History

1978, this place in these pictures, the building process, the beginning ground of the place that evolved and became SoundFarm, where surely 100 musicians, or more, have come through the Door, exploring every type of music you could imagine, and then some ….
Dare to Suck, has always been our motto, and boy did we sometimes! … but often there was pure magic…

There have been various incarnations of who was in the “Band” since 1978, depending on who was around, and what kind of gig we might be creating at the time … Some groupings were jazz oriented, where i get to play a lot more flute, perhaps my favorite role… other eras, different players …. but i do have to say here that ALWAYS, myself Ken Nelson and bassist Richard Lucas were a part of every era, and it was the two of us coming together that made SoundFarm happen… and certainly drummer/engineer Christian Heilman moved us into a different mode, being the kick starter for this current recording project!

This music we are producing right now is an explosion of recording creativity, now that we figured out with our Macbooks how to use GarageBand, ProTools, and a few microphones. We laid basic rhythm tracks at Radio Star Studios in Weed, just to capture the drums and the raw structure of the songs. That was grueling work, though completely fun too (my fingers were bleeding). Then drummer/engineer Christian Heilman went through all the many takes and created the best rhythm sequences into song structures on ProTools, then came to SoundFarm from Seattle, where we edited and completely cleaned up all the basic tracks, turning them into great rhythm tracks. Then we invited a number of friends over to track and overdub all the other parts into GarageBand on my macbook pro, such as vocals, guitars, flute, keyboards,horns, and percussions. Then I sent those track files via the internet to Christian who lives in Seattle, where he dropped them into ProTools. Christian then put mixes up on Soundcloud , where we could listen to our work, make comments at the particular spots of the songs, and thereby made a lot of choices via internet sharing. Then there have been marathon weeks, where Christian stayed at the SoundFarm, and Richard (Golden Ears) Lucas, and myself, Coyote, created the mixes track by track, note by note, phrase by phrase … such a very amazing tedious process that many don’t know what goes into it …

Always my favorite nights are when spontaneous songs, complete with wonderful lyrics, and musical phrasing, just pop out on the spot because there is so much musical devotion in the room that it just happens… We are then being played by the Muse, not the other way around… and i think that is why we play music. Always trying to be taken into something larger than our own individual selves. Ours songs sort of arrived by that process …

Music is truly a gift to be shared, because it is in the listening of each person playing into the sound of the group, where there is a mysterious connection made. It is ancient, going back to the caves, and it has evolved amazingly with our human species.

So that’s a little beginning Blurb about our current Inspiration, with a little historical context for fun … We, the SoundFarm Band players, hope you have a lot of fun watching our construction process, and me bumbling around here, presenting our story and our songs over the internet, for your enjoyment!
….more to come!