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I've made no bones about the fact that I love music. My entry into filmmaking came only after an internship at a North Hollywood recording studio brought my recording chops up, and then I used that skillset to start location recording, and then sound editing, picture editing, post production supe duties, and finally producing...but I digress.I've been playing music since I was five years old. First piano and drums (orchestra percussionist for five years), then classical guitar for a while, then cello for a few years, voice lessons in high school, and on-the-job accompanist training in college. So it should come as no surprise that my current business has a soft spot for musicians.What does that mean? Well, I still need to make money. But I can cut deals that benefit an artist or label because of my varied skillset. I can do your product packaging, but I can also work on your website and advertising. We can work on a music video, brilliant photography, and even do some recording. Later on I'll show you a few examples.
But first: the newest project that I'm working on is with a fantastic San Antonio-based artist, Matt McCormack. Check out this guy's amazing songwriting. We met through a friend, and I played onstage with him a few months ago when he traveled to L.A. at Genghis Cohen (fantastic venue, and fantastic restaurant too).So when Matt asked me to add some keyboard parts to his new recording project, we embarked on a long-distance back-and-forth to find the right sounds for these new songs. Here are the first two:
I'm really excited about the collaboration, and I hope to be onstage with Matt again sometime soon.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Check out this amazing 70s-style photo from a recording session with Shakedown Mambo:
...and the photo that ended up on the back cover of their most recent album:
PACKAGING
I did a rather long blog post on the creation of the CD packaging for T-Lou, a Zydeco/accordion artist here in L.A., but there are a few other recent additions. These are varied, but fantastic:
(notice that I started with photography and moved to doing Shakedown Mambo's packaging?)
(Buddy Zapata is also the guy who introduced me to Matt McCormack...)
MUSIC PRODUCTION
- Avery Roberts (my son!)(see the above CD cover) needed some demos recorded. Those demos turned into a self-published album entitled "Where Nothing Can Hurt Me".
- The aforementioned keyboard tracks for Matt McCormack's new album were recorded in my studio, and then added to the mix by Matt's amazing production team in San Antonio -- an engineer, mixer, and mastering engineer.
- Check out my "audio" page for more examples of my experience working as a composer, engineer, and producer.
WEBSITES
VIDEO PRODUCTION
All of these videos were shot and produced by Hearken Creative:
LOGOS
I was a founding member (keyboards again) of a Doobie Brothers tribute band, and developed an "homage" logo for that band:
As you can see, we are a one-stop shop for marketing musical acts. Does this limit us? No! We are still working on communications and marketing for pharmaceutical companies, nonprofits, colleges, museums, and more. But it's fun to look at one market segment, and see how much incredibly fun material we have produced.(The blog post title is from 2003's movie "School of Rock"...)
