Photography by Kenny Schick – Kenny is a music producer, engineer, singer songwriter & photographer, living in Nashville TN (from the Bay Area CA) (see more photos here)
Contact Kenny if you would like High Rez photos without water marks
If you are limited in the sounds that you yourself can produce but you’ve imagined your songs with other instruments or a full band to expand beyond just you and your guitar or keyboard, you’ve come to the right place!
Or have you already recorded tracks and just want some additional instruments and orchestration? Maybe you just need a killer mix that’ll take your music to the next level and compete with or exceed the best commercial mixes in the industry?
To get the high quality, industry standard professional recordings you are looking for,
you would need:
+ a producer
+ a variety of other musicians
+ a recording engineer
+ a mixing engineer
+ a mastering engineer
It can get, expensive and complicated working with that many people. BUT, what if you could get all that with just one person?
Taking your stripped down songs and ideas to a full band or fully orchestrated arrangement that is unique to your personality and artistry is Kenny Schick’s specialty. Kenny becomes your team, your creative support, your genius producer, your personal multi-instrumental session musician, your geeky recording engineer and your mixing expert, all while creating a fun environment.
Kenny can help you realize what is possible for your songs and help you achieve it. In the studio he can help you capture your best performance and then produce yours songs so it sounds exactly how you imagined or even better.
There is also a mobile option for recording – Kenny will come to you and record you in your home, rehearsal space or favorite location.
Once the music is complete, Basement3Productions can also help you with what comes next – for most people the hard part is the selling and promotion of your music. We offer visual design & photography, and help you with marketing, production and distribution.
Basement3Productions is a one stop shop when it comes to music production!
Kenny Schick is a music designer, a producer, a multi-instrumentalist, a recording engineer, a mixing engineer and a mastering engineer. He’s had 25+ years of experience and knowledge working with many genres, bands and artists and is himself a performing and recording singer songwriter, so he fully understands the mind set of a performing artist.
From Pro Recording and Mixing, all the way to Full Production and Design – with Basement3Productions you CAN make your music dreams a reality!
Kenny Schick is a Producer / Engineer / Musician / Photographer in Nashville TN
Why, you may (or may not) ask?…..because we have fans who seem to like them, and also, we have been producing music for licensing (TV, film, etc.), and it seems that there is often a call for cover songs these days. Further, it’s always been a pleasure of mine to take a song everyone knows and do something a little different with it. In the case of ArtemesiaBlack, the goal of course is not to do a ‘Zappaesque’ cover Styx song, or a ska version of ‘Roundabout’, but rather, to take songs and fit them into our special somber zone.
I’ve never been a huge Bruce Springsteen fan per se, though I’ve always totally appreciated his spirit, his longevity, and his unrelenting dedication to his fans/performance/music. I’ve always enjoyed his songs when they come up on the radio (or updated radio replacements), but I don’t really know any of them intimately. However, for some reason, Bruce’s song ‘Dancing In The Dark’ kept creeping into my head as a good possibility for the ArtemesiaBlack treatment. Maybe just a few lines that I knew kept popping into my head, maybe just the melody….not sure. Once we gave it a listen, I was surprised how appropriate the lyrics actually were for us—much more bite to them than the pop presentation of the original gave away without a deep listen. We hope you enjoy our boss version of the Boss…. and if we ever play it live, we hope Courtney Cox will come dance with us onstage.
It took us just a day and a half to conceptualize, record, and mix this song. There were some other parts I recorded too, but we ultimately felt it sounded best really stripped down. If any of you singer songwriters out there ever want to record a cover and get some help arranging it into something a little different, or… if you have any originals you’d like arranged and taken to a magical place – Basement 3 Productions is your place so call me, get hold of me— it’s what I love to do… you’d be surprised what is a available to you…
This is Mike’s 3rd release produced and recorded with B3P—Mike was the 2nd client we had after starting our business, and it’s been really fun watching him grow and define himself and his music.
BANDCAMP
When I first met Mike through Dale Mungary of South Bay Dub Allstars/Dub FX , he was a pop piano based songwriter who definitely tipped his hat in the country music direction, but wasn’t exactly a country artist. The first recording we did at Hans Heim’s Studio B in Aptos, using Hans’ amazing studio and beautiful Kawaii piano. Hans Heim’s music I had gotten together with Mike for pre-production and gave him my metronome to work with for a few months prior to our recording session, as he was used to just playing music on his own and he sort of just flowed with what he was feeling.
