up the music when we were driving around and he’d have me pick out all of the instruments,” says Chris.  ”This led to me having significant appreciation for the details in music.”

The members of Allenton Hill, all in their early twenties, got together when they began to play at a local Youth Center in their hometown of Dayton, OH in 2006.  They met Ackerman, who has now been playing drums for about 16 years, when he ended up living at their house for a short time.  Although he currently lives in Nashville, Ackerman drives up to Ohio every week to be with the band.

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