With over 30 years experience as a recording engineer, producer, and performing musician, Brett William Kull brings unparalleled skill and experience to any recording project.

 

Greetings all, so yep, I make music.

 

For me, making music =

(1) coercing notes, rhythms, or lyrics from some sort of device or human/animal,

(2) recording these tonal or atonal sounds and

(3) making them “shake hands” with each other in a variety of audible ways.

 

I try to get out of the way of music and let it flow. It’s not easy getting out of the way because people (including myself) tend to complicate things with over-thinking or pretending/adding overwrought pretense to art. We see this tendency from the poles of every musical style dichotomy. In my work, I try to get rid of the annoying pretense as best as I can and focus on what is being said with your/my music. I don’t care if the song is a # 1 hit or a song you wrote for your cat – I actually understand how to write a song for a cat better than a #1 hit. Nobody knows what a number #1 hit is. If a person claims to know how to write a #1 hit ... run, don’t walk!

 

With that said, I do know when something feels right, good, and manages to hit that chord of joy, sadness, anger, or any other emotional color. I get out of the way when those moments happen. When I say "get out of the way" I mean doing my job in a transparent way. My job is to record a performance without stifling it. Yet within this open door of allowing for emotional freedom comes a weighted understanding of concepts and terms such as: pushing and pulling the beat, sitting in the pocket, dissonance, consonance, inversions, theme and variation, the Nyquist frequency, phase relationships, microphone characteristics, the proximity effect, comb filtering, rarefaction, the precedence effect, pitch relationships, dithering, voicing, harmony, hertz, decibels, and a zillion other little things that frankly should be mandatory for anyone claiming and getting paid to record audio/music.

 

I started recording on a two track reel to reel in 7th grade. That’s when the music bug bit me. It was a pain in the ass to record multi-track stuff back then. You either had to buy a 4-track cassette tape machine, a very expensive multi-track machine…or go to an expensive studio. I remember going to a studio for $100 an hour just outside of Philadelphia back in the mid 80s. This was one of the less expensive places to go. The engineer was disinterested, aloof, and hated my questions. The recordings (which I still have today) sucked. That experience and many others in the mid and late 80s prompted me to invest in a 16-track tape machine for myself. I think it cost me $6000…. But it was worth every penny. It forced me to start really understanding recording and songwriting.

 

It was partially because of that machine that my band (echolyn) got signed to Sony Music back in 1993. I got to work in some world-class studios in Nashville for four months, absorbing everything I could learn. As a session guitarist, over the next 10 years, I got to work in Nashville a couple times as well as in NYC, Philly, and other top notch places in the North East. I was able to learn from some of the best engineers and producers around and see WHY they were better than most: It’s because they care about their craft and they care about the projects they work on. I have not stopped learning and still scratch my head with wonderment at the shit I still don’t understand. It’s a beautiful thing and keeps me inspired to figure out how things work and the best way to accomplish tasks.

 

I love making music and creating little masterpieces of emotion. I’ve recorded thousands of songs with countless artists. Every one of them had 100% of my energy and focus. I love what I do and have a ton of experience doing it. Give me a shout if you have something cool you want to record.