Forty-one Fifteen

07/24/2020

Any day tracking with the gramless Taylor Bray ( ) is a good one!

07/17/2020

SiriusXM The Highway

Adam Doleac stopped by to make a little something for the good people at SiriusXM The Highway. Y'all enjoy.

Why yes, Adam Doleac's Highway Finds Fest performance of "Famous" IS absolutely what you need to hear this week. 😍❤️

06/11/2020

Self Doubt, Plateaus, and Life Outside Of The Studio :: Paul Moak

Friends, if you ever wonder what in the world you’re doing... you’re in good company.

Do you ever face self doubt about your creative work? Do you ever get stuck creatively? Do you face the imposter syndrome? You're not alone... and neither am...

06/11/2020

Music City Listeners :: Nuggets - YouTube

We're starting to roll out some easy-to-peruse clips from Music City Listeners. Enjoy!

06/11/2020

Ben Dunn came to us as an intern back in May of 2015. He was a master of the vibe even then… completely cool through and through. Our hope for anyone who interns with us is that they’ll pick up not only audio skills, but some insight into how they can successfully run their own freelance music business or how to plug themselves into other peoples’.

I knew Ben would succeed in this town when he had a pitch for me in his exit interview. Ben observed our need for extra help to keep our building clean, and that we had valuable evening studio time going unused. So, he proposed staying connected with us by becoming the infamous “Nightman”... meaning he’d come in during off hours to help keep the place tidy and log hours against session time for himself and his clients. That’s ambition, right there.

At the same time, Ben started doing work around the various venues at the Mercy Lounge/Cannery complex, and through a series of events, he worked his way into a road gig with and has since become their lighting guy.

After Dave and Arun moved out toward the end of 2017, I converted the Dave Cave into a mix suite for myself and reconnected with Ben to split the room with me. He still works upstairs when he’s not on the road. He’s always writing, mixing, or producing something. He works with his own band Jive Talk () and writes, produces, and mixes for another duo called Honey and the Heavy (). And lately, he’s been mixing and mastering a new duo from LA called Isaac and Robi (). Writing, producing and mixing projects that he cares about is what keeps him going.

Enjoy these great looks back in time: pandemic times, the upstairs suite, interning circa 2015, putting headphones on guitar band members in 2011, and the classic 2010 college dorm setup. @ Forty-one Fifteen

06/02/2020

Timeline Photos

05/15/2020

Yes! New music on the way.


・・・
will be here tomorrow! PRESAVE NOW 💃 link in bio

05/15/2020

Paul Moak :: Music City Listeners :: Ep 2

The day has finally arrived. Click below to join us for our first installment of Music City Listeners with our special guest Paul Moak. Tell your friends!

Welcome to Music City Listeners. Here, we will be taking a deep dive into the origin stories of some of Music City's best listeners. In this episode, our gue...

05/15/2020

Welcome to Music City Listeners

Today, we are so proud to release to you our first video installment of Music City Listeners with Paul Moak.

05/12/2020

This Friday, we launch our first episode of into the wild on YouTube and your favorite podcasting platforms.

Go follow along on Instagram, subscribe on YouTube, or start poking around in podcast land. You might find some bonus nuggets and us figuring out how the Internet tubes all fit together.

05/08/2020

Our story picks back up with my dear friend, Dave Elkins. I met Dave when I was an intern and he was working on a record for a band called Rekapse with Paul Moak. Somehow in my high school and college days, I missed the vast phenomenon of emo music and the really popular band that Dave fronts, Mae.

As an aside, I’m glad it was that way. There wasn’t anything to be weird about, and we got to be friends without any presumptions or fan-boyness. Dave has a deep soul and is always on the move to the next venture… with an infectious kind of care and insight you’d hope for and expect in such an artist.

Not long after we first met, Dave and his bride moved to Nashville and worked out of an amazing space in Green Hills. Around the time that Tate moved into the upstairs, Dave was looking for a new production suite to better fit the kind of work he was doing. And even though the upstairs had a lot of limitations and wasn’t yet built out for studio use, Dave decided that he wanted it and that he could share the suite with brilliant guitarist/producer/music-man Arun Bali.

A few months in, Dave generously fronted the cost of floating the floors of his room, and we were able to repay him via his rent and studio time. And he did it again when he and Arun needed to take on the entirety of the upstairs. Dave’s a visionary guy, so he saw the value in doing that… and we’ve been the better for it.

Dave brought an enormous amount of creativity and energy to our space for nearly 3 years. As hard as it is to see a season come to an end, Dave was able to venture out into a new space of his own just down the road in Goodlettsville… a proper full-blown Schematic Studios ().

Enjoy this look back to the days of “The Dave Cave” at the top of the stairs, and of course, lumberjack Dave preparing the way for a magical musical gathering experience in the backyard. @ Forty-one Fifteen

05/06/2020

Welcome To Music City Listeners

Friends and neighbors, on May 15, we are bringing Music City Listeners to you via YouTube and your favorite podcasting platforms.

What is Music City Listeners, you ask?

Watch the video below, and read on!

The burning question I had as a young engineer and producer in this town was this... "how do I go from what I'm doing to being a 'real' professional like the people I'm working under?" I asked that question a lot, and I always heard these wildly fascinating stories, none of which were the same.

So, a few years ago, I started hosting an event to share these fascinating stories with budding professionals and curious onlookers alike. We captured those conversations, and are here to share them with you now.

To give you a taste, in the first episode, you'll hear my conversation with Paul Moak... starting with a simple "where are you from?"... and connecting the dots of his story from Jackson, Mississippi to being a producer and proud owner of The Smoakstack.

And after a short break, you can listen in to the open Q&A from our guests that night.

Hi, and welcome to Music City Listeners. I’m your host Dewey Boyd, and I wanted to know how people find their place in the music industry. So, I’ve started a...

05/04/2020

fortyonefifteen

Friends, let's connect our worlds on YouTube!

Many of you have shot videos in our space or have beautiful music videos to go with songs recorded with us. Can you link your video in the comments here so that we can make playlists to point people your way?

We're working up some original content of our own, and we'd love for any rising tide in our world to lift your boat too.

And of course, we're grateful for any links back our way on content featuring our space.

We're in this together... and we're delighted to be in this with you.

Welcome to the YouTube home of the East Nashville recording studio, Forty-one Fifteen. Since our inception in 2012, we have been committed to helping people ...

04/29/2020

Ryan Youmans () came to us as an intern in early 2015. Just like Michael (), I had met him on my treks to Clemson University as a guest speaker to the recording department.

If you know Ryan, I’m sure it comes as no surprise that he was a star intern. He’s among the most diligent workers I know, and he pretty much always has a plan in action.

When he and his wife moved to town after graduation, he cobbled together an impressive studio in his basement. He also had a nice portable PA that I rented from him on several occasions to do the odd live gig here and there.

Ryan came on board at Forty-one Fifteen with Tate () and Michael as part of our co-op. He kept himself quite busy and became an integral part of our studio family. Near the time we dissolved our co-op, Ryan and his wife bought a house, and he started building a studio space of his own. We were able to keep him in the family for the transition period while he got his place up and running.

Since then, his place has quite literally grown into the new and improved , built out by our good friend .

Ryan has remained my first-call substitute for any time I have to miss a road gig. I can trust his people skills, his work ethic, and his ears to stand in for me.

Enjoy these pictures of him, the first four recent shots at the Amber Sound, followed by a couple throwbacks from his time with us at . @ Forty-one Fifteen

04/27/2020

Michael Mechling came to us in the summer of 2014. He and I first met on one of my treks down to Clemson University as a guest speaker to their recording department. He ambitiously tracked me down on a lunch break and inquired about interning over the summer. And since most of what we look for in intern candidates is the desire to learn from us, we were easily persuaded to bring him on.

Michael proved himself to be one of the most capable, self-starting interns we’ve ever had. After he finished up at Clemson, he moved to Nashville and took on a follow-up degree from MTSU.

When Jeff left the fold and we developed the co-op of guys to take his place, Michael was one of the start interns we approached to join in. Ever looking to buy new gear, Michael also jumped in and purchased some of Jeff’s tracking gear to help in the transition.

