Hurst Sound Studios

Drums first.
Everything else followed.

I have been playing drums since I was five years old. Guitar came later and is still catching up; keys are the next thing on the bench. Somewhere along the way the microphones stopped being a means to an end and became the hobby — cabinet placement, room sound, the mix. This is where that work lives.

Hear the recordings YouTube channel (opens in a new tab)

Formerly Hurst Audio Productions. Same work, new address.

What this is

Not a portfolio in the professional sense — nobody is hiring me to mix their record. It is the honest pile of things I have made or preserved: original recordings, a good deal of AI-generated music, a 1982 single my mother sang that existed nowhere on the internet until I put it there, and a broadcast music archive that took years to complete.

Everything here is either mine, made with someone I know, or archived because it was about to disappear. Where it is somebody else’s work, I say so.

  • 01

    Recordings

    Programmed drums, tracked guitars, and mixes done the long way round.

  • 02

    AI Music

    From the first weeks of Suno to full albums on the streaming services.

  • 03

    The Weatherscan Archive

    All four discs of the in-house library, plus Trammell Starks’ three.

  • 04

    Joy Coleman, 1982

    A 45 cut in Mississippi, sung by my mother, and traced back forty years later.

  • 05

    The Studio

    The kits, the guitars, the amps, and the software behind all of it.

  • 06

    Accessible Production

    Making a DAW talk — OSARA, SWS, and my Linux port of OSARA.

Start here

Three tracks that between them cover most of what this site is about: something played, something generated, and something rescued.

“Winter”

An original with Kyle Frownfelter. I programmed the drums and mixed it; he played guitar and bass.

Original recording. Watch on YouTube (opens in a new tab).

“Blind Visionary”

One of the first things I made with Suno, back when it had only just appeared. A rap track, which is not where anyone would have guessed I’d start.

Generated with Suno AI. Watch on YouTube (opens in a new tab).

“The Man You Used to Be”

My mother, Joy Coleman, on the A-side of a 45 pressed in 1982. Transferred from the original vinyl.

Transfer from the original vinyl. Watch on YouTube (opens in a new tab).

Where this is going

The recording side of this hobby has been about capture for a long time — get a good source in front of a good microphone and stay out of its way. What interests me now is the other direction: building the sound rather than catching it.

  • Sound design. Synthesis from first principles, and designing a sound to fit a purpose instead of hunting through a preset list.
  • Instrument modeling. What actually makes a modeled cabinet or a physically modeled drum convincing, and where the models still give themselves away.
  • Production technique. Arrangement, bus structure, and the parts of mixing that are decisions rather than plugin settings.
  • Keys. Learning piano properly, as a third instrument rather than something I poke at to find a chord.

More about the background →