Audio Samples

Greg Adams & East Bay Soul – Mixing & Mastering

2018 – Mixing and Mastering (plus additional recording) for Greg Adams & East Bay Soul’s latest CD “Conversation“.
You can hear lower quality versions of the entire album on YouTube:

2017 – Mixing and Mastering for Kirk Fischer’s CD “Friends”.
Listen to the lower quality playlist of the entire album on YouTube:

2015 – Mixing and Mastering for Greg Adams & East Bay Soul’s “That’s Life” CD.
Listen to the lower quality playlist of the entire album on YouTube:

Original Music

The songs from this SoundCloud set are my own original music compositions and productions. In all cases, I composed and arranged all the music, and then often brought in professional studio musicians to replace my demo parts and make them better! On the first 3 songs, I brought in singer/songwriter Coreena to write lyrics for the existing music and perform the vocals, so she is credited as a co-writer on those songs. Everything was produced, recorded, and mixed by me at DBAR Productions (with a few drum tracks recorded at London Bridge Studio).

Remixing

Rework Howard Jones Contest

There are two old songs of Howard Jones that I totally reworked and remixed in completely different styles for the Rework Howard Jones contest. Unfortunately, Howard never did announce any winners from the contest. However, I still think these are good examples of two different styles of music that I have produced that are completely different from the standard electronic dance music type remixes.

Automaton – This was the first set of tracks Howard released for the Rework contest.  Knowing that most people would probably do electronic dance remixes, I took this in a more rock/metal direction with a bit of a spy movie modern soundtrack feel to it.

I’ve Said Too Much – This was the second set of track Howard released for the Rework contest.  For this I decided to go the opposite direction of what I did last time, and went with a more classical orchestral approach.  I also slowed the tracks, and Howard’s vocals, down in tempo quite a bit, and then gradually raised the tempo back up in each section of the song until I got back to the original tempo for the last set of choruses.

 

Mixing

I don’t really need a separate audio samples section for mixing, since all the songs in all the other categories are songs that I also mixed.  However, I’ll provide a short list here of some of my favorite songs that I mixed, as well as links to some client project where I did the mixing.

Winner of the Sennheiser/Neumann Bo Bice Mixing Competition

I found out in January 2013, that my mix of Bo Bice’s song November was chosen as the best submitted mix in 2012 for the Sennheiser/Neumann Bo Bice Mixing Competition.  They provided us all with the tracks from 3 unreleased Bo Bice songs, and we were allowed to choose one to mix and submit for the competition.  The competition was judged by top industry professionals, including Al Schmitt, Tom Young, David Thoener, Karl Richardson, Tim Palmer, Greg Lukens, and Cool & Dre.  My mix was picked as the best out of “many great entries”.  My prize was a $4200 Neumann U87 microphone!  You can hear the mix below (posted with permission).

 

Sound On Sound, Dave Pensado Mixing Competition

I entered this contest in early 2011 with a song that I co-produced, recorded, and mixed for Larry Murante. I think I just really liked Larry’s great song. It wasn’t particularly challenging to mix since I worked with great professional musicians, and recorded everything in my own studio, but I still thing it turned out quite well! The contest was judged on the overall quality of the mix (i.e., the engineer’s mixing skills and creativity). Out of hundreds of entries, my mix won third place, for which I received a really nice microphone and set of headphones.

R.X. Bertoldi

Jill Cohn

  • Singing Stories and Songs – As of Spring 2018, I’m helping Jill wrap up the mixing and mastering of this album. I also recorded a few of the songs with her at Earwig (Malcolm Burn produced and recorded the majority of the band songs), and we did some overdubs in my studio.
  • Beautiful I Love You – I did the majority of the mixing for this Jill Cohn CD. You can listen to samples from the album and purchase downloads here.
  • the Absence of Moving – This was a complete album that I recorded and mixed for Jill Cohn back in 2000. Part of it was recorded at Triad Studios (where I worked), and the rest recorded in my own studio, except for the string section on one song which we recorded at Avast. I did all the mixing in my studio as well. Visit the Absence of Moving page on Jill’s site here.

