The Peluso Community
Jeff Oehler & Beehive Productions
My interest in making music and recordings began as a teenager while living in St. Louis, MO, the birthplace of Miles Davis and Chuck Berry. I bought a cheap used Fostex reel-to-reel 8-track and went to town recording myself and friends. Creating and recording all sorts of useless noise was great fun and it ultimately pushed me to take it more seriously.
Jeff Oehler Producer & Engineer:
I headed to Berklee College of Music in Boston and then on to the New School College of Jazz & Contemporary Music in New York City. During my time in New York I had exposure to the inside world of major labels while working for EMI Records and GRP/Impulse. I quickly became disenchanted with the realities of the big corporate music scene and grew determined to devote myself to the support and development of independent artists.
Along with my partner Susan Bibeau, we formed Beehive Productions in 1996 out of an interest in grass-roots artist development. We built our first studio in the Adirondack Mountains of Northern NY State, creating a relaxed and open environment for artists to come to for weeks at a time to work on writing, performing and recording. That space was a massive turn of the century industrial building converted to a residential studio and workspace. It was there (inspired by the sounds I knew from so many Columbia 30th Street recordings) that I developed an interest in the use of ambient sound and developed my own techniques for capturing inspired performances while constantly modifying and utilizing the presence of dynamic room acoustics.
Currently, I often travel to produce folk, rock & jazz recordings for independent albums & artist development projects, as well as live recordings for broadcast media like Folk Alley.com and NPRmusic. I still strive to endlessly create unique acoustic settings for every project.
Jeff worked with us at Peluso Microphone Lab to develop the ‘MSC’ or Mid-Side-Custom mic design we offer with our P-49 and 22 251 models. This MSC design takes the original side address LDC microphone format and adds an extra end address capsule within the original headgrille. The result is a microphone that is perfect to do video recording with a singer songwriter. The added end address capsule is oriented to capture the performer’s vocal while the native side address capsule is oriented to capture the instrument work. With the side address capsule set to bi-directional mode, the vocal source will be in the null point. The final result is a phase coherent, stereo image with individual control over vocal and instrument. And… it looks great in the videos!