New CD releases in 2010:
Doomsday Revolution by The New Czars
Tangier Dream by Eric Walker
Music for Ballet Lovers, Vol.3 by Yoshi Gurwell

Currently, our in house producer, Steffen Presley is working with legendary bassist, Ronnie Hudson whose credits include session and live bassist for Isaac Hayes, including the Shaft album and tour; staff session player for Stax Records, including many of those great hits; songwriter with multi-platinum sales, including West Coast PopLock. Along with Street People Records president, Michael Hooks, they are arranging and producing new material at our Song-Haven Studios.

Just released is the highly charged rock CD by 9 Chambers, produced by Greg Hampton for Samson Records and features high profile musicians Ed Mundell, Jorgen Carlsson, and Vinny Appice from Monster Magnet, Gov't Mule and Alice Cooper. Steffen Presley has a Hammond B3 organ credit for several of the songs. Steffen recorded the organ parts at his own studio, Song-Haven in 2010.

Multi-instrumentalist Jeff Dean is preparing to release his masterpiece album, Gift on CD and Apple iTunes for download. A collection of solo piano pieces encompassing original material as well as adaptions of well known classical music, the album was edited, mixed and mastered at Song-Haven Studio A by Steffen Presley. Jeff has been performing his pieces at venues in the Los Angeles foothill communities.

Vocalist and comedian Arlene Nicoletti recently recorded backing tracks (arranged and performed by Steffen Presley) for her show Something Old, Something New at Flappers and other venues in the Los Angeles Fernando Valley.

Eric Walker has announced that his electronic masterpiece Tangier Dream, produced by Steffen Presley has reached number #38 this July on iTunes Electronic Charts in the UK. It also placed within the top 200 in the US, entirely with independent promotion. Congratulations, Eric!!! More on this project below. Eric has begun recording his follow up album at Song-Haven Studios, again with Steffen Presley producing, arranging, mixing and performing some of the instruments.

Brazilian songwriter/singer Ernando Novais recently completed his first song with us, the beautiful and moving Clareza Da Razao, which mixes Brazilian lyrics and rhythms with modern pop production. Ernando, who currently resides in Arizona, has wonderful things to say about how he feels about Steffen's arranging and producing of this song. We have posted these comments in our testimonials section. Presently, Ernando is recording several more songs with Steffen, including a collaboration with famous Brazilian guitarist Joao Marquee who has recorded the guitar parts in Brazil. Stay tuned for further developments!

Theatrical trained vocalist Mark Charbonneau wanted to expand his vocal capabilities and repertoire, and decided that Steffen Presley was just the producer to help him realize his goals. With a wealth of outstanding song-writer contacts, Steffen his helping to fill that repertoire with the best possible material. Just completed is the wonderful The Wind Will Blow Me Away by Brian Nassau who has also been a long time Song-Haven client. Currently, Mark is working with Steffen on a rendition of I'm Gonna Win This Fight by Glen Hoffman who recorded the original version of this song with a female vocalist at Song-Haven with Steffen producing, along with many other fine songs. Much more to come from this excellent baritone. Stay tuned.

7 Mansions, led by Satina Warner has been busy recording at Song-Haven for the last two years. Final mixes and mastering has been completed for a four song EP and pending digital release. A complete album will be released soon titled Level 3, with final mixing now underway. Assisted by her song-writing partner, electric guitarist Diz Butler, vocalist Satina have created a very original World Beat sound, consisting of powerful elements of rock, blues, traditional and modern R&B, infused with elements of reggae/ska and ethnic influences including Indian music! Produced and engineered by Steffen Presley, he is using new state-of-the-art equipment and production methods to create something truly masterful! More information soon! Check out 7 Mansions on CD Baby.

Professional world-class ballet pianist Yoshi Gurwell has completed her sixth solo piano CD (volume #6) in a series called Music for Ballet Lovers with 40 new solo piano selections, all composed by her husband Doug Gurwell. A release date for August is now set! Volume 5 in this series was completed just a couple of months ago with 46 selections from various classical composers, and is available now for purchase on CD Baby. Our new MXL R77 ribbon mic are enhancing her particular style and producing a piano sound comparable to the best pianos in the best studios in the entire world! Carolyn Presley, our art and design department head has once again created original stunning artwork which has been a big factor in Yoshi's big success with her previous CD releases! We also designed her web-site, DuoDolphinMusic.com. Volume #4 was recorded and released earlier this year as well (yes, she is unbelievably prolific!!), all recorded at Song-Haven. This collection has gradually elevated Yoshi's status in the ballet world, with each release earning her big profits!

