What’s happening, everybody? I know that my last installment of NITM was 3 months ago, but let me explain. The reason for the delay is...I got busy! I know it’s lame, but it’s the truth. Things around here have started to pick up, especially for the Recording School, and I’ve been spread out all over the place, so I kinda let this fall by the wayside for a while. But we’re here now, so let’s see what’s been going on around LIRS, shall we?

The Brad Alford and Rodney Isaacs sessions have been put on hold for a while, due to personal reasons for both artists, but I’m hoping to get both projects back into the swing of things very soon. Brad’s CD only needs a few lead vocal tracks and possibly some backing vocals along with a guitar solo here and there, so there is a possible mid summer/early fall final mix date. Rodney’s sessions however, had just gotten started with only guitar tracks for a couple of songs completed when we stopped, so it’s hard to tell (with his schedule) when we’ll start back up, much less any tentative final mix date.

My main session in Studio A for the past month or so has been local blues/R&B guitarist Tee Dee Young. He is also the guitarist/band leader for the local R&B group Scandalous and runs his own nightclub here in downtown Lexington, called fittingly enough, Tee Dee’s! He’s brought most of the band with him to help record the songs for his first solo release, and they are cookin’! We have the basic tracks for 8 songs finished and we only plan to do a couple more, so I’d be looking for Tee Dee’s CD sometime early this summer. You can go to the ME Magazine myspace page the week of March 24th and check out a semi-rough mix of one of the songs from the CD entitled "I Gotta Move".

I am also happy to welcome a new member to the ever-growing staff here at LIRS. Graduated Student Amber Sloan has signed on for some of that ever needed "real world experience", and so far is doing great! Her first solo session is this weekend and I know that she’ll do fine. Plans are to eventually make her more of an all-around instructor, so that if one of us gets bogged down on another project, Amber can step in and pick up the slack. It’s going to be a long road (teaching is very different from being a student!), but we all feel confident that she is up to the task. Welcome Amber!

We are also possibly going to work with a band that is coming all the way from Europe this summer, but that whole deal is still up in the air, so I can’t say any more on that until I know the specifics. If it goes down it should prove to be a very good experience for them and us alike!

Like I said earlier, the school is growing like crazy! We have instituted a few new classes for graduated students who want a little more and those are filling up as soon as openings happen. We are now not only offering a "Producer’s Course" where we show you the ups and downs of being a bands’ producer - much different than just engineering - as well as an advanced audio engineering course (AE II) and just recently we have added Mastering with Waves. This last course is where you learn the final phase in recording - the mastering process. The tools are familiar if you’ve already taken the Recording school course, but the applications of those tools are quite different. Mastering takes a good ear, as you are affecting the entire mix instead of individual parts, so one wrong move could ruin the whole song! All of these new courses are going great and it’s wonderful for us to be able to master our own work instead of sending it out to another studio and hoping for the best!

Normally I take this time to welcome new students, but the list is not only very long, but since I’ve taken time off from this column, there are quite a few students that have already come and gone! I promise next time to get back with the original program! Until then I can only say "Welcome to you all and I hope you’re experience here is all you thought it would be!!"

Well, that’s it for now. Don’t forget that you are welcome to stop by and tour our facilities anytime. Just give us a call at 859-335-8440 (if youÕre local) or TOLL FREE at 877-335-8440 to set it up, so we can give you the ultimate LIRCo experience. See ya next time!!!

Steve Nall
Head Engineer, LIRS