Our resident session drummer Dylan Wissing is playing on the title track and lead single of Alicia Keys‘ latest release “Girl on Fire” with Nicki Minaj.The recording took place in June at Alicia’s personal Manhattan studio (and that’s a pretty sweet place…). The great Ken Lewis was engineering, with Indie Studio Drummer’s Matt Teitelman assisting on the drum teching. As of this writing the album is #1 on iTunes, and the single is on radio charts all around the world. Check out the video:

Another recent session was for Fabolous and his track “SoNY,” adding old school funk fills. More work with Ken Lewis (Matt T. assisting), for Hip Hop producer extraordinaire Just Blaze. Fairly high-pressure session, as I was on the road with Blues/Soul singer Kirsten Thien when the call came in.  It was a mad dash to get back to the studio from the final show in Maine, and a sprint to get the kit miced, the parts learned, and the tracks sent to Ken.  The song was on the radio about three days after our parts were sent.  Check out the video, with some powerful footage from Hurricane Sandy:

On a completely different side, recently tracked the song “Wouldn’t Be a Merry Christmas” with Grammy-winning producer Steve Addabbo (Shawn Colvin, Suzanne Vega) for artist Elizabeth Chan.  Elizabeth is featured on Morgan Spurlock’s show Failure Club. Her debut EP “Naughty & Nice” hit #4 on iTunes Holiday Music chart, with the single in iTunes Top 25.

Indie studio Drummer’s Dylan Wissing has been on tour for several weeks this year with Blues/Soul sensation Kirsten Thien. In May, Kirsten and the band (an amazing group of musicians and people, with David Patterson on guitar, and Erik Boyd and Johnny Pisano sharing the bass chair) travelled across the US to Washington State. The band travelled to Europe in October for an amazing sixteen days of shows. Here’s live footage from a date opening for the great Dickey Betts.

After Hurricane Irene destroyed our former studio last year, we’ve spent a good part of the year building our fabