nickreederacademic

Creative Work and Collaboration

Overview of my collaborations – Technical and Creative

This section outlines two decades of creative work involving independent audio production (the Plant Recording Studios, Nick Reeder Studios), songwriting, acoustic design, and the collaborative fieldwork, research and music production that I did as an ethnomusicologist and popular music scholar – which included international ethnographic projects. During this period I tried to use my studio and media production skills in service of the music communities I was studying, and I also tried to maintain connections with and help facilitate projects among groups of talented people I had the fortune to work with.

Table of Contents

Independent Audio Production: Nick Reeder Studios

After attending recording school at California Recording Institute in San Francisco, my career in audio production began at The Plant Recording Studios, one of California’s most iconic facilities (home to Santana, Metallica, Fleetwood Mac. etc). While assisting on sessions, I started working with local artists and writing music. A pivotal early collaboration was with the band Dryspell, as singer John Morris and I worked together on a bunch of projects and in 2004, started Aqueduct Records, a boutique label supporting independent releases, including a feature film soundtrack, singer-songwriter EPs, and an album of my original songs.

Between 1997 and 2001, I worked on a wide range of audio projects, first at The Plant Recording Studios in Sausalito CA, and later through Nick Reeder Studios at 1745 Market St. in San Francisco CA.

I have recorded and mixed projects across genres like gospel, jazz, hip-hop, rock and R&B, and contributed original sound design and post-production for film, web, and branded media.

Clients have included:

  • MC Hammer
  • E-40
  • Martin Obeng
  • Luce
  • Steve Kimock
  • Resin
  • Stroke 9
  • Universal Studios
  • The San Jose Community Choir
  • Jeff Stevenson

Acoustic Design & Embodied Learning

My interest in building things by hand began as a carpenter’s assistant in high school, and from doing maintenance and carpentry at Cragged Mountain Farm, a summer camp in New Hampshire where I worked summers from my late teens and into my 30s, leading outdoor trips (and playing and singing a lot of music with kids). In retrospect, these short, intense leadership challenges in the wilds of Maine and New Hampshire set me up well for the challenges music production.

Mi interest in acoustic design and studio construction initially fueled by necessity: I learned that if you do not have a neutral sounding space to record and mix you can’t do it accurately.

Therefore my carpentry skills came in handy as I designed and built two full control rooms: the first at 1745 Market Street in San Francisco, and the second inside a log cabin while teaching at Lake Tahoe Preparatory School in 2003. Using SpectraFoo room analysis software, I built frequency absorbers and diffusers to optimize the studios’ sonic environments.

As I got better at the technology, I moved to Nashville for a short stint in 2004 to work with Three Trees Music, building custom acoustic panels and engineering sessions at a new residential studio owned by musician Bucky Baxter (pedal steel for Bob Dylan, Ryan Adams).

While I don’t claim to be the most brilliant engineer or the most efficient carpenter, my persistence in these mechanical areas has made me a much better producer and mixer, more cognizant for example, of the different frequency ranges at which particular instruments and voices need space in which to breathe.

These experiences, which as an educator I describe as embodied learning, have solidified my belief that hands-on skill development is essential for all learners, especially when paired with social and emotional learning components. I like to teach students about the history of intellectual, philosophical and scientific discourse about the body/mind dichotomy because I think it is important to resist efforts to simplify embodied learning as merely bridging the “physical” and the “intellectual.” In practice, learning is always integrated, and separating body from mind often overlooks the needs of non-verbal, kinesthetic learners and reinforces systemic inequities.(See my AIM Teaching Philosophy for more on this.)

Also, I have had a long term fascination with cognitive science and I have been drawn to writers and mentors in the humanities like Forrest Gander who incorporate the natural and behavioral sciences in their work.

https://literaryarts.brown.edu/people/forrest-gander

I’ll never forget the first day of a Poetry, Mind, Body seminar I took with Forrest when he marched us directly to the morgue at the Brown med school to put our hands-on dead bodies (if we chose).

— Shapiro, 2007: Leitan & Chaffey, 2014 – Swinburne Journal Contribution

As a dynamic domain of research, embodied cognition investigates, in multiple ways and with multiple aims, the claim that the body is directly involved in cognition.”

Songwriting & Collaborations

While learning to become a producer or engineer, I also became songwriter and performer. At Northfield Mount Hermon School, I studied New England poets like Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson, sparking a lifelong love of verse, and I subsequently began writing poems while studying Proust, Joyce and Faulkner with Arnold Weinstein at Brown as an undergraduate.

In my late twenties, while producing bands in San Francisco, I recorded my original songs with some of the musicians I worked with in the studio. The Nick Reeder Band album was a collaborative effort, recorded at multiple Bay Area studios, overdubbed and mixed ant Nick Reeder Studios and mastered by Justin Weis (my mentor from California Recording Institute) at Trakworx Studio—where we also recorded and filmed the Potluck Opera project in 2008.

