While a formidable country songwriter and arranger in her own right, Suzy Bogguss’ voice is the centerpiece of her sonic offering. Anyone who’s heard it once will immediately recognize it on a subsequent listen—heartfelt and pitch-perfect, with just a touch of lonesome smoke. Suzy’s been in the game a while, now, having scored a string of top ten singles in the 90s, including “Outbound Plane,” “Drive South,” “Hey Cinderella,” “Letting Go” and, most notably, “Aces,” The title track of her platinum-selling 1991 album. All told, three of her albums have raked in gold album status, and to date she’s moved a total of three million copies and taken home awards from the CMA, ACM, and the Grammys.

She’s not one to hang up her hat on such accomplishments—nowadays, Suzy plays a lot of shows, and somehow finds the time to run her own label, Loyal Dutchess—which has allowed her complete creative freedom and ownership of her material. Her latest full-length, Lucky, illustrates the benefits of having set out on her own. Lucky finds Suzy reinterpreting classics from none other than Merle Haggard. The admittedly sparse, acoustic instrumentation allows Suzy’s aforementioned voice—and the stories it tells—to drive the entire record. And as anyone who’s listened to Merle Haggard knows, the story is what matters most.

Suzy’s Nimbit store is packed with no fewer than nine full-length records, including a Christmas album and a greatest hits compilation. She’s also taking advantage of the platform’s Calendar feature, and from the looks of things she’s pretty booked up through late April. If she rolls through your town, she is not to be missed.

• Click here to keep up with Suzy on Nimbit.
• Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.

Well, Mark Williams is back from Chicago, and is pleased to report that The Cold Waves music festival was a smashing success. The show was attended by nearly 2,000 people, and thousands of dollars were raised for Hope for the Day, a non-profit movement dedicated to utilizing music and the arts as a defense mechanism to suicide.

Mark recorded the entire show via the new StudioLive RM32AI, and the recordings have been mixed and polished by Jason Novak and sound great. They’re now available for purchase on Nimbit! All told, there are 12 full sets to choose from, broken down by artist, and there’s also a compilation CD featuring songs from all involved, and Cold Waves t-shirts up for grabs. You can also click here to get the 4-song Cold Waves sampler promo, absolutely free! Proceeds from the Nimbit sales of the show’s recordings will also be going to benefit Hope for the Day. These are exclusive, can’t-get-’em-anywhere-else-not-even-Bitorrent tracks! You can get any track for $0.99, the price for a band’s entire performance is relative to the length of their set, but is always a better deal than buying each track individually.

The lineup was a great mix of stalwart lifers like Front 242 and Die Krupps, and new blood like the Author and Punisher and Youth Code. The full roster includes:

• Die Krupps
• Front 242
• Surachai
• Caustic
• Author & Punisher
• Cyanotic
• Acumen Nation
• Cocksure
• Youth Coda
• SMP
• Aaimon
• Fear Factory

We’re not done with Cold Waves just yet, by the way. We’re in the process of editing together the whopping 60 gigs of video Mark brought back from Chicago, which includes interviews, live performances, and I imagine a surprise or two. Stay tuned!

• Click here to keep up with Cold Waves on Nimbit.
• Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.

Dave Coffin‘s involvement in the music biz started when he was very young, potentially even prenatal—he was born into a supportive family who raised him in an environment rife with classical music, and you know what they say about kids who hear Mozart while in the womb.

As Dave grew up a little, his aptitude for music was clear, and said supportive family encouraged his musical leanings by buying him a strat for his ninth birthday. Despite having been raised on the classics, Dave found himself drawn more toward mohawks than powdered wigs, and wound up cutting his musical teeth on punk rock.

While his parents may not have been able to sway him from Green Day, Dave Matthews (yes, that Dave Matthews) did. After hearing the siren song of DMB, Coffin cashed in the strat and amp for a Martin, and the rest is history. He wrote and recorded acoustically for six years before pulling up stakes from Maine and shipping up to Boston for college, where he majored in Ellis Paul with a minor in Patty Griffin.