When we got to the session, I noticed his feel was not quite there when working with a click track, but when we turned it off, his songs had a good musicality to them. Since we decided the recordings would be mostly just him and his piano, we turned off the click and just let him get good live tracks of him singing and playing at the same time. Well as it turned out, I added some overdub tracks, and Mike’s mind started racing with the possibilities of further production, so we ended up working drums and everything around these ‘free form’ tracks—we even had drummer Kevin Higuchi play to a few tracks, and I was in the drum room with him directing him through the areas where the tracks sped up and slowed down—in his usual fashion, Kevin killed it and got the songs in 2 takes despite the lack of a click track—those that are familiar with session work know that adding drums to a track that is already ‘done’ in this fashion is no small feat. I still love to listen to the album that came from those sessions: Sean Circle.
At the time we were recording Sean Circle, I’d become interested in country guitar. It all happened when I was on the Dr. Z amplifier (drzamps.com) web site drooling over their amps and I stumbled across a video of Brad Paisley demoing one of their amps. I was so taken with his playing and technique that I googled ‘how to play guitar like Brad Paisley’, and that led me to a guy named Doug Seven (sizzlingguitarlicks.com), who does tutorial videos. To this day, I still practice stuff off these videos. This was to serve me well when Mike came back to do album 2, now fully defining himself as a country artist. Mike used the piano only to show me his songs for this group of songs, and then let me transfer everything to guitar for the main song sketches.
At this time, working with Mike was very different than it had been before—and things went, and still go very quickly when we work on songs. He comes up to the studio with the songs about 85% done, I set up a piano for him, and he plays the basic idea—I quickly grab the chords and feel he’s going for, and in minutes we are playing through the basic song. While having a beer, (and maybe a whiskey), we quickly define the form, often adding the bridge sections and figuring out the last details. Then, we record a version of me playing guitar and him singing, and the songs are born—we chat a little, sometimes I knock out the main acoustic guitar part, have him sing to it(and sometimes, that vocal take even becomes the final vocal!), then send him on his way to let me orchestrate and produce the instrumental parts. I send him mp3s, we discuss, and pretty soon, we have a complete song. I end up doing/creating most of the instruments and back up vocals, along with my wife and business partner Sabine, and we’ve been fortunate to stumble across the great fiddle player Kurt Baumer (fiddletrax.com), who, from his studio in Austin creates super tasty fiddle parts that I can play with and edit to fit to the songs. Working with Mike in this fashion for last year’s EP and his brand new release is a complete pleasure—everything moves so quickly and effortlessly, it’s just a blast.
Mike is a prolific writer, and even as ‘Dreamin’ releases today, we have 4 new songs nearly complete for album number 4! Staying with the country vibe, we are looking forward to some new flavors on the new music, so stay tuned! In the meantime, all you folks who love country should enjoy this album, and those who are just geeky about production/music and still value the art of recording and have an appreciation for sonic quality, well, there’s something here for you too. 🙂 At Basement 3 Productions, the art of recording/production and high quality visual presentation is our primary focus, and we aim to make all our artists, like Mike, sound and look as amazing as their unique and important artistic visions.
Produced, Recorded, Instrumentation, Mixing & Mastering by Kenny Schick.
Photography by Kenny Schick.
Design of album covers and web site by Sabine Heusler-Schick
At that time, we still recorded to tape, and the tape alone was quite an investment—as I recall, about $300 a roll for 2” tape, and one needed about 3 or 4 rolls to make an album, so a band could be $1200 into a project before they even hit the studio. During this time, I figured out how to use 2 cassette machines to create multi-track recordings, and eventually got a 4 track cassette recorder, but that was all for fun—I wasn’t going to get a studio quality recording out of those devices, and that was the kind of sound I was looking for. Around 1992, Alesis released the ADAT, a digital recorder using Super VHS tape as a medium for capture—I bought one early on, as I knew I wanted to be able to spend countless hours creating music that could eventually be released at commercial quality—I didn’t yet realize it, but I had become an early adopter of the home studio mindset that is so prevalent today, and in fact has put so many commercial studios out of business.
I set up my first 2 studios in the basements of houses I lived in, the first basement being an unfinished dirt basement who’s (is a basement a ’who’?) floor I covered with cardboard, then scraps of carpeting pulled from a dumpster. I built walls with 2 x 4’s and dry wall, and at barely over 6 feet in height, that was the first studio. We moved in about a year, and the next house also had a basement—a bit of a rarity in California. This basement was actually a ‘finished’ basement, so the studio was an ‘upgrade’ from the first one, and this is where I started recording what would become my first solo release. That basement flooded twice during a particularly rainy winter, and fortunately, I did not lose too much gear. At that time, I started what would become a lifelong process of buying gear to make better recordings, and I bought any book I could find on recording/home recording down at Tower Books. In 1996, I moved into a basement apartment that would be my home and studio for 10 years—it had also been the rehearsal studio of my band Dot 3 in the late 80’s, so as the third basement studio, and the rehearsal space of one the best bands I’d played with, Dot 3, I called my solo project, Basement 3. It was here that I graduated from my ADAT to my first Pro Tools rig in 2000.
