StudioPros

If you want a great drum track for your song, you might want to practice your… keyboard skills?

Well, if this video teaches us anything, it’s that we musicians should probably start shedding our keyboard chops if we want to record a funky, tight drum part:

And if you want to really rock out, just follow this guy’s lead (he really busts it open at about 1:20):

So the moral of these two videos is this: if you want to record a drum track, you can lock yourself in your room, practice drumming on a keyboard for hours on end, and then maybe in a few years you might be able to play something that resembles a real drummer. Almost.

…OR…

You can spend all that time that you would have been practicing your fake drumming skills working on writing great songs instead, and have a real studio drummer lay down a live drum beat for your song within 48 hours.

So let’s do a quick recap: years of practice, or a two-day turnaround? Something that sort of sounds like a real drummer, or something that’s actually played by a professional studio drummer? A $2,000 keyboard, or a $125 drum track?

I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is the better choice! And when you’re ready to have studio-quality drums recorded for your next song, have Studio Pros make it easy for you!

Without a band of his own, Jeremy Bright turned to online musical collaborations to breathe new life into his songwriting.

“I’ll never be one of those people who lives for my job,” says Jeremy Bright. “I live for my off hours and my passions and my hobbies.” Bright’s passions, of course, include his music. A piano player since he was six, the Alabama-born songwriter’s love of music may have been set in motion generations before he was even around. “A lot of my family was into music, so it’s kind of in my genes,” he says. Now in Phoenix, AZ, Bright recalls his early musical influences being the soul music of his home state and the music of churches he grew up in.

And while he enjoys his day job as a software engineer, he doesn’t get his biggest fulfillment from his nine-to-five hours. Bright has been working on his latest album for three years, and he’s made collaborating with musicians online a regular occurrence. “I was in a band, but that kind of fell apart,” Bright says when explaining why he turned to the Internet to find musicians for his album. His search brought him to Studio Pros, where he explored the website and listened to demos to get a feel for whether the service would be a good fit for him. “What I heard was quality. So I gave it a shot, used Studio Pros on one of my songs. The tracks that I got back sounded good and I just kinda went from there.”

Bright used several Studio Pros services to supplement tracks he had recorded himself, choosing different Studio Pros musicians depending on what his songs needed. “I used the drummer to replace some of my drums, and on one song I used their guitar player to replace some bad tracks,” he says. “On ‘Angels Watch Over’ I used Studio Pros for the majority of the instrumentation on there.”

Listen to a clip of “Angels Watch Over” here:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(more…)

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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(more…)

Let Studio Pros help you fill in all of the missing elements to your home recordings.

Adrian Sakashita is a composer who spends his time between Los Angeles and London as well as an online business owner.  This is the perfect case for Studio Pros, as Adrian can manage his projects from all around the world and still be kept in the loop on his production, while not wasting too much time at a studio.

 Studio Pros just recently worked with him on his latest work “Seduction” and filled in the missing pieces of his recordings using our studio musicians, “Studio Pros helps make better music!  I simply couldn’t resist the temptation and dove in head first a few years ago.  Since then, I’ve turned my attention back to composition.”

(more…)