Travis Oberg

  • Library Card – Great singer songwriter!  I mixed the last 5 songs of his Library Card project, which you can listen to on the Travis Oberg Bandcamp page.

The Peptides

  • Love Question Mark –A big project where Claude did most of the mixing himself in Cubase and then sent me the project files for fine tuning and a bit of sweetening. Visit their site at www.thepeptides.com to listen.
  • For Those Who Hate – I did all the mixing for this big 25 song project that has received rave reviews.  This one was a lot of fun to work on.  You can check it out here:  www.thepeptides.com/forthosewhohate/
  • North Hero – This was a bit of a side project that Claude sent me while working on For Those Who Hate.  Some really great work on this one that I very much enjoyed mixing!  www.thepeptides.com/northhero/

Larry Murante

Yes We Can – I co-produced, recorded, and mixed this song for Larry, and even shot and edited the video.  There is a different version on his album, but the video has the mix I did for him.  Click here to watch the video.

Production

I’ve done many forms of “production” for many different clients over the years, including for my own projects.

Lots of examples of original music that I have produced for myself at the top of this page.

Scroll back up to the Remix sectionfor what I can do for reworking and remixing existing songs.

One of my favorite things to do is to work with singer/songwriters who don’t have bands, and possibly don’t even play any musical instruments themselves. I love to compose and arrange the music for their songs, and then do the complete production, recording, and mixing for them. It’s one of the most satisfying parts of my “job” when I hear a great song come together through great production, recording, and mixing.

Here are some of my favorite singer/songwriter projects that I produced:

Frankie Cleary

This is an older project, but it’s still one of my favorites! Frankie had four songs that he had written with his acoustic guitar while in the Navy, and he wanted to do full productions of them. Time and budget was fairly limited, so we cranked it out a bit faster than I would have liked, but I still think the songs turned out great! Since he played acoustic guitar, he had the basic chord progressions and arrangements already figured out. I helped him tighten up the arrangements, and then I hired some of my favorite studio musicians to play on this project, including Heart drummer Ben Smith, and guitarist Greg Fulton.

Listen to all four songs from Frankie’s project here:
https://www.soundclick.com/bands3/default.cfm?bandID=10670&content=songs

Aneel

Another of my favorite artists to work with, although it was quite a few years ago!  Aneel is a great RnB singer and songwriter, but doesn’t play any instruments.

My Best Friend

A really old song that I reworked for Aneel.  He originally recorded this tribute to his father as a simple piano and vocal song at another studio.  He then brought those tracks to me and I added the strings using a couple of old Ensoniq synthesizers (this was before the days of huge orchestral sample libraries on computers).  I actually really loved that first version we did with just piano, strings, and his original vocal track, but can’t seem to find a copy of that.  This was a later version we did where we added a soprano saxophone part, and he did a new version of the vocals in my studio.  It’s still a really touching song, but I did prefer the earlier version I did with him.

America

The first full song we did together was a song called America. He sang the song to me, and I worked out all the music.  It was all done by me on synthesizers, except for the acoustic guitar parts which were played by Greg Fulton.  We reworked this song a few years ago for charity CD by adding some sound bites in during the solo section.  This is that latest version.

Heroes

This is a song that Aneel originally wrote to sing over a darker sounding RnB track that another producer had created.  He wanted me to try to do something different with it, so I went for more of a pop crossover type of RnB song, with a big over-the-top orchestral arrangement.  This was my first attempt at a really big orchestral type arrangement using nothing but synths and samples.  All the orchestra parts are from an old version of Reason (version 2 or 3, I believe) which was Rewired into Cubase.  I probably went a bit too far over-the-top at the end of the song, but I still enjoy this track.

