Parlor City Sound

13/05/2025

More guides! Yay! We're working on more technical stuff, and intend to get started profiling artists and music venues in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, though, we'll be writing guides when we can. And we're always open to feedback on them, too.

A quick note: yes, we're doing the "affiliate links" thing. If you click links to reverb.com (or Sweetwater if they ever approve us) and you buy a thing, we earn a tiny commission on it and you don't pay anything extra. We'd love to start paying people to work with PCS, and we absolutely refuse to paywall stuff on our site, so yeah, ads and affiliate links. Sorry!

We hope they're not too annoying, and if people start complaining we'll remove them. We promise we'll only link to relevant stuff, and we will never endorse any product that hasn't been used by us or someone we personally know and trust. Ever.

Let's take a look at ten of the best microphones for recording vocals that cost $500 or less. A suitable budget for most aspiring home recording engineers.

29/04/2025

We haven't heard any reports of these pay-to-play scams happening in Binghamton recently, but if you come across them, please do let us know. We're more than happy to expose scammers here. Still, it's worth knowing what to watch out for, just in case!

Should you pay to play gigs? Is there ever an instance where it's okay to buy and resell tickets, or pay 'slot fees?' This guide will help you avoid scams

11/04/2025

At long last, a new article! This new EP from Tom Jolu drops on Saturday, and it's a doozy. There's a considerable dose of musical talent on display here, captured between the storied walls of the old Abandoned Studios location. Be sure to head over to Sound Go Round and grab your copy on vinyl when it hits shelves this Saturday!

Tom Jolu Live at Abandoned Studios is out April 12th. You can only get it on vinyl, and as we explain in this review, yes ... it's worth every cent!

04/04/2025

Hey, you ... music venue representative. Yes, you! We're ramping things back up at Parlor City Sound, and we want to write about your music venue (if it's within driving distance of Binghamton and Ithaca, anyway). We want to write a profile about your venue and help 607 music acts get in touch with you to potentially book gigs.

We're also looking into building a free booking tool that helps artists and venues find each other and communicate. We need some feedback on our ideas from venues to make that work.

Drop us a line. We'd love to chat with you. We want to help music fans and artists learn more about your venue, and we aren't asking for money to do it. Let's talk!

03/04/2025

We planned on announcing this properly soon, but apparently quite a few people discovered it by accident—we're in the process of ending our hiatus from Parlor City Sound, and we plan on having new content going up by the end of this month (probably in the next week or two).

Parlor City Sound ended up on a backburner for quite a while. A new house, new jobs, frantic new schedules ... it was a lot. And we didn't want to just pop up out of nowhere and say "here's a new article. Oh, and we're back, by the way." We felt we owed everyone an explanation as to where we disappeared to.

Well, as a thousand or so people have already seen, we've been working on the site quite a bit lately. It has a fresh coat of paint, some fantastic improvements under the hood, and we're in the process of developing a very fancy event calendar to replace our old one.

It was a serious pain in the rear keeping the old event calendar regularly updated. We had to add events and venues manually, and it was rather time consuming to keep it up to date. So, we decided to replace that. And we couldn't find a magical plugin that did everything we wanted it to do, so we're building this new event calendar entirely from scratch, code and all.

This is where a bunch of people accidentally learned that we're working on a new event calendar. No, Radiohead and The National are not performing in Binghamton this year (although we really want them to and they totally should).

We were having a bit of fun creating fictional events to test out the new calendar, and I figured we'd leave them up until after April 1st to be silly. The Tom Jolu event was the only real one (and that's still published there).

This new event calendar will allows music acts, venues, promoters, etc. in the 607 region to login and publish their own events themselves. All of that is working already, too (see our comment below to learn how to get access). Now, we're trying to make all of that look pretty and identify whatever lingering bugs there are.

We intend to play a serious game of catch-up soon. A lot of incredible new releases happened in the past several months, and we hope to review every last one of them. There are new music acts we'd love to write profiles on. New guides we're hoping to finish. Regional businesses we want to write about. So much we want to cover soon!

We're sorry for essentially ghosting the entire music community for a while. Real life can sometimes unexpectedly do that to you. But Parlor City Sound is coming back, hopefully in a big way, very soon. Please let us know what all we missed, and tell us what you think of the site's still-in-progress overhaul, too!

25/06/2024

We keep noticing a trend with the music acts recording at Abandoned Studios: there's nothing else that sounds quite like them, and that's a very, very good thing. So we sat down with Michael Micha to learn how he's finding that incredibly unique sonic signature we've been hearing from bands like Grown Ups, Damnthekid, and The Neo Politans.

We had a chat with Michael Micha to learn how Abandoned Studios in Johnson City is producing such a unique, breakout sound. Read our full interview here

21/06/2024

Be sure to check out this album by Damn the Kid, it's incredibly special and engaging from start to finish!

17/06/2024

We've been looking forward to 'Ava's Town', the freshman LP from Damnthekid, and to say it doesn't disappoint would be a serious understatement. It's a work that further deepens your appreciation for Damn the Kid's signature sound, and their experimental gambles pay big dividends as the album unfolds. 'Ava's Town' will be available on Friday, June 21st. Be sure to give it a listen!

'Ava's Town', the long-awaited freshman LP by Damn the Kid, showcases the band's signature sound and their willingness to expand on it in big ways

14/06/2024

Ready for a track that oozes 80's pop cool in a refreshingly modern way? Grab some neon shades and crack open a Tab as you check out the time-traveling new indie pop single 'Trojan Horse' by Amoreena in our full review here.

Binghamton indie pop singer Amoreena opens up a time portal to the 1980's with 'Trojan Horse', her latest impressive single. Check it out in our review here!

12/06/2024

Grown Ups are one of those incredibly rare bands that literally never disappoint you. Their music is so wonderfully intricate, with layer upon layer of depth and warmth both sonically and lyrically. And their latest LP, 'Together, For a Moment' is their finest work yet. Learn about their newest album in our full review here. And break out your headphones, because this is one of those albums you want to truly savor.

The latest LP from Grown Ups, 'Together, For a Moment', is arguably their best album to date. Learn more about this excellent album in our latest review!

01/06/2024

Local music legend and Music City founder Benny Fiacco will be inducted into the Binghamton Wall of Stars at the Broome County Forum Theatre on June 20th. The ceremony and celebratory after party are open to the public, and we hope we'll see you there!

Local music legend Benny Fiacco will be inducted to the Wall of Stars at the Forum Theatre in Binghamton on June 20th in a public ceremony.

20/05/2024

Binghamton Porchfest 2024 is implementing some changes to how homeowners in the Abel Bennett Historic District will pair up with music acts and other artists. The new system will be a little different, but ultimately a good thing for performers, hosts, and eventgoers.

Binghamton Porchfest 2024 will implement a new DIY matchmaking process between hosts and artists, relieving some of the stress from event organizers.