Some artists like Michael McDonald and Kirk Whalum were really special to me because I had been such a fan of their work long before I ever got to work with them. Looking back on your journey so far, what specific moments or productions would you say stand out for you personally?Ī: I am very thankful to be a part of many great projects with many really wonderful people. Q: Throughout your career, you have accumulated an impressive seven Grammy Awards and several other accolades along the way. This is what I really love about working with sound and creating in the studio. The sound of the music and how it is captured must tell that story as well for everything to work together and to move the listener. There is more to a great song than just a great melody and a great lyric performed by a great artist. Music doesn’t just have to sound great – it needs to communicate, to move us and to make us feel something. What’s the greatest part of working with sound?Ī: I believe in being able to bring a song or idea to life by the way it sounds or “feels.” What I mean by this is that there are plenty of ways to make music sound great, but there is a real art to making music sound like what the song and lyric is saying. Q: Since then, you have literally worked nonstop on records and projects. It was far more exciting than playing live – it was a whole new world of being able to create and take time to craft sounds in a way that would bring a song to life and then capture that sound on a recording. I really fell in love with being in the studio.
That is when it all seemed to come together and make sense for what I wanted to do. I was watching the engineers and producers work, and recalling all of the training I had gotten early on at church. I distinctly remember walking into an actual recording studio for the very first time in my life to record. I also started playing in a band around this time and we decided to go and professionally record a few songs. After high school, I went to college as a music major studying composition and arranging. I played keyboards and several other instruments, so I simply knew that in some way I wanted to create music. I did love the ability to control the audio and sound as I had learned by this teacher at my church, but I had also taken music lessons from a young age. Q: Did you know then and there that this was your calling career-wise?Ī: I knew even at the early age of twelve or thirteen that I wanted to make music, but I wasn’t sure what that even meant. By the time I was thirteen years old, I was operating the controls by myself and even being hired as the sound engineer for conferences and weddings. So, for the next several months he taught me everything he could, and each week I would come with my list of questions that I’d thought of throughout the week.
Well, I was instantly amazed by how the audio could be controlled and he could see that I was captivated by that. He invited me to watch as he mixed the music that day. A teacher at my church was also the live sound engineer there, and one day I simply asked what he was doing behind that big audio desk during the church service. Walk us through the story of how this came about.Ī: It all started as curiosity more than anything. Q: You first encountered the world of audio engineering at your local church already at the age of twelve. Welcome to a collection of drums that encapsulates the essence of one of the most powerful and uniting forms of musical expression: gospel. If words are the lifeblood of gospel music, rhythm is the heartbeat upon which they thrive. With its four fundamentally different sets of tonal characteristics, this EZX covers the entire scope and paints an impressive sonic image – from the open-sounding tones of the early 1940s and the dry, muffled and tight ones of the 1960s to the punchy, distinct and crystal clear sound of today.Īdd to that the ear and craftsmanship of Danny Duncan – seven-time Grammy Award-winning engineer/producer with a longstanding gospel merit – the breathtaking aura of the Paragon Studios A-room, the magic stroke of drummer Calvin Rodgers as well as custom presets, MIDI, percussion, handclaps, snaps and foot stomps and you have the ultimate gospel battery. With branches arching into anything from R&B and soul to rock, hip-hop and fusion, gospel is the literal definition of width. The Gospel EZX celebrates just that: the power of rhythm and the legacy of a genre whose DNA over the course of history has seeped through to almost any facet of music imaginable. Simply put: rhythm is instilled in each fiber of gospel as we know it. Up until today and ever since the early days, when makeshift kits, foot stomps and handclaps served as rhythm sections in churches, the beat has been central in every syllable, bar and phrase of worship music.
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