John Matchette

For a bit of contrast, here are some samples of what I’ve produced with an “amateur” songwriter.  John just happens to be a neighbor that found out about me and wanted to do some demos of songs he wrote to send out to friends, and possibly publishing companies.  He sings and plays guitar, but not professionally.  For two of the songs I did for him, I brought in a full band, to do more “produced” versions of his more up tempo “rock” songs.  The other songs were more stripped down acoustic demos.  John did the lead vocals himself.  Everything recorded and mixed at DBAR Productions.

Yeah I Wanna Do That

Two Hearts Stand Ready

Hip-Hop & Rap – Composing, Production, Recording & Mixing

I’ve done a lot of work with various rap and hip-hop groups over the years.  Before I had the bigger space for recording drums, hip-hop and rap was almost a specialty of mine since my studio was perfectly set up for electronic music production, vocal recording, and mixing.

Baby C & Paradine Records

I worked with these guys in the late 90s, and did two albums with them, Baby C’s “Not To Be Funked With”, and the “2-0-Sickness” compilation.  Lonnie Perrin was the producer and label owner, and came up with some really great music and songs.  Baby C had a great voice and a smooth flow.  It was always fun working with, recording and mixing their music.  Baby C had a small degree of success, nominated for hip-hop album of the year in the Northwest Urban Music Awards, and performing on the Jenny Jones show as well as at KUBE 93’s Summer Jam.  The big hit was called “Mob With Me”.  If you search for it on the internet, you can find it.  I won’t post it here, but it’s still for sale as downloads on some sites.  I did, however, do my own remix of Mob With Me, which we put out on a vinyl LP for a short time.  You can hear the remix below:

 The Rebelz

I’ve been working with this group for quite some time now.  I’ve done a couple albums with them, as well as several singles and various other projects.  Check out their web site for more information and song samples.

Get Lite

This song was never released, but was something we put together very quickly to take advantage of a dance that everyone was doing at the time with a certain syncopated clapping beat.  I put together the music very quickly for this one (sometimes less is more), and they did the vocals almost as fast.  A quick mix, and this one was done.

Superman

This is a song the Rebelz did with Vietnamese artist MK.  It was originally recorded to a beat by another producer, but that didn’t work out.  So, I created a new version of the beat to match (adding my own personal touches), recorded the rap vocals, and did the mix.

Amp Me Up

This was a fun parody cover version of a song we did a couple years back.  I recreated the music for the song, adding my own little twists, and we recorded and mixed this fairly quickly.

Hey Mr DJ

A cover version of a classic song I did with the Rebelz.  Again, I produced the music for this cover song.  Shawna Locey did the singing.  I did the mixing and mastering as well.

Mastering

Most of my original work I master myself, and I often do the mastering for work that I record and mix for other artists (but, not always). Then, there are occasions where people hire me just for mastering.

For some mastering examples in a variety of styles, just listen to any of the songs in the Original Music section at the top of the page.

Here are some clients that hired me just for mastering:

  • Greg Adams – Midnight Morning – My most famous mastering project. I did the mastering for legendary trumpet player Greg Adams for his Midnight Morning album, which was released on Blue Note Records. www.gregadamsmusic.com/ebs/music_Midnight.htm
  • Todd Carter Koeppen – My latest job was doing the mastering for Todd’s newest single This Side Of The Cross which he recorded and mixed himself. I also did the mastering on some of his earlier albums. www.toddcarterkoeppen.com

Still Need More?

This above list is just a very small sampling of what I happened to have available when putting this page together.

For other samples, you can check out some of my old audio samples with the old jukebox (will open in a new window or tab).

You can also visit my SoundCloud page to browse through all the music I have uploaded there.

I’ll try to update this as I have the time.  In most cases, though, I can’t post music from artists who are trying to sell the same music through other sites, so most of the material I post here will either be my own original music, or older material that the artists have given me permission to post as samples.