And so it was that Michael had 3 days a month with us for a while. He did such a great job with the studio and with contributing ideas and gear for the team to use that Taylor and I brought him on as a junior partner in 2016… junior mostly meaning that Taylor and I are old men compared to him and have a unique quantity of blood, sweat, and tears in the place.

Michael continues as a partner with us today. He’s contributed a mountain of gear for us all to use, and yes, he is responsible for one of our most significant upgrades of late… the Technivorm Moccamster coffee maker (oh yeah, and a U67).

Michael spends a lot of his time assisting the great Reid Shippen (). He also makes time for some FOH mixing (for Adam Doleac () before quarantine). And whenever he’s not doing that, he’s mixing from his own amazing hybrid setup or tracking at . @ Forty-one Fifteen

04/21/2020

Loop Community Drum Sample Pack by Loop Community - Patch

Are y'all missing the drum sounds from Forty-one Fifteen? Well, here's a fix. Dewey Boyd Jr. and Stephen Puckett got together and made a drum sample back for Loop Community.

Y'all enjoy. We can't wait to be making these sounds in person again.

A patch for Audio File by Loop Community.

04/20/2020

Our story picks up with one of our first interns, Tate Mercer. Tate came on as an intern from SAE in April 2013. He was pretty much a kid, but even then, he had pretty amazing mix chops. Back then, Natalie and I lived at the studio, and so did our beloved goldendoodle, Honey.

We let Tate studio/dog-sit for us a few times, staying in our guest room upstairs. Toward the end of Tate’s internship, Tate heard me make some offhand remark about it being non-ideal to live at the studio. He blurted out, “I’d LOVE to live here.” And that was all it took.

Natalie and I had been looking for a way to move out, but we couldn’t afford to renovate the upstairs to make rentable work-space… and well, renting it residentially seemed completely impossible until Tate brought it up.

We quickly cooked up a plan to have Tate rent our former guest room, to find another studio-rat tenant for our room, and for us to rent a house nearby. Tate’s rent was higher than he would have paid in a house full of dudes, but it came with nighttime studio access, and the ever industrious Tate Mercer launched his career after bedtime.

I couldn’t believe the sounds he was getting. Our studio was churning out Americana/Indie-pop by day and metal/pop-punk by night.

For a little while, the ever-talented Elad Shapiro lived down the hall, but after a few months, his desire to find more suitable living quarters lined up with and wanting to start working in what used to be my bedroom… but that’s another story for another day.

Tate lived at the studio and worked a lot with Dave and Arun. Dave and Arun’s operation hit a place where it needed to expand into two rooms. It aligned with Jeff’s exit and Tate’s desire to move out, so we worked up a co-op of sorts to fill Jeff’s share of the overhead and the calendar, and Tate jumped into that with two other of our star interns.

A few years later, Tate did a stint in Portland as an assistant to and has since returned to Nashville. He’s stayed in touch with our growing family. He’s producing and mixing great music all the time, and he’s recently started touring as an audio/drum tech. @ Forty-one Fifteen

04/19/2020

Jeff Braun was the third founder of Forty-one Fifteen. Jeff is a fabulously talented engineer. He’s best known now for his mixing, but he’s also a wizard at editing and flying percussion. He was also the one that persuaded Taylor and I to sell off our army of $200 pieces of gear in order to buy a smaller, consolidated palette of well-chosen gear.

Jeff and Taylor went to school together at MTSU, and they were star pupils. Jeff and Taylor brought audio credibility and skill to the studio out of the gate, and we all picked up as many tricks from each other as we could.

Even at the outset, we knew that our partnership was a means of slingshotting our collective careers, so we carefully set ourselves up to be able to outgrow each other… to plant future studios out of the one we made together.

Jeff was the first to specialize. He maintained a mixing suite of his own not long after the studio began, and so he only needed the shared facility for recording. And with his mixing getting more and more in demand, it eventually made sense for him to liquidate his tracking gear and use it to upgrade his mixing rig and pull out of Forty-one Fifteen.

