We Can Mend The Sky by Jake Runestad. This was from the PMEA Region I Choir Festival in 2022, which I hosted at Butler Intermediate School.

The Seeker, by David Maslanka. This was from the PMEA Region I Band festival. I was the invited guest pianist with this band as well. I chose this recording because of the dynamic contrast throughout.

Praise to the Lord - Arr. Melius Christiansen. This was performed by the Grove City College Choir. I chose it because the recording required a good deal of restorative processes including the Waves X-Noise plug-in that I referenced in my budget plan. There were fan noises, ambient sound, coughing, and children in the audience.

Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1, movement 1, performed by the Butler Symphony Orchestra. I was the celeste player on this recording, but I chose it for the depth between the solo cellist and the rest of the orchestra.

Hold Me While You Wait. I recorded this during the height of the pandemic, and at the request of the young singers and their parents, they wanted record it on location at their farm. It was the first time I had recorded in a cornfield. They were actively in the flight path of Pittsburgh International Airport, and we had to pause every 5 minutes to wait for a jet to pass over. We lugged a piano into the field and used all the extension cords and battery backups that we could find. The purpose of the video and audio was to serve as content for The Voice, or a similar show, and these talented twins did get accepted for the show.

Gloryland Way - by the Bluegrass Band Lifegate. We did the tracking in the church where one of the singers is a pastor, and then we did some revisions and overdubbing back in the studio.

Goodbye - by singer/songwriter, Kara Whitmire (performing name Kara Rose). Kara comes to the studio often with some wonderful song ideas, and I am usually tasked with producing duties as well as engineering duties. That sometimes means rearranging song forms, and often means that I am playing keyboard cello or other parts to fill out the mix. In this case I generated the drum tracks by playing some and with a virtual drummer on others using both ProTools and Logic.

Quando Quando Quando - performed by Joe Lege. Joe is a Pittsburgh area accordionist who spends much of his retirement traveling between nursing homes and other low-key performance spaces playing the old Italian hits. He wanted to do a recording that featured himself playing accordion, piano, and singing. We did two albums of 15 songs each.

She Walks on Moonlight - by Stephen Hartle. Stephen is an amateur musician who wanted to give a song as a gift to his wife on their 15th wedding anniversary. They currently have seven children together. Stephen wrote the song and could sing it to me, but he needed me to harmonize and produce it. We ended up hiring cellist Robin Hasenpflug as featured artist on the recording, myself on piano and keyboards, and of course, Stephen on vocals.

Dementia - by Still Life. This is a young punk band from the Pittsburgh area. Dementia is one of their tamer tunes. We used some drum replacement techniques to get the very forward percussion sound, and while we kept the vocals somewhat back in the mix, we did a great deal of processing on them to get the singer in tune and comprehendible.

For the birth of each of my children, I wrote them an original Lullaby, and recorded them a full album of lullabies that now, nearly 6 years later, they still fall asleep to each night. I had only one snow day to record and compose, so they are both quick and dirty mixes, but it represents that I can teach songwriting skills within the recording arts classes, and that I can work quickly to get a result when under a time crunch. The first is “Colin’s Lullaby,” born June 2017, and the second is “Elyse’s Theme,” born October 2019. The first one was a surprise to my wife, and for the second one, she wanted to sing too, so you’ll hear a duet between the two of us.

During the pandemic, I found myself reinventing the recording studio. As a music educator, I knew that virtual ensembles were going to be my way of connecting my students with an audience, and so I dove into video work right away. I became adept enough at this that I was sought after by ensembles across the United States, Canada, and Asia. Below are two recordings that I made for the band at Humboldt State University in Northern California. To get this result, I worked with their conducted at length to create a MIDI performance of the score. Then we collaborated to make sure that the tempo changes and expressivity would match up with his conducting. We then created a conducting video and synchronized the MIDI audio to give to his students. Then, I received their audio and began to make the virtual band come together. Due to the nature of playing separately, I made good use of pitch and rhythm tools in Logic, and any editing tools in ProTools. I made the final video with Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Here are two recordings from the Humboldt band. The first is Lincolnshire Posy, and the second is Conga del Fuego Nuevo.

The final video that I’ll post here was a fun collaboration with a middle school honors band from Korea. We did two songs - one for the 7th graders and one for the 8th. I made several others of these and thousands more recordings. Feel free to ask for more, or for the higher quality wav files if you like. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to speaking with you on Wednesday!