Featured collaborators included:

  • Shelby Gaines
  • Chris Daddio
  • Joe Lewis
  • Patrick Cress
  • Bruce Kaplan
  • Kate Regan (in memoriam)
  • Paulo Baldoi
  • Greg Anderson

[🎧 Explore the Nick Reeder Band on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/artist/6IOY41IVnHJLyFUq5gf00q)

My interest in Brazilian Portuguese also emerged from these songwriting efforts, from several projects I engineered in the Bay Area with Brazilian musical and church groups, and as a way to expand my poetic and musical vocabulary.

In graduate school, I continued to write songs and poems, translate poetry from Portuguese while taking classes with poet Forrest Gander and to compose new songs. Some of this material was recorded in Boston in 2009 with a new, East Coast version of the Nick Reeder Band, though never formally released due to my academic commitments.

Still, songwriting remains a core part of my creative identity, influencing the way I teach, collaborate and tell stories.

International & Ethnographic Projects

Kwaku Obeng – “Africa’s Moving Forward” (2014)

Co-engineered with Jim Moses at Brown University Studio

My interest in ethnomusicology began while managing staff housing at a ski resort, where I lived among Brazilian seasonal workers (one of the buildings I managed was essentially an international youth hostel). It was there that I befriended several Brazilian students whose warmth, humor, and passion for music sparked my fascination with Brazilian culture. Having recently stepped back from a demanding career in audio engineering in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was drawn instinctively to the beauty of the Portuguese language and the complexity of Brazilian musical traditions.

This cultural immersion deepened at Brown University, where I studied Ghanaian drumming under Martin Obeng, a master percussionist whose music and mentorship shaped my sense of rhythm and improvisation. I had taken some music classes as an undergrad at Brown, so I had a great network there to reconnect with after working in the music business. Working with Martin and Jim Moses, who teaches recording at Brown and was one of my mentors there, I co-engineered Africa Is Moving Forward, a studio album of Martin’s original compositions blending traditional Ghanaian music with many other styles. This project allowed me to contribute technical expertise while learning from rich Afro-diasporic musical traditions, an experience that continues to shape both my scholarship and parenting (my son now plays drums and percussion in middle school jazz band and orchestra).

As a scholar of music technology, I also became attuned to how the aesthetics of improvisation and community-based music-making have directly shaped the evolution of recording and performance technologies.

During pre-dissertation fieldwork in Bahia, Brazil, I partnered with local Afro-Brazilian musicians to document, record, and exchange knowledge in informal studio environments. These collaborative efforts emphasized mutual respect: I offered engineering and recording services in exchange for access and insight into the Afro-Brazilian percussion traditions and broader religion of Candomblé, Axé music, and other Afro-diasporic musical traditions. I also paid for as many drumming lessons as I could take!

One of the most meaningful experiences was studying with master drummer Gabi Guedes, who welcomed me not only as a student of rhythm but as a participant in sacred ceremonies. His mentorship profoundly shaped my understanding of ritual, diaspora, and music’s role as a living, spiritual force.

These lessons now inform how I teach West African, Afro-Brazilian music and other Afro-diasporic in the classroom. During my pre-dissertation fieldwork in Bahia, I had the extraordinary opportunity to study Afro-Brazilian drumming with master percussionist Gabi Guedes. Raised in the renowned Alto do Gantois temple alongside Iyalorixá Mãe Menininha, Gabi embodies the spiritual and musical lineage of Candomblé. He not only welcomed me as a student of rhythm, but also invited me to participate in ceremonies, experiences that reshaped my understanding of sacred music, diaspora, and cultural transmission. I later wove these lessons into my university-level Introduction to World Music course, where students explored Afro-Brazilian drumming as both musical form and social practice. Through participatory workshops and guided listening, we studied the cultural contexts of rhythms, using them to explore broader questions of ritual, identity, and resistance. This approach encouraged students to see music not simply as sound, but as a living, communal act of memory, resilience and connection across continents.

Teaching Through Collaboration

Jeff Stevenson and the Potluck Opera – “After You Fell” (2009)

As part of my master’s work at Brown University, I received special permission to submit a hypermedia thesis that combined media (on a DVD) with interviews with musicians, written scholarship, documentary film, some stuff I coded so I could hyperlink texts , music videos, etc.

The project focused on the students’ musical compositions, performances, and related social and technological phenomena, or techno-culture. I supported them by recording their performances and helping them distribute the material through digital platforms for promotional use (ethnomusicology encourages participant observation and applied ethnomusicology, reciprocity and service to the communities being studied.

A year later Berklee composer Jeff Stevenson and I went to San Francisco, He wanted to collaborate with local musicians, including members of the Berkeley Community Orchestra, to stage a big piece he had written. We organized a performance event called the Potluck Opera, hosted at a club run by my friend Joe Lewis. Artist Nik Ayers painted a mural on-site, featuring some of the orchestra’s musicians.

We documented rehearsals and performances, capturing a vibrant fusion of classical and jazz players. Later that weekend, we also recorded studio sessions with several of the night’s groups at Trakworx Studio, filmed by my skiing friends from Lake Tahoe (we would film ourselves at resorts in exchange for free tickets and generally liked to play around with the cameras.)

Although the full documentary remains unfinished, we produced and shared high-quality audio and video mixes with the musicians as part of our shared commitment to creative exchange and community-centered collaboration.