Released last year Tangier Dream, an adventurous electronica music venture, has been enjoying big digital download and CD sales! Featuring compositions by Eric Walker (Star of George Lucas' Star Wars spinoff movie, "The Ewok Adventure" and others), this album of 12 instrumental electronica compositions was produced by Steffen Presley, who also contributed many of the tasty synthesizer bits as well as engineering the mixing and mastering at Song-Haven Studios. Currently vailable for purchase now on iTunes and Amazon, or search using the keywords; Eric Walker or Tangier Dream. Update: Eric has created three new videos with music from this album. See and hear them at YouTube. Buoyed by his recent success, Eric is currently in the finishing stages of pre-production for his next album, where he promises to "raise the bar". Towards that end, recording is set to begin very soon at Song-Haven, with producer/arranger/engineer/synth-expert Steffen Presley once again at the helm!

Camel Audio makes one of the very best and deepest of the soft synthesizers (synthesizers which run on modern computers as software), Alchemy. Recently, Camel Audio purchased four presets for this powerhouse instrument from our in house sound designer, Steffen Presley. These will be added to their sound libraries for sale in the future. Meanwhile, original and cutting edge sound design for a significant number of very high end synthesizers, hard and soft, are a significant factor towards setting our clients music ahead of the pack and getting them noticed!

The New Czars have just released their much anticipated album Doomsday Revolution on Samson Records. Core members include guitarist/producer Greg Hampton, drummer David "Chilli" Moreno; bassist Paul Ill; along with guest artist, guitarist/vocalist Adrian Belew (of King Crimson fame - one of my all time favorite bands). If you compiled a list of all the artists these musicians have worked with, you'd have a virtual who's who of rock n' roll - Alice Cooper, Lita Ford, Bootsy Collins, Buckethead, Reeves Gabrels, Bruce Dickinson, Puddle of Mudd, Courtney Love, Pink, etc.. Steffen Presley provided his expertise on synthesizers/sound-design and complex odd time signatures for some of the songs at our Song-Haven Studios. Doomsday Revolution features heavy rock songs and instrumental compositions with a distinctive progressive slant. See a review at Maximum Ink Music Magazine.

Grammy award winning engineer, Steve Pouliot (Saturday Night Fever, etc.) chose Song-Haven Studios to record the daughter of the late legendary Grammy award winning producer and hit songwriter, Freddie Perren (Jackson 5, Smokey Robinson, I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor etc.), vocalist Amy Perren, with Steffen Presley performing the acoustic piano and other instrumental parts. More information soon as this project develops.

Deke and the Blazers are a Doo-Wop vocal group from various parts of the USA who met at a Doo-Wop convention in Detroit. They decided to record an album and chose Song-Haven studios to record the project, with owner Steffen Presley producing. He prepared custom backing tracks for the songs in advance of the vocal session which took place on the last day of 2008. Mixing and mastering have been completed, with a CD release soon. Meanwhile, the group is appearing in live performances across the country. The group also just recorded a jingle with four-part a cappella vocals at our studio, presently airing on WPON in Detroit. They performed locally at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City on June 27 2009 to standing ovation! Most recently, they had a great write-up and interview for Keep Rockin' magazine.

San Francisco based John Torre has been very busy recording various projects both in his home town and here at Song-Haven studios. His most recent project is an exciting compilation of pieces by J. S. Bach, with accompaniment written by Robert Schumann. Featuring John on lead electric guitar and Steffen Presley on keyboards, drums; as well as engineering, mixing and mastering, these amazing versions are note for note true to the original composers intentions, but using modern instrumentation and recording production. The album, called The Bach-Schumann Sonatas has been completed and is available on CD Baby, and also includes his previous recordings at Song-Haven Studios; The Golden Baroque, a set of Concertos and Sonatas by several composers of the Baroque era, including J.S. and C.P.E. Bach, Georg Frederic Handel, Antonio Vivaldi and Tomaso Albinoni.

Las Vegas singer and entertainer Kiki Kalor has just launched a fabulous new web-site featuring her eclectic mix of standards as well as very unique arrangements of songs not so well known. The result is great fun! Much of her backing music as well as her CDs were done at Song-Haven Studios with instrumentation and engineering by Steffen Presley. Check it out!

Hawaiian icons The Brothers Cazimero have released 37 albums, received numerous awards, performed at Carnegie Hall, and are household names in their native Hawaii. Roland Cazimero is currently recording a solo album. As part of the production team, Steffen Presley has performed keyboards and drums on several songs, with several more in progress. Commercial release is expected sometime early next year. Stay tuned for more info!

