WHY SONICadVENTURES?
SonicADventures is privately owned by a couple of professional musicians/educators who actively perform, teach, record, and produce both classical and jazz music for the past twenty-five years. Our hand-picked musical instruments for audio production include vintage tube and modern solid state microphones and outboard gear, mic preamplifiers, small format mixing consoles, and mastering level analog and digital recorders, along with powerful AVID Pro Tools HD3 system with custom PRISM MEDIA and GENEX AD/DA converters and clocking. We have selected all these instruments very carefully after years of thorough private listening tests, comparisons, repairs, and mods. We simply prefer their sound characteristics for our productions since vast majority of our projects we work on include classical, jazz, and/or combination of various chamber acoustic music performances where utmost detail and depth of the listening experience is of most importance.
Our studio is equipped with the industry standard Protools HD3 recording system and TC Electronics M6000 mastering effects system as 95% of recording studios worldwide use for both tracking and post production. This makes it easy to exchange files among studios World-wide.
We are capable of providing reliable, battery backed up on-location recording & tracking services for chamber acoustic music projects and most live performances.
Our home studio features a $32,000 valued Steinway & Sons certified Boston 6' 7" grand piano in superb condition as well as well maintained vintage Fender Rhodes electric piano along with amps by Ampeg and Polytone. It is a descent space to record small group of musicians successfully when performing acoustic music.
We have had some twenty-five years of experience in recording both stereo and multi-track performances and mixing for clients from the European Union, United States, and Canada. You can be assured that your project is in very good hands.
BACKGROUND INFO
I have been fond of music for as long as I can remember. My first classical piano lessons had started when I was five and shortly after that I joined a children's choir in my home town to further enhance my musicianship. This was an auditioned group consisting of very young and talented students and a rather competitive environment to be part of. We had performed and traveled regularly within Central Europe and I had stayed a member until my early teens when my voice finally started to change.
In my third year at the Janacek Conservatory of Music in Ostrava (former Czechoslovakia), where I studied classical piano and music theory, I began recording my first jazz combo rehearsals and live performances. It was at that time when I was selected to become a part time accompanist for the percussion department as well as the time when the Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia took place. It was us, the students, who had helped change the system from hard core communism to democracy and it took only about six weeks. I was in the middle of all those events along with my peers, helping our voices to be heard in public since all media were still under the control of the communist party in late 1989. It was also then when I got my feet wet when attempting to learn how to improvise and study various Jazz styles, and when I started to perform professionally with local bands for pay, and began writing tunes in jazz idiom and first contemporary classical chamber music compositions, while practicing and working on my piano skills for about 10-hours every day to further enhance my overall musicianship skills. Those were great times full of hard solitary work in the practise room, but also full of hope for better future.
For the past two plus decades I've been repeatedly asked to mix and master various audio sessions for my close friends and clients from the EU region which has led me into exploring this field on a professional level and helped me experience areas of music production most musicians never have a chance to witness up close. My wife and partner in this endeavor Andrea has been very helpful in supporting me and my passion for capturing sounds of music and therefore deserves full recognition. Thank you!
My first job teaching at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri in the early 2000 included a recording arts element as part of my load. I was in charge of all faculty concert recordings in addition to teaching jazz oriented courses and directing jazz ensembles there. My passion for recording arts has continued to grow and culminated in 2012 when I was signed to the New Port Line label of Prague, Czech Republic to produce five jazz albums for them and later releasing my sixth album on Lukas Oravec label of Brno, Czech Republic. On my albums you can often hear outstanding American jazz soloists of today such as John Riley on drums (Vanguard Jazz Orchestra), Donny McCaslin on tenor saxophone (David Bowie and Maria Schneider Orchestra), Joel Frahm on tenor and soprano saxophones (Brooklyn based virtuoso musician), Paul Bollenback on guitar (Joey DeFrancesco Trio), Rick Margitza (Miles Davis' tenor saxophonist), and as of late Bob Sheppard (Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Natalie Cole), and Ed Soph (Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, Joe Henderson). These collaborations have proven to be very promising for my upcoming future carrier as a music producer, jazz pianist and composer, as well as music mixer and mastering engineer, therefore I'm very thankful for the great friendship, support, and opportunity given by Petr Marek, owner of the New Port Line label. Big thanks go also to my colleague and our audio engineers Dan Gonko and Jim Elenteny at WCU, who both have been willing to accommodate my needs during each tracking session as I prefer to use my own microphones and preamps as much as possible.
And so here we are in mid 2019. I feel good about the future of music and art form of jazz regardless of the shortcomings we as musicians are faced with in today's digitally oriented download world of hardly paying streaming media services and young generation of listeners who are accustomed to free music, courtesy of youtube/Google and the likes. May true art prevail though and may we as humans find a way to support true artists well into the future because without art what is the point of living? (last updated July 2019)
Here is a short list of most recent mixes and masters of my clients album projects:
"Drifter Days" by Daniel Bulatkin.
"Movin' Spirit" by Lukas Oravec.
"Light of Blue" by Lukas Oravec Orchestra. Nominated for 2021 Slovakian Esprit Award.
"Seven Last Words" by Adam Booker. You can read a review of it here.
"Sperkasa" by Marek Dorcik. You can learn more about it here.