Wheelhouse Release

Another year, another album and another great album cover by my artist wife Nancy. This release though is a bit different in that it is an all instrumental work. Wheelhouse is finally mixed and mastered and will officially be available on all the streaming platforms June, 19th. What started out as a bit of an experiment throwing a few Jazz chops on top of some 808 beats soon grew into a full blown studio effort. I will say not having vocals became much more difficult than I originally thought. The guitar becomes your voice and demands very well crafted song components too properly lift a song. A.K.A, no shredding. It turns out that the more 'spreadable' guitar songs I recorded didn't make this release, going with the more slow hand compositions. I tend to compose now in an ad-hoc approach, arranging, layering parts and melody as they offer themselves realtime. In this way song production can completely change as it progresses and hardly ever finishes the way it starts out. Of course this approach completely contradicts established contemporary music production but Oh well.... I think I used all my guitars but relied primarily on my main Fenders, Though I did employ my PRS more than the last few albums, rediscovering what a fantastic instrument it is. Almost all these guitar parts were virtually tracked through my Kemper amp profiler. This tool makes it very easy to come back and replicate exact tones for dubbing which is essential when doing all the tracking solo. The tracking/mixing was done both in Seattle and North Carolina across most of 2019 and into early 2020. Mastering was done once again by ZenMastering in SanDiego where Paul Abbott does a wonderful job framing my work. Obviously a lot has happened over this timespan and I suspect not too many people are going to be that interested in someone's new music. In some ways I'm glad this effort lacks lyrics which could never pay tribute or offer any comfort to what many folks are going through. So maybe these little snippets of songs can at least be a pleasant distraction like they were for me to the events of the day.
​Robin

FYI, Full Funkle is the first song on the album. Kind of my vision what it would be like if Jeff Beck jammed with the Chills Peppers, enjoy..

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