In between doing a world tour, rock and roll legend Alice Cooper has recently recorded a new album. Headed up by producer Greg Hampton, the recording team arrived at our Song-Haven Studios where Steffen Presley added Hammond B3 organ, piano and synthesizer performances to several of the songs and is credited on the album. "Along Came a Spider" was released the beginning of August 2009 and has become Alice Cooper's biggest hit in many years, already reaching the top fifty worldwide.

On January 23, 2008, The Honolulu Symphony Chorus along with the Kamehameha Glee Club Alumni performed at the St. Teresa Co-Cathedral in Honolulu, to honor Mother Marianne Cope of the Franciscan nuns. Steffen Presley was hired to arrange the choir parts for a song composed by Sean Tiwanak and E. Napua Pa'ele especially for the occasion. Steffen created a mock-up demo using Sound Designer technology to create an artificial choir to help the real choir in rehearsals and also created the printed sheet music scores. We hope to present recordings and photos soon.

Arlene Nicoletti

The long awaited album from Ruben Burciaga's band AZLA has just been released on his own label. The CD, titled Slang is tour de force of Latin rock inspired world music. Recorded and mixed at Song-Haven studios over the last few years, the album features Ruben's melodic, dynamic and soaring guitar playing, some stellar keyboard work from engineer Steffen Presley, and a wealth of guest vocalists and percussionists. Cover art, depicted here, was created by Ruben.

Support your local music! A Sharp Music Method is a music school with a local chapter here in Tujunga. They have just released their first student albums on CD. Musicians of Tomorrow, Holiday Songs. Steffen did the recordings at our Song-Haven studios. Carolyn Presley did the graphic artwork, and Steffen and Carolyn's son, Skylar Presley is an A Sharp Music student (where he is excelling on piano) performing on the CDs. Funds from the sale of the CDs support the Young Musician's Scholarship. More information can be had at the school's web-site; www.musiclessons4all.com.

A very popular performer in his native Hawaii, Sean Tiwanak has been heavily promoting his fine world music CD, Home to Me, which was recorded, mixed and mastered entirely in our Song-Haven studios. Endless Production's owner, Steffen Presley is credited with co-producing this album, along with performing the Bass; Hammond B3 organ; alto saxophone; piano and other keyboards, as well as also engineering, mixing and mastering. The CD artwork was created by Carolyn Presley in our art department. The CD is out on the "Na Lo Productions" label. At Sean's new website (designed by Endless Productions) hometome.com you can hear selections, view information, as well as read the highly compelling story behind the album, and also purchase this CD. Reviews, press and radio are coming fast and furiously, so stay tuned for updates! Steffen also recently composed and produced a soundtrack for a video presentation for the DynaMetric company.

Ted Mattingly, an excellent Country singer, who came down from Northern California in 2004 to record a CD of songs at our studio, quickly sold out all of the CDs and has recently re-ordered to keep up with growing demand! Besides all of the engineering, Steffen played piano and alto saxophone on the recordings.

Producer Greg Hampton is working on his pet project, two CD releases of the late guitar legend Tommy Bolin. The first CD has just been released. For the second CD, Greg has brought legendary organist/vocalist Mike Finnigan to our studio to overdub Hammond B3 organ and lead vocals to one of the songs. Mike is currently touring with Crosby, Stills and Nash, has worked with Etta James, Dave Mason and notably appears on the seminal classic album, Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix, on the song, Rainy Day, Dream Away.

The Grace Design m103 mic pre-amp/channel strip has been newly installed in our rack. This device features ultra hi-fidelity and transparent sound throughout the signal chain which includes their high-end mic pre-amp, EQ and optical compressor, and includes a special mode for ribbon mics (such as our MXL R77). This recent purchase serves to offer more variety and contrast with our tried and true tube pre-amps and channel strips. We've also added more plug-ins for our Universal Audio UAD2 PCIe system (see below for more details). These include the Solid State Logic (SSL) G Series bus compressor, for that extra punch to our mixes. For mastering we added Universal Audio Precision Limiter.