Good change isn’t ever easy, but with some finagling of finances and lots of goodwill all around, Taylor and I kept the same level of service at the studio while freeing Jeff up to go do his thing! We’re really proud of him, and we’re sure that you’ve heard his work whether you realize it or not.

Swipe to see a look back at Jeff’s Forty-one Fifteen days, with lil Pepper in tow. You’ll even get a rare look at the “house band” playing live for . And even farther back, you’ll find Jeff and Taylor at the old Maple Studios and Jeff painting the back room of Taylor’s house to make it pretty enough for recording. @ Forty-one Fifteen

04/18/2020

Meet Taylor Bray, studio dad #2. He’s an audio savant. Taylor was making better records in his late teens than most people do in their mid twenties, and doing so with a small army of M-Audio, Beheringer, Presonus, and Shure gear.

Taylor and I met and became friends just before either of us moved to Nashville in 2009… from my time mixing a show or two for a band that Taylor had produced and was playing with. He moved to a little house two blocks from Natalie and me, and even then, we worked together on a few projects. I even lost a little blood on a box cutter under his house running a snake cable from his back room to his dining (ahem, “control”) room.

While Taylor was finishing up at MTSU, he partnered up with Jeff Braun and Tommy Carnes to run a studio out of his house in East Nashville. Even though the house was a rental, they spruced it up with fresh paint, sealed windows, and floating floors to make it a suitable workplace. It became Maple Studios.

Some really special projects came out of that space in that time, but the lease was coming due in the Spring of 2012, and the landlord wasn’t taking great care of the building. So my pitching the idea of Forty-one Fifteen over chips and salsa was unwittingly well timed, and Taylor fearlessly set out to help it become a reality.

And truthfully, any small amount of fear would have derailed the whole thing. We drained our accounts to build acoustic treatment. We roped the brilliantly talented Jason Eskridge in to making window panels to block out Gallatin Road’s roar. We chipped away at the monster until it was workable… and then we dove right in.

Taylor spent a few years on the road mixing monitors for Ricky Skaggs, and when he was in town, he was making records and buying more toys for us all to play with. Taylor has since moved on to mixing the show for Dan + Shay. We don’t see him around as much as we used to, but the good seed he sowed at the outset is still bearing fruit.

And of course, he is still available for recording projects! You’ll just want to schedule in advance. It’s worth it.

@ Forty-one Fifteen

04/16/2020

Hey there, I’m Dewey, and my wife () and I bought back in 2012. Back then, I had this whacky idea that we needed to buy a house before we started trying to have any children. We scoured the 2011 housing market in our price range, and after a pretty frustrating 9 month journey through multiple contracts, we came back to the drawing board.

In an invariably slow-feeling turn of divine providence, we got the sense that instead of a house to live in, our lives were actually bottlenecking at me having a place to work… a place to record music on my own.

So, I switched the property search to commercial properties, and on my very first search, I found 4115 Gallatin Pike.

Even then, it was too expensive for us. The only way we could afford it was to live in the second story and share the studio space with a couple of rent paying, gear-contributing partners. So I asked Taylor Bray to go to lunch with me at Las Maracas to discuss the matter. Before long, we roped Jeff Braun () into the risky endeavor and made plans to move the then Maple Studios from Taylor’s house into its new collective home.

Thankfully, Natalie and I were able to move our residence out of the studio (thanks ) after a year and a half… which actually was necessary before trying to have children. We now have a son, Zeke. I keep myself busy with coordinating the studio, engineering and producing, and mixing the show for on the road.

And for your amusement, swipe for a photo of me circa October 2010… being so happy about the gargantuan Mackie mixer someone let me have… giving me a lot of preamps, EQ, and zero latency monitoring to use on the front end of my home recorded projects. @ Forty-one Fifteen

04/15/2020

In our nearly 8 years of existence, we have never pushed pause quite like this. We miss seeing you all in person, sipping coffee together, and feeling the pulse of time and space as we make music together.

Now is a better time than most to take stock of the past… to remember where we came from. It helps us to have more gumption and vision for where we’re headed.

We have been planning some big, big future plans, and honestly, we couldn’t be more grateful for every delay that kept them from leaving us in the lurch in this moment. But… rather than get into all of that just yet, let me invite you to come along with us for an amusing look backward.

We’ll start here, with a photo of the studio from . Swipe to see an actual photo of the studio from 1924, back when it was the Lassiter family home. And as a bonus, a picture from the porch from 1929! @ Forty-one Fifteen

02/14/2020

x 🎙🎛🎚👏 ・・・ I met these fellas at IBMA’s World of Bluegrass in 2018. Dennis Parker invited me to see them play, and I was stunned not only at how well they played, but at how well they arranged a catalogue of music that I knew from my youth... 90s contemporary Christian music... much of which is brilliantly written and lost in a sea of temporal production. I got to know this band and their desire to spread the gospel to people you might expect to be steeped in it... the folks of Appalachia. As a traveler of those parts and from hearing from these guys, much of Appalachia operates in the margins and has to deal with the cultural runoff from more urban centers. As a result, there’s a real need for a grounded-ness across generations and a sense of unity. This project steps into that gap and brings timeless good news for the unity of God’s multiethnic, multigenerational people. The recordings are earthy and live. They’re rich and imperfect. They’re inviting and reassuring. They’re full of freedom and life.

02/14/2020

x 🎙🎛🎚👏
・・・
I met these fellas at IBMA’s World of Bluegrass in 2018. Dennis Parker invited me to see them play, and I was stunned not only at how well they played, but at how well they arranged a catalogue of music that I knew from my youth... 90s contemporary Christian music... much of which is brilliantly written and lost in a sea of temporal production.

I got to know this band and their desire to spread the gospel to people you might expect to be steeped in it... the folks of Appalachia. As a traveler of those parts and from hearing from these guys, much of Appalachia operates in the margins and has to deal with the cultural runoff from more urban centers. As a result, there’s a real need for a grounded-ness across generations and a sense of unity.
This project steps into that gap and brings timeless good news for the unity of God’s multiethnic, multigenerational people. The recordings are earthy and live. They’re rich and imperfect. They’re inviting and reassuring. They’re full of freedom and life.

01/24/2020

Registration is open 🥳🥳! ・・・ Nashville artists, this could be you! Submissions for our competition are officially open! YOU could win an artist development package and play 2020! Submissions close Feb. 2. Link in bio!

01/24/2020

Registration is open 🥳🥳!
・・・
Nashville artists, this could be you! Submissions for our competition are officially open! YOU could win an artist development package and play 2020! Submissions close Feb. 2. Link in bio!

01/10/2020

Some great behind-the-scenes footage from our recent sessions hosting with at the helm. 🎥:
・・・
A little behind-the-scenes video of tracking at . Thanks for making me look like a cool producer. I’m so excited about this new stuff we are working on

01/02/2020

and the gents brought the heat with a lil while back! Radical sounds and fast scooters is a mega 2020 combo

01/02/2020

and the gents brought the heat with a lil while back! Radical sounds and fast scooters is a mega 2020 combo

01/02/2020

Annnd we’re back! Hoping everyone had a lovely New Year. So enjoyed hosting and earlier this year! Here’s to a fruitful 2020!

12/17/2019

Loved having in recently! Enjoy a nice tour of the studio from their sessions ✊
・・・
Cutting new tracks at Studio with , and

12/13/2019

Folks are loving the new album! 🥳🥳🏆🏆 and at the desk on this one! 💪🤝💪
・・・
It’s been 3 weeks since LANDMARK released and I’d like to thank you all for the great support of my project!! I’ve enjoyed seeing some of you even learning my tunes, that means a lot to me. A guitar transcription book of the record will be coming out next year, working on it now! Thanks to for the clip 📸

11/29/2019

by co-produced and tracked here at the studio by and 🙌🙌 ・・・ no. 2 of 3 with 🖤 Produced w/ Studio: Mastered by -

11/29/2019

by co-produced and tracked here at the studio by and 🙌🙌
・・・
no. 2 of 3 with 🖤

Produced w/
Studio:
Mastered by -

11/17/2019

・・・ My my my, you certainly are beautiful. . . . . . . . . . . . . .