COVID has hurt live music in Lexington, but what about the recording studio?

When all manner of live music performances are shut down in the face of a global pandemic, what happens to the environment where songs and sounds are created for posterity – namely, the recording studio?

For veteran Lexington producer, engineer, mixer and all-around studio chieftain Duane Lundy, making music in a COVID-19 world has traveled down to two avenues.

“Well, there’s ‘How I thought it would affect me’ and ‘How it did affect me,’” said the owner of the Lexington Recording Company, which was known for several years as Shangri-La Productions. As the operator of his own studio, Lundy has overseen recordings by myriad local artists (Justin Wells, Abby Hamilton), national acts (Miles Nielsen, Joe Pug) and some that are a hybrid of both (Vandaveer, Horse Feathers).

“I was midway through a couple of projects and then finished a couple of others,” said Lundy. “Being an engineer and producer, obviously this put most things to a halt. So there was a little bump in the road. At one point, I thought, ‘Uh oh, this is going to be a real problem.’ There were a few weeks of uncertainty and I guess there’s still a little bit of that all the time in the music industry.

“But my gig, essentially, is a top-to-bottom situation where I’m involved in the entirety of the recording scenario. Fortunately for me, when I first started, I learned from some great mixers how to mix my own projects. So at the point when this happened, I was able to finish some projects that in were completion mode by using my mixing skills. Then I was fortunate enough to get other offers from people I didn’t produce who wanted me to mix their material, so I stayed busy.”

Mixing music offered another advantage in terms of logistics and distancing. Since many of his studio clients are from outside Central Kentucky, Lundy was accustomed to mixing without the artists being in the studio with him.

“Rarely are the artists here. About 80 percent of my work is done with artists not from this region and, in some cases, not from this country. So mixing has been one of the upsides to the digital world. We are able to get files and projects from place to place without any kind of physical handoff. I love it when the artist is here, but it’s just not always a viable situation. I work on keeping them very involved with each step of my mixing, but without them necessarily being here.”

Realities of the COVID environment are still felt, however, especially since the world of recorded music and live performance are so closely linked. Lundy said the pandemic has underscored longstanding defects in a music industry business model that dictates an artist makes a recording and then tours to promote it. Touring also happens to be the primary source of income for artists and, in turn, the means to pay for a record to be made in the first place.

“When the relaxing part of the situation we’re in now hits and/or when there is some sort of resolution, artists are not going to have time to record because they’ve got to go out and earn,” said Lundy. “Contradictory to the way I think a lot of people may view creatives (artists), I find them to be some of the best small business and mid-size business owners there are. They’re very in touch with their financial scenario and how their infrastructure is going to run. So one of my hopes was that there would be a call to get material done or at least in motion now so that when everything does relax that they would have their material recorded and ready even if it wasn’t immediate to come out. It would be something that maybe in six months or nine months, a year, two years down the road would come out. They would be releasing material because they would be in revenue producing mode again. So I fit into the scenario by trying to facilitate that and finish a project as they are gearing up to go back out to earn.”

As with many aspects of the pandemic and their effect on all forms of commerce, uncertainty looms. In a business model where artists receive meager recompense for recorded work, hardship is inevitable.

“It definitely points an arrow at the most vulnerable parts of the industry - in any industry, really. This is a unique situation we’re seeing now. If you are not physically able to sell or perform or make your hamburgers or whatever you create, if you’re not able to do that, then you can’t earn.

“It’s a real shame the way the music industry is set up in regard to that. There are areas where people listen to music, whether it’s in a movie, commercial, a TV show, through a streaming service or on your turntable. Somebody should be paying for that stuff. There is an incredibly disproportionate relationship between the people making the music and the amount of money they’re earning from that. It’s sad. This should have been a time where musicians especially, even at the mid-size level, should be able to see, at a minimum, a trickle of what’s coming in their accounts. Artists are seeing less than pennies on the dollar coming in for material they have paid to have made, that they have spent a lifetime honing their craft to do.

“My great fear coming out of this is that there won’t be a correction of payment, of equitable resources being put towards the intellectual properties and the material that these artists are putting out. It’s a tricky landmine of an industry.”