“I’m looking for a drummer, who do you recommend?”
When I asked this question to engineer Jason Mariani while setting up a recording session with Carbonite Studio in Ojai, his reply was the same as Warren Ross, who I had worked with for cutting a bank of guitar work tracks in Santa Barbara. They each told me one guy: Austin Beede.
That’s when you know you’ve got to work with someone because their talent is known by multiple people in the field.
Austin is a talented drummer who is a part of the group Grateful Shred and provides lessons at Rhythm West in Buellton, California.
Luckily he was available and happy to do the recordings at Carbonite Studios. In our first session he worked on 3 tracks - “Nowhere”, “Drifting in Reality”, and “High on the Mountain” - where he added the drums to each song. He did an amazing job and I could hear why he came so highly recommended.
I enjoyed his work so much that I also requested that he work with me on the simple Soul Stingers demo project. Sonically, my goal was for the tracks was to have a live feel and sound. So at Rhythm West in a drum studio we set up his drum kit and captured him on a portable Zoom recording deck. I edited all 10 tracks to play through one after the other so that the drums could be added in one take with a simple live performance feel. Austin added his groove with his calm personal touch.
Austin is definitely a one of a kind skilled player and person and I am thankful that he provided his creativity and talent to our projects. I really look forward to playing live with him sometime too!
Stream samples of the sessions, Sweet Melissa, here,
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