I have been obsessed with music, the creative process, and the tools and tech that go with that for as long as I can remember. I wrote my first handwritten song when I was 8 or 9 years old. My first attempt at building a recording studio was in 5th grade. I had never seen a studio and knew nothing of the tools, tech, or creative process to make music. But, I loved what I heard on the radio and those cassette tapes I bought from Columbia House and BMG Tape Clubs. I wondered and imagined how those sounds got made. I did multiple rounds of those “10 free tapes” deals. I would scan through that catalog and any name that seemed vaguely familiar I would try it out. Ravenous curiosity, then like now. That was Spotify in the late 1970’s! The Eagles. Kansas. Supertramp. Journey. Alan Parsons. Boston. Styx. Billy Joel. Genesis. Yes. Fleetwood Mac. Elton John. Miles Davis. Chuck Mangione. Maynard Ferguson. Beethoven. Chopin. Duke Ellington. Count Basie. Louis Armstrong. Van Halen. Rush. Creedence Clearwater Revival, REO Speedwagon. Tchaikovsky. Bach. Grover Washington Jr. and Bob James (after seeing those in my Grandpa’s records). Thanks to my Dad, Dan Fogelberg, Waylon Jennings, and Don Williams. Later in the 80's Devo, Men At Work, The Police, The Cars, Madness, Howard Jones, Scritti Politti, A-Ha, The Cure, Oingo Boingo, Duran Duran, Tears For Fears, Billy Idol, Alphaville, etc. To this day I incessantly devour any kind of new music I can get my hands on, something that started young and never stopped. I had well over a hundred tapes as a kid, here are just a few here and here. Then, in the 90's and 2000's I ended up with thousands and thousands of CD's as my knowledge and curiosity expanded by many, many orders of magnitude.
My Dad had bought my brother Denny and I Fender guitars and got us lessons. He taught us to play and sing out of a Waylon Jennings songbook. I have that on display in my studio along with all his Waylon 8-Track tapes. He got a first generation Casio Keyboard from the church. I strung together a couple of cassette recorders, a boom box, my Fender Telecaster and a guitar amp, that Casio Keyboard, a Radio Shack Mic my saxophone I got from my Grandpa Talmage, my brother's Fender Mustang Bass, and a recorder (the kind you play that they give you in elementary school). I'd bounce and layer back and forther between those cassette recorders trying to get all the sound and instruments to work together. Sounded terrible, but that was my idea of fun as a kid.
My child brain daydreamed of an elaborate machine that used levers and motors to play actual drums, bass, guitar, keys and all kinds of other instruments. Fast forward, years later I would see the organ at Organ Stop Pizza that did pretty much that. Then, in 2010 I saw Pat Metheny at Mesa Arts Center with his Orchestrion project, a one-man wonder of levers, motors, and machines doing what my 5th grade brain had imagined. To see what my kid brain dreamed up in the late 1970’s, see those. The late 70's was a few years before 1983 when MIDI would come along and make my childhood daydreaming a reality only with digital not mechanical instruments. I would spend the rest of my life with an insatiable curiosity and pursuit to explore and experiment with all the new music creation tech that would come along with MIDI always being at the core of it.
My next attempt at making a studio was in the 1990's. We were newly married, living in a single wide trailer with no money. I bought a Yamaha SY77 workstation synth I bought with money from selling my Telecaster. It had a 16 track sequencer and blew my mind. There it was, that magical machine I dreamed up as kid, right there. I wore the paint of the buttons on that keyboard creating all kinds of tracks including the orchestral score for Prokofiev Piano Concerto #3 so I could play along the solo part with it. The most important experience in my pursuit of music was Mesa Community College and incredible teachers like Grant Wolf, Fred Forney, Ruth Yandell, and many others. See here for more. Thanks to those brilliant and inspiring people my mind blew wide open to Stravinsky, Miles, Coltrane, Mahler, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Coltrane, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Bartok, and endlessly on and on from there. I started MCC thinking I was a business major but it didn't talke long with Grant, Ruth, Fred, and others to realize I was a music major, a decision in hindsight I wouldn't dream of changing. That's where I really learned what music really was, jazz, classical, but so much more. This was 1990 and I played a Yamaha DX7, a Korg M1, big band and fusion music, Beethoven Sonatas, and that Prokofiev Piano Concerto #3! Fred and Grant built out a full recording studio while I was there. Jim Robson of Rockin' R Ranch is my cousin and had a studio in the barn with his brother in law Bobby Madsen. During that time, I got my first exposure to multi-track tape and drum machines. The new MCC studio took that exposure to the next level giving me time on both sides of the glass, although most of that at the piano, not in the control room.
During that time, the early 90's, I also found a dusty and well used but great sounding Peavey 15" Black Widow PA System I bought from a country band. I would eventually get an early Apple Macintosh computer with sequencing software. In 2000 I got a Yamaha S90 keyboard and a Yamaha AW16G all-in-one multi-track recorder. That started in a bedroom then expanded to the loft game room. I upgraded to Pro Tools DIGI002 and got a vocal booth and a Yamaha Disklavier DC3 piano downstairs. I outgrew that, especially with trying to juggle family having to suffer through being quiet while I brought in projects. In 2005 I bought a home that I converted to a studio and upgraded to a full Pro Tools HD system. That became the long term home of Talmage Studios. I added a Yamaha Motif ES Rack, a Proteus 2000, I got a Yamaha Disklavier DC7 piano and began assembling the collection of high end mics, preamps, and other gear that makes up Talmage Studio today. I've been updating the studio constantly since then with a major system overhaul in 2019.
Creating music and having a place to create has always been a huge part of my life. The studio I've had since 2005 has become a joyful and sacred place for me, but also for many of the other local Arizona music people. I do all kinds of music, but church related music to worship God and Christ is the most central part of what I do. I don't say it lightly when I say that my studio and the music I do is an important part of my consecration (an important part of our faith). In 2019 we moved to Utah to get closer to Grandkids. We still travel back to Arizona regularly to be with family and work there and certainly to get time in the studio. But, I have since built out a quite well equipped and functional studio in the basement up in Utah. I've added lots of keyboards, especially Yamaha, to the various locations I now move around between. We travel so much now that I've put a lot of effort into get refining my portable/mobile system. Gratefully Apple's revolutionary new Mac Silicon combined with VST instruments, sample libraries, and plugins advancing so far has made that possible with the new laptops being vastly more powerful and functional than any system we've had in the past.
Those daydreams I had as a kid have become real in ways far beyond my imagination. It is an amazing time to be alive for making music. Talmage Studios is still a physical place, that home I converted in 2005. But, it has also become a virtual place for me too. While I still very much need the fixed installation with good rooms and acoustics, great piano, isolation booths, high end speakers, and high end mics and preamps, my studio has expanded to be pretty much wherever I'm at. The ranch. The AirBNB. The hotel room. The office. The airplane. The cruise ship. I have every size and kind of keyboard in every place from tiny ones that fit in my carry on bag to big fully weighted Yamaha Keyboards parked in Utah, the studio, the office, the house, everywhere I'm going to be, ready to be used on demand. Creating and exploring music is a never ending fascination for me and tech has made it so I can do far more of it than ever before.