Dave’s Nimbit store offers two four-song EPs and the 2010 full-length, The King is Dead. The Dave is alive, fortunately, and so are many of his session-player friends, who joined him in the studio to make their mark on Dead, and it sounds great as a result. Dave’s earnest performance, songs, and sincerity probably helped a lot, too. Give it a close listen, and you may well be able to hear a streak of politically-charged punk rock attitude here—buried quietly somewhere in the songwriter’s heart, and no longer worn on a safety-pinned sleeve.

• Click here to keep up with Dave on Nimbit.
• Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.

Kid Pan Alley

Like Nimbit, Kid Pan Alley is all about empowering people through music. But unlike Nimbit, Kid Pan Alley is quite an analog affair, and targeted to a suitably younger demographic evocative of the outfit’s name. KPA was founded some 14 years ago by Paul Reisler. His vision is to instill musical creativity, teamwork, and confidence in folks by getting them rolling early—while they’re still impressionable youngsters.

It’s working—and it’s not just kids who are taking notice. To date, the organization has fostered 2,500 original songs that have been performed by over 35,000 children. Some KPA projects have included world-renouned artists including Delbert McClinton, Sissy Spacek, Cracker, Amy Grant, Kix Brooks, Raul Malo, Suzy Bogguss, the Nashville Chamber Orchestra—and the organization sports recognition in the way of  Parents’ Choice and NAPPA Gold awards, 6 ASCAP Foundation awards and a Grammy nom.

This recognition and growth is due in no small part to the key element that that separates Kid Pan Alley from a lot of other youth music programs: the children are writing their own songs. Paul finds that kids are better collaborators than most adults—perhaps because they’ve yet to “develop” the sort of ego and self-importance we associate with a lot of adults; creatively, kids’ malleable brains are not yet bound by the rules-based blinders of adulthood. These children are encouraged to produce in an off-the-cuff, fun spirit—and even quieter kids are seen to light up like Christmas trees at the opportunity to contribute to a song.

KPA’s Nimbit store offers collected works from no less than 13 region-specific Kid Pan Alley residencies, as well as four collections, including the Grammy-nominated Kid Pan Alley Nashville, and the perhaps misleadingly-titled Unreleased Favorites. 

Kid Pan Alley is Kids’ music, by and for kids—and once you’ve heard it, you may begin to feel that there’s something a little sideways about the notion of children’s music being written by adults.

Interested in getting Kid Pan Alley rolling in your neighborhood? Click here.

• Click here to keep up with Kid Pan Alley on Nimbit.
• Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.

Adam Ezra Group

It’s been a good couple years for Boston’s Adam Ezra Group. They’ve successfully engineered a brand of country rock that is simultaneously rootsy and forward-thinking. The formula is paying off, as the band were the worthy recipients of the 2013 New England Music Awards “Band of the year,” and also earned “Album of the Year” and “Song of the Year” from the same committee in 2012.

Ezra and his six-piece Group are the kind of guys who are more than just pro musicians. They’re the sort of rare-blood all-or-nothing types who truly believe in music as a force for change. That’s well in-line with what we’re about here at PreSonus and Nimbit—so, hats off, guys. When not touring and recording, all of the guys are activists and community leaders, whose efforts include volunteering for relief effort in Kosovo and practicing environmental geography in South Africa.

While they’ve demonstrated a reliable and consistent recording output—ten full-length albums since 2000—at the end of the day, Adam Ezra Group is all about the live experience. Their impassioned performances have drawn deserved comparison to guys like Bruce Springsteen, and have found them touring in quite good company: Rusted Root, Jason Mraz, Goo Goo Dolls, Blues Traveler, Los Lobos, and Dwight Yoakam, to name a handful.

AEG is currently touring with a StudioLive 24.4.2 and recording their live shows for release, so when you see them live be sure to scream real loud so that you can hear yourself when the recordings are released!

From a marketing perspective, Adam Ezra Group’s Nimbit store is full of good stuff—their offering includes four full-length releases and a couple singles. But they really shine in the merch department, including nearly a full wardrobe of Ramble-themed apparel. One notable non-wearable offering: custom purple beer coozies! In terms of non-Ramble Adam Ezra merch, there are no fewer than nine custom t-shirt choices available, stickers, and my personal favorite—AEG temporary tattoos! Furthermore, they’ve got their concert calendar kept completely up-to-date, so give it a gander and see when you can catch Adam Ezra Group when they roll through your town—looks like they’ve got a handful of east coast shows booked at the time of this writing.

