Don’t take that tone with me

I recently completed a site for Mike Christiansen (mikechristiansen.com). Mike is the head of the Utah State Guitar Program, an amazing player, and a really cool cat. Featured on his new site is a book Mike developed called “My First Guitar Book.” It’s the most innovative teaching book I’ve ever seen for young children. It utilizes a unique color-coded system to help young children make connections between notes and strings.

Because of my long history in guitar education and with the instrument, Mike hired me to lay the book out. It was a challenge, as it it needed to be very clear and easy to read for children. I’m really proud of it and, more importantly, so is Mike!

mikechristiansen.com - developed by FarisWheel Productions

Another milestone for the Amusement Park Studio: I was hired to record all the classical guitar pieces for the Christopher Parkening Method Books, Vol.1 & 2 (Hal Leonard Publishing). David Brandon performed all the pieces and I captured them in Pro Tools.

Chris and David were so pleased with the sound I captured on David’s “Legacy” CD, that they asked me to do the project. I used a stereo matched pair of Schoeps MK4s into an API A2D directly into Pro Tools at 24/96. I mixed it using a few plugins – very subtle eq and compression mainly to handle a peak in David’s Ramirez guitar that centers around A 440 and its related harmonics (his guitar is really prominent in A) along with a couple instances of Altiverb, then summed it out through my Amek console into a TLA semi-parametric tube EQ. We then went back into the A2D analog-to-digital converter into a Masterlink at 24/96. The first CD has a total of 99 tracks!

David felt so strongly about my work that he had it put in the contract that my name had to be printed in every book and on every CD as the recording engineer. Kinda cool.