Ryan Foltz has a degree in Music from Cleveland's prestigious Case Western Reserve University. He has worked in the audio industry professionally since he was a teenager, doing both studio engineering and live sound. As a professional musician, he has also spent a lot of time on the other side of the desk playing drums, trumpet, mandolin, tin whistle, dulcimer, guitar, bass, organ and more...
Ryan opened the first version of Cleveland Audio in 1997 in an unused part of a radio station, recording on 8-track analog. He never stopped recording, but learned a lot along the way as house engineer at every major Cleveland venue (at one time or another), occasionally rubbing elbows with some legends, both on stage and at the desk. Ryan has been around the world many times as a musician, a mix engineer and a monitor tech. The studio has morphed and grown over the years into a very capable mid-level facility with a long client list and many great records to its credit.
Ryan has extensive experience recording and producing all types of music, Cleveland Audio primarily centers on the band-type recording scenario from heavy music to trad country and everything in between, but Ryan is studied and practiced in the minimal microphone techniques required for classical and jazz recording and can also accomplish this type of production with a very high level of skill.
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RYAN ON THE "LIVE VIBE"
A recording should be a reflection of the thing recorded. Yes, of course, you say. Obvious, but there is a lot to that statement. All performances have their inconsistencies, flaws, and sometimes outright flubs. It is human to do so; even the best performers in the world could never exactly duplicate a performance. It's just not possible. An engineer/producer's job is to accurately reproduce a performance, but also flatter the source a bit. In the context of recording a band, the best case scenario is to capture these inconsistencies as "excitement" rather than "wrong".
Breaking it down that way seems a bit clinical, but attention to detail is important when deciding whether a performance is "sloppy and exciting" or just "sloppy". Great records have "slosh" to them. Musicians anticipate... and then sometimes they drag... they push and pull and sometimes barely hold together. They crash a scale out of excitement. They rush a fill and then "pregnant pause" before the big chorus. These things are "wrong", but if you fix all of them really bad things happen. Your record gets "square" and sad. Boring. Precise maybe, but no fun at all.
This isn't to say there's any excuse for stuff that's just "wrong". Poor musicianship is just bad no matter how you slice it (unless you literally slice it and make something good out of it... what's up danger mouse!). The good news is the modern set of recording tools gives a good engineer great flexibility to "save" great takes from that one (or three) fatal flaw(s). The trick is not to go too far!
Records should have a bit of "Big Pink" to them. An explosive quality; well-executed but almost off-the-rails. Tunes should feel new and fresh and exciting to EVERYONE: the band, the engineer, the listener... everybody. This is the quality bands generally want when they say "live vibe" to me. They want that slosh. What they think they want is to record all live all at once all in one room, and I'm into that (and it works sometimes)... but what they really want is a "real" sounding record... and to me, there's no other kind.