• Keep up with Adam Ezra Group on Nimbit here.
• Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.

Bim Skala Bim

Ska is one of those musical forms that, like surf rock, relies heavily on a fairly strict set of rules. It’s difficult to stray to far from the established formula and still sound like a ska band. Get too far off, and it’s not ska anymore. Play it safe, and you sound just like everybody else. I tell ya, it’s hard out here for a rude boy.

But Bim Skala Bim, formed in Boston in 1983, has managed to avoid either pitfall entirely, by adding a modicum of rock ‘n’ roll and—perhaps surprisingly, calypso—to their two-tone infrastructure. The result? I dunno. Call it four-tone, maybe. But whatever it is, the guys must really love it, as they’ve been at it for 31 years. In that time they’ve toured with homies The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Dropkick Murphys, and dropped nine full-length albums, most of which are available on Nimbit.

Oh, and it’s not just the band that loves what they do. Bim Skala Bim was a major force in launching third wave ska in the first place—or was it the third place—and about million bands followed their lead well into the 1990s. Furthermore, hometown pride is strong in The City of Champions, and they’ve decorated BSB liberally with no fewer than 10 Boston Music Awards and eight Boston Phoenix Reader’s Poll awards, and they’ve been recognized by Boston Magazine’s “Best of Boston” twice. In March of 2013, Boston Business Journal rated Bim Skala Bim’s Bones as album #19 in their “Boston Top 40 Albums of All Time” list.

Their Nimbit store is full to the brim of albums dating back to their early days, and also includes a rarities compilation and a few singles. Perhaps most notable is 2013’s Chet’s Last Call, featuring the band’s original lineup revisiting the roots that got the band—and a lot of fans–skanking in the first place.

• Click here to keep up with Bim Skala Bim on Nimbit.
• Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.

Ska is one of those musical forms that, like surf rock, relies heavily on a fairly strict set of rules. It’s difficult to stray to far from the established formula and still sound like a ska band. Get too far off, and it’s not ska anymore. Play it safe, and you sound just like everybody else. I tell ya, it’s hard out here for a rude boy.

But Bim Skala Bim, formed in Boston in 1983, has managed to avoid either pitfall entirely, by adding a modicum of rock ‘n’ roll and—perhaps surprisingly, calypso—to their two-tone infrastructure. The result? I dunno. Call it four-tone, maybe. But whatever it is, the guys must really love it, as they’ve been at it for 31 years. In that time they’ve toured with homies The Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Dropkick Murphys, and dropped nine full-length albums, most of which are available on Nimbit.

Oh, and it’s not just the band that loves what they do. Bim Skala Bim was a major force in launching third wave ska in the first place—or was it the third place—and about million bands followed their lead well into the 1990s. Furthermore, hometown pride is strong in The City of Champions, and they’ve decorated BSB liberally with no fewer than 10 Boston Music Awards and eight Boston Phoenix Reader’s Poll awards, and they’ve been recognized by Boston Magazine’s “Best of Boston” twice. In March of 2013, Boston Business Journal rated Bim Skala Bim’s Bones as album #19 in their “Boston Top 40 Albums of All Time” list.

Their Nimbit store is full to the brim of albums dating back to their early days, and also includes a rarities compilation and a few singles. Perhaps most notable is 2013’s Chet’s Last Call, featuring the band’s original lineup revisiting the roots that got the band—and a lot of fans–skanking in the first place.

• Click here to keep up with Bim Skala Bim on Nimbit.
• Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.

Like Nimbit, Kid Pan Alley is all about empowering people through music. But unlike Nimbit, Kid Pan Alley is quite an analog affair, and targeted to a suitably younger demographic evocative of the outfit’s name. KPA was founded some 14 years ago by Paul Reisler. His vision is to instill musical creativity, teamwork, and confidence in folks by getting them rolling early—while they’re still impressionable youngsters.

It’s working—and it’s not just kids who are taking notice. To date, the organization has fostered 2,500 original songs that have been performed by over 35,000 children. Some KPA projects have included world-renouned artists including Delbert McClinton, Sissy Spacek, Cracker, Amy Grant, Kix Brooks, Raul Malo, Suzy Bogguss, the Nashville Chamber Orchestra—and the organization sports recognition in the way of  Parents’ Choice and NAPPA Gold awards, 6 ASCAP Foundation awards and a Grammy nom.

This recognition and growth is due in no small part to the key element that that separates Kid Pan Alley from a lot of other youth music programs: the children are writing their own songs. Paul finds that kids are better collaborators than most adults—perhaps because they’ve yet to “develop” the sort of ego and self-importance we associate with a lot of adults; creatively, kids’ malleable brains are not yet bound by the rules-based blinders of adulthood. These children are encouraged to produce in an off-the-cuff, fun spirit—and even quieter kids are seen to light up like Christmas trees at the opportunity to contribute to a song.

KPA’s Nimbit store offers collected works from no less than 13 region-specific Kid Pan Alley residencies, as well as four collections, including the Grammy-nominated Kid Pan Alley Nashville, and the perhaps misleadingly-titled Unreleased Favorites. 

Kid Pan Alley is Kids’ music, by and for kids—and once you’ve heard it, you may begin to feel that there’s something a little sideways about the notion of children’s music being written by adults.

Interested in getting Kid Pan Alley rolling in your neighborhood? Click here.

• Click here to keep up with Kid Pan Alley on Nimbit.
• Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.

Check out this video for a ton of musical kids who are equal parts adorable and confident:

[This just in from John Taglieri from Dawg Pound Studios!]

Hey there, I’m John Taglieri from Dawg Pound Studios. Based in Hanson, Massachusetts, our studio boasts a 200 square foot live room full of drums, vintage amps, a ’64 Hammond, and close to 30 mostly-vintage guitars and basses to choose from. Our control room is full of great digital and outboard gear to help make sure we capture the music as accurately as it is performed—and make it sound amazing. I’ve produced close to 20 CDs for myself and clients, and as an engineer/producer have had two Billboard charting CDs (a #74 and a #112), a #1 single on Amazon, a total of 11 top ten singles on Amazon & iTunes, as well as a Best-Selling Alternative EP on iTunes. The studio has been touted as having a great-sounding live room, and a control room that sounds true. What you hear at the mix area is what it sounds like out in the real world as well.

One thing I’m proud of is that we use a lot of PreSonus gear in the studio. When I had my studio at its old location in New Jersey, it was very piecemeal. I started really working with PreSonus when I moved the studio to Massachusetts three years ago. I did the studio build from scratch and wanted the best gear that I would feel comfortable with. The room didn’t exist, so I worked with an acoustic engineer to get the design right, got some help from Auralex to tune it, and then chose PreSonus for workflow, live room monitoring and control room mixing. Currently I’m using the following;

• a StudioLive 24.4.2 mixer
• a FaderPort
• StudioOne Professional 2
• Four HP4 headphone amps in the live room
• an ADL 600 preamp (Coming soon!)

For my latest EP, Days Like These, we had a great and fun situation. We assembled top musicians from all over the country, including Kenny Aronoff (John Mellencamp, John Fogerty, Michelle Branch), Rich Redmond (Jason Aldean, Ludacris), Alan Bowers (Rachel Allyn), Chad Cunningham, as well as myself on drums. We also got Lee Turner (Darius Rucker) & Eric Ragno (Kiss, Alice Cooper) on keys and Greg Juliano on bass. Keith LuBrant, Joe Gilder & myself handled guitars, and we used writers from the US & Australia.

Tracks were cut in eight different studios around the country, as well as at Dawg Pound Studios, and on all different DAWs. We then used DropBox to get the .WAVs to Dawg Pound Studios, where Studio One Professional 2 was used to assemble and mix all the tracks. Dozens of tracks were done in-house as well as sent in. All songs started at my studio with acoustic guitar, vocals, and click tracks, and ended with final mixes. The workflow was effortless. Working with Studio One and my FaderPort, mixing was a great experience. I had just added the FaderPort to the system and I can’t tell you how much it streamlines mixing. It makes subtle mix, pan and FX moves far easier than using my trackpad. I run a tricked-out Mac Mini with a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. We must have done something right because the EP debuted on release week on the Billboard Independent Album chart at #112, which was quite an honor.

Running PreSonus in my studio has brought my studio up to a level of quality that I can truly be proud of. I am putting out sounds rivaling any other studio thanks to the quality of my inputs, the workflow, the ease of mixing, true quality stock plugins, great preamps, and I know my clients love the custom monitoring setup in the live room during tracking. Stop by the studio’s website and Facebook and check us out!

• DawgPoundStudios.com
• facebook.com/DawgPoundStudios

It’s been a good couple years for Boston’s Adam Ezra Group. They’ve successfully engineered a brand of country rock that is simultaneously rootsy and forward-thinking. The formula is paying off, as the band were the worthy recipients of the 2013 New England Music Awards “Band of the year,” and also earned “Album of the Year” and “Song of the Year” from the same committee in 2012.

Ezra and his six-piece Group are the kind of guys who are more than just pro musicians. They’re the sort of rare-blood all-or-nothing types who truly believe in music as a force for change. That’s well in-line with what we’re about here at PreSonus and Nimbit—so, hats off, guys. When not touring and recording, all of the guys are activists and community leaders, whose efforts include volunteering for relief effort in Kosovo and practicing environmental geography in South Africa.

While they’ve demonstrated a reliable and consistent recording output—ten full-length albums since 2000—at the end of the day, Adam Ezra Group is all about the live experience. Their impassioned performances have drawn deserved comparison to guys like Bruce Springsteen, and have found them touring in quite good company: Rusted Root, Jason Mraz, Goo Goo Dolls, Blues Traveler, Los Lobos, and Dwight Yoakam, to name a handful.

AEG is currently touring with a StudioLive 24.4.2 and recording their live shows for release, so when you see them live be sure to scream real loud so that you can hear yourself when the recordings are released!

From a marketing perspective, Adam Ezra Group’s Nimbit store is full of good stuff—their offering includes four full-length releases and a couple singles. But they really shine in the merch department, including nearly a full wardrobe of Ramble-themed apparel. One notable non-wearable offering: custom purple beer coozies! In terms of non-Ramble Adam Ezra merch, there are no fewer than nine custom t-shirt choices available, stickers, and my personal favorite—AEG temporary tattoos! Furthermore, they’ve got their concert calendar kept completely up-to-date, so give it a gander and see when you can catch Adam Ezra Group when they roll through your town—looks like they’ve got a handful of east coast shows booked at the time of this writing.

Keep up with Adam Ezra Group on Nimbit here.
Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.

Drum Corp International:

Well, this is a refreshing a change of pace from the typical Artist-of-the-Week. Up this time around is Drum Corp International, AKA DCI to those in-the-know, which now includes you.

Were this the usual singer/songwriter or rock band, this is the part where I would talk about where they are from, or their musical influences, or key band members. But how do I write about an organization made up of multiple bands, comprised of talented folks from all over the world?

I can’t, except to say that contemporary drum corp is the torchbearer for a richly storied tradition with origins in American and Canadian military history that goes back to the first world war, with competitive circuits really coming into their own by the 1960s.

Drum Corps International formed in 1972, and is the non-profit governing body for junior (under-21) drum and bugle corps in the US and Canada.

Over at the DCI Nimbit store, once can download a metric tonne of live competition performances from prestigious venues like the Alamodome and University of Akron’s InfoCision Stadium. Recordings contain championship performances from some of DCIs brightest and boldest. You can also grab a DCI hoodie or a DCI SNOWFLAKE CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT, just in time for… September?

Last but not least, you can get DVD and Blu-ray recordings of the 2013 and 2012 world championships, as well as the cutting-edge DCI Essentials collection, which includes top performances from DCI performances of yesteryear; up-converted to HD with a 5.1 audio mix. DVD is a great way to go, as drum corp is a highly visual medium.

Incidentally, PreSonus is a proud sponsor of DCI wunderkind The Blue Devils, who recently took first place at the DCI annual championship. Not only did they win, but they got the highest score ever in the history of DCI competition—a 99.65. They’ve been using PreSonus StudioLive AI Mixers and Loudspeakers in their performances for a little under a year, now, and we’re proud to have been a part of their prestigious victory. Check out a detailed overview of their set up at: musiced.presonus.com/fieldaudio

Click here to visit DCI’s Nimbit profile and get some epic recordings!

Ellis Paul:

In the film “Lemmy,” a wonderful biopic of Motörhead’s iconic frontman, Slash (of Guns’n’Roses fame) paints an abrupt picture of reverence when describing the film’s namesake. It goes something like this: “I’ve known a lot of ‘rock ‘n’ roll’ personalities, and the ones that I admire, and the ones that I’m drawn towards, are the guys that are… f***in’… the real deal. People who live, sleep, and breathe rock ‘n’ roll.” Compare that to this quote from a guy who’s not in Motörhead or Guns’n’Roses, and doesn’t play rock ‘n’ roll so much as folk: Ellis Paul. “I’ve got a car with over 4​75​,000 miles on it, and it’s my third road vehicle,​” Paul declares. “I’ve been doing 200 shows a year for over twenty years. There isn’t a town in the country where I won’t find a friend. I’m a nomad. And I’m gonna write and play until I’m gone.” Real-deal? Well, if that doesn’t sound like the real-deal lifestyle of someone who puts the “true” in “troubadour,” than I don’t know what to tell you. While Ellis claims to live in Charlottesville, VA., it seems pretty clear to me that he lives on the road. Ellis was rather inadvertently introduced to the guitar when a sports injury knocked him out of commission and he needed something else to do. He took to songwriting almost immediately, and was soon playing Boston-area gigs, and turning Boston-area heads. Over time his songwriting matured through a healthy twin-obsession with both Woody Guthrie and musical narrative, garnering a couple of local songwriting contest wins, releasing his first record, Say Something, in 1993. And somehow, when not on the road (and when is that again?) Paul finds the time to record, and at the time of this writing has released EIGHTEEN more albums—including two volumes of his childrens’ album series, The Hero in You—and culminating in his latest, Chasing Beauty. He’s also landed placements in some A-list Hollywood films, including some Farrelly brothers hits. If you appreciate the earnestness of Cash and like your guitar served up with a side order of great story, you owe it to yourself to listen to Ellis Paul. Closely. Click here to visit Ellis Paul’s Nimbit profile and get his latest, NINETEENTH album, Chasing Beauty.

How many people do you think play guitar? Probably too many. So I understand if you don’t get excited when I write “here’s another guitar player.” But hold up.

Fact is, not many of them play guitar like Neil Zaza, a man compelled to broaden the range of the instrument’s expressive power and bring it to the masses. Whenever I find myself starting to get board with the ocean of guitar available in popular music, I throw one of Neil’s tracks on, and I hear a mission statement. He’s like a six-string missionary. Call it Telecastervangelism.

The mission statement, as I hear it through his music, goes something like, “Hey buddy, you thought guitars were boring? Think again, because I just figured out THIS.” And then my mind blows, and I fall in love with the guitar all over again, and then I press “repeat.” The heavy focus on melody and advanced technique, found here, may be enough for the average shredder. Neil’s secret weapon, however, is his genre melting-pot, which brews up such disparaging amalgams as classical and funk.

Makes sense, as the man has educated himself in all of the above. He studied classical guitar at the U of Akron before moving on to teaching, and in 1987 formed the eponymous band Zaza. Zaza’s Zaza toured until 1992, and Neil has been on a steady solo gig ever since, releasing five solo records amidst international touring. He’s also landed signature guitar deals with both Cort and Carvin. With his monster chops and ever-growing list of credentials, we were confident that Neil was the right man for the job when we tasked him with recording the guitar samples that are included in Notion and Progression.

It turns out his solo records are available on his Nimbit store, and if you take a close look at his store, there’s some unorthodox cool stuff going on over there. For one, you can get Zaza T-shirts in every color the rainbow forgot. Furthermore, Neil still teaches, and makes several of his coursework’s backing tracks available, as well as his Live DVD, “Live on Crooked River Groove.”

Not too shabby for a kid from Akron. Keep up with Neil Zaza on Nimbit, and ride his guitar into the future.

Interested in Nimbit? Sign up for free here.