During this time, I played in many bands playing many styles on several instruments. Because of my interest in various musical instruments and styles, and my indecisive nature, I became a sort of musical chameleon, playing with lots of different bands, usually on either saxophone or guitar. I wanted to find my ‘thing’—what was it going to be? Jazz? Punk? Sax? Guitar? Classical? Grunge? Flute? World Music? Funk? Industrial? Experimental? Because of my obsessive nature, I delved as deep as i could into all my musical interests, and I went equally as deep with the art of recording—I always had a compulsion to take every avenue as far as it would go, and thus, with the time needed to indulge, I was often single…:) I often kicked myself for not being decisive about one instrument or one genre, as I felt the division of focus would never allow me to get to the ultimate destination on one single thing, but I didn’t realize this inability to decide would serve me very well in the future.
Playing as everybody else’s sideman and keeping my own creations in the closet (basement) started to to feel unsatisfactory, so I started to make plans to bring my own visions to life. With plans of bringing a band together continually failing, I decided I might try to present my music as a solo act—and given it’s many layers, that was going to be an interesting challenge. I bought a good acoustic guitar and tried to strip things down to just vocal and guitar, and I took voice lessons as I was not feeling happy with that part of the presentation. To prepare myself for solo performances, I discovered the world of open mics—I knew they existed, but being in bands since the age of 12, I had no idea what a large community was lurking in the world of open mics and singer-songwriters. It was a whole world that was new to me. In usual ‘Kenny fashion’, I embraced this world with a vengeance and spent countless hours preparing solo performances and traveling the entire bay area and beyond in search of open mics and venues for acoustic music as I started to book solo shows. I toured the west coast and started writing songs based in the singer-songwriter tradition, stripping things way back. In 2006, I became restless, and in a complete left turn, I quit all my bands, quit my full time job of 14 years, and went to Australia to meet a girl (Sabine) I met on MySpace while exploring possibilities of playing music abroad. I had planned to stay in Australia for a year and explore music, so I created my first mobile recording rig—a laptop, a small interface, and 3 microphones—all small enough to bring on the plane as carry on. In Australia, I began recording my 4th solo album, and I began to record Sabine’s first album in her Melbourne apartment. Sabine had been a closet song writer, so this whole experience was new to her and a bit of a shock to her system.
My time in Australia had not brought the clarity of vision I was looking for—in fact, I felt less clear than ever, so I came back to the US in early 2007 with many questions. My friends Heather and Dave put me up in their home for many months while I tried to figure out what was next, as I mixed the album I’d recorded in Australia, as well as Sabine’s album. For some income, I started recording an album for Aly Kahn, a fellow singer-songwriter, using an expanded version of the mobile rig I’d brought to Australia—I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the start of Basement 3 Productions. I’d always kept my tools for my own endeavors, and I’d always co produced stuff for the bands I was in, but this was my first foray into using my knowledge of recording, my multi-instrumental skills, and my collection of gear for recording others. A vision started to appear—most singer-songwriters were individuals without a band, and without the knowledge of how to reproduce their music in a way that would stand up in the commercial realm. I could record them well, and even more useful, I could be their ‘band’—here’s where the years of musical indecision would come in handy! There were many studios who could/can do great recordings, but none that could offer to arrange and perform all the parts that would take singer-songwriter’s songs to a ‘finished’ state. It wasn’t immediately clear, but I began doing this for others, and it sort of just—happened.
Sabine came to the US in 2008, and we roamed the country for several months, then came back to the bay area, and I started producing and recording people in their homes/remote locations with my mobile rig to bring in some income. My background in photography allowed me to shoot the imagery for their albums, and Sabine’s background in graphic design made her the perfect person to design the album art. Still not fully clear to us, we’d already become the ‘one stop shop’. We lived for a time in a vacant house provided us by our friends Barbara and Karl, then moved back to my old digs at Lani’s Basement 3 for a time, and Sabine knew we had to find a place we could use for real studio. We needed a quiet location, so I mentioned the Santa Cruz mountains might yield something quiet. Sabine, despite my panic and concern over rent, found a place to check out in Boulder Creek—we went for it, and Basement 3 Productions in it’s current form was born in 2009. The first years were a struggle and were a combination of production work, photographic work, design work, music lessons, house sitting, and working at my friend Mike’s imaging business. Every year got better, and by around 2013, we were starting to have to drop teaching and some of the other things to keep up with the production work. Here in 2017, 10 years after it all ‘started’, Basement 3 Productions has found it’s unique niche helping singer-songwriters achieve their dreams and has become a haven for singer-songwriters struggling to present their art in a fully professional manner.
Kenny