greg talenfeld

greg talenfeld in the ok records control room

Greg Talenfeld is a producer, engineer, songwriter and guitarist. A "short list" of album credits follows below.

As a songwriter, he has written and recorded material for film, television and stage. Band projects include alt-country pioneers Cottonhead, the wonderfully noisy Vodka, the dulcet tones of The Professor and MaryAnn, and The Caterpillars; a home-grown duo with wife Melanie Rock.

Recent theater credits include Shakespeare in the Park's production of Measure for Measure with composer John Gromada; and Mary Birdsong's Three Days in The Tub at Joe's Pub in New York City.

On television Greg's work can be heard on HBO's The Sopranos, MTV, VH1, Biography, History, Animal Planet and even some really great commercials.

back story

New York City, 1989: I was just another dreadlock/slacker guitarist/engineer when I hooked up with Jim Waters at Waterworks Recording over on West 14th Street by the river. We took the place from a half-inch eight track with a Yamaha console up through one-inch sixteen and finally two-inch twenty-four. Did a bunch of sheetrocking too, as I recall. We also latched on to the whole MIDI thing early, running Performer on a Mac SE with its mighty 4 meg of RAM and blistering 8 MHz clock.

By 1993 Jim had moved on to Tuscon and opened Waterworks Recording West, while I ran the place on my own until 2000, when a multi-alarm late night fire in Dizzy Izzy's Bagels downstairs forced everyone out of the building. But not before making lots of great music:


…and now

OKRecords is several giant steps ahead from where the old Waterworks left off. Designed by studio designer Francis Manzella and architect Robert Silarski, the entire century-old H&D Garage Building has been rebuilt to enhance a live recording process. The concrete floors of the studio have been fully floated. Acoustic finishes include brick and wood beams salvaged from the original garage, blending nineteenth century industrial with modern Hi-Tech. The private upstairs lounge has a kitchen and full bath. Building OKRecords has been a leap of faith; it allows us to carefully craft sound in an authentic, comfortable environment.


digi/log production

I've made a lot of great records with this 1970's Trident 24 console. Having been upgraded and customized by Matt Marinelli and Andrew Roberts, it's better than new. My personal preference is to work in an analog environment, with rugged old gear. That said, it's often more practical, and even more appealing, to delve into the digital realm, for all sorts of reasons.

So we configured OKRecords in a way that permits stand-alone operation in either analog or digital formats, or some combination of the two. Digi/log production enables each element to do only the stuff it does best.

Putting Pro Tools to work like a tape machine, you have full use of all the mod cons: incredible editing capability, multiple takes and comping, even that instantaneous rewind thing. By running individual outputs from the digital converters into discrete returns on the console we couple the best features of Pro Tools with the natural warmth of the Trident's slammin' track summing and equalizer sections, with easy access to all of our classic rack gear. Mix to the Studer half inch ét voila: more soul from the EQ's, more iron in the pre's and all the latitude to to color outside the lines that analog processing provides.

We have a lot of options at our disposal here, so I always encourage potential clients to call to discuss a project. There's no set "best way to work". Sometimes you want the classic "warmth" of tape, and other times you just want to keep everything in the computer. Most projects are some combination of the two. We can work with you to find the approach that best suits your goals.


recent projects

albums

television


theater


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