2011: What's old is new again...again! Not satisfied with accurate and pristine digital reproduction? Universal Audio has been making high-end studio equipment for decades, and is currently the premiere company for powered plug-ins. Their UAD-2 PCI express system uses the high performance Sharc chip to power a range of processing power which includes super authentic modeled re-creations of a large range of classic analog gear used on many hit records over several decades. These include Universal Audio's own 1176 Leveling amplifier as well as classic analog gear exactingly emulated with powered plug-ins fully approved by the original companies such as Neve, SSL, Studer and many others! Want the exact sound of vintage analog gear from music's golden eras? We now have it and much more importantly, we know how to use it! Also in this vein, for a long time in the past, it used to be that the only kind of portable reverb a musician could have was a "spring reverb" (signal sent down rows of coiled springs). Many of these sounded great, but once digital reverb came to be with it's more realistic sound of real spaces, most of us forgot about spring reverbs. Well, the thing is, spring reverbs have a unique and very pleasing analog sound character, very useful on a variety of instruments and vocals. Finally, using today's highly sophisticated digital modeling and convolution techniques, terrific plug-in emulations have started to appear, first with Spring reverb from Softube which includes most of the limitations of the real analog units, and then later, Spring Age from Overloud, which while retaining a highly accurate emulation of three separate vintage reverb models, goes the considerable extra distance using current technology to add a host of features we could only wish we had years ago, such as variable decay time and much more. In addition, many of the new plug-ins are original creations making full use of current technology, such as Universal Audio's Real Verb-Pro, an acoustic space modeling kit which sounds incredible. Finally, I am going to start using plug-in reverb along with my highly trusted outboard gear!

2010 was about microphones, with the addition of the fabulous new MXL R77 Classic ribbon microphone. I've been using this mic in situations where maintaining the delicacy of the instrument is important, such as when recording acoustic instruments for classical music. This mic has already done a superb job of capturing clarinet, piano, acoustic guitar and voice here at Song-Haven Studios. At the other end of the spectrum, to aid our lead in establishing ear-catching and never-heard-before synth sounds for our electronica projects, we've added one of the best soft-synths on the market (for our new Apple Mac-Pro Xeon quad-core computer system), Alchemy by Camel Audio. This super synth/sampler boasts superbly controllable additive synthesis, along with spectral synthesis. Sound waves can be created from scratch or analyzed from samples, allowing manipulation of sound beyond traditional samples could accomplish. There have been several other improvements to our studio gear including replacing the entire keyboard action of my venerable Kurzweil K2500X master controller synth/sampler with an updated and superb keyboard action based on the newer Kurzweil K2600 model.

June 2009 marks the installation of a brand new main computer system; an Apple Mac-Pro with the new Intel Xeon quad-core processor. Along with that, we have upgraded to Cubase 5 from Steinberg. Not long ago Steinberg was purchased by Yamaha and they have infused Cubase with their leading edge technology. Actually, this is the third time there has been a "Cubase 5", with the last version 5 running on the old and now thoroughly obsolete Mac OS9 operating system for Apple computers (although that really doesn't seem all that long ago). With the advent of the Apple OSX operating system, Steinberg rebuilt Cubase from the ground up, and now we are once again at version 5, albeit with features, speed and capacity hardly dreamed of when the old version 5 was current. New features of interest include extremely sophisticated built in pitch correction; VST3 Convolution reverb; a drum sampling instrument which we've been loading up with our custom samples; and many more amazing features to enhance creativity and speed up work flow.

2008 began with a complete overhaul of Studio C, (the piano room). The old recording system has been replaced by a new model Apple iMac Intel/CoreDuo, running the state-of-the-art OSX 10.5.1 Leopard. Along with that is a new Alesis i0|14 audio/MIDI interface. New capabilities include recording at sample rates up to 192kHz(!) for ultra high resolution recording of our very fine Falcone grand piano. Find out more in our studio-tour section. Other studio improvements include updating to Cubase 5 providing superior DAW audio and MIDI recording and editing, along with XML export/import of music scores. In 2007 we added to our already plentiful high-end synthesizer collection with the Dave Smith Instruments; Poly Evolver. Using a stunning hybrid of real analog (!) with digital, the legendary Dave Smith claims this is a sound which cannot be acheived with "soft-synth" technology. We certainly agree with this assessment, as we are coninuing to make a major effort to provide a professional sound not attainable in small computer-run studios. As usual, instead of sleeping, we are spending the wee hours programming remarkable sound-patches no one else has anything like! See photos in our Studio tour section. Whether you are interested in fine piano recording, Surround Sound mixing, unique electronic and acoustic sounds found nowhere else, custom arrangements, stunning production or just want to record your voice. .

For those of you interested in recording in Surround Sound, Song-Haven studio now has full Surround Sound implementation in all formats up to 5.1, including 360 degree monitoring and mixing!Each channel can have it's own specific panning location within three dimensions! All panning movements in any direction can be fully automated (including specified 360 degree circular or square shapes). The possibilities for stunning 3D sound-scapes is phenomenal! Now, with Cubase SX3, Surround sound recordings can be exported in official Surround Sound file formats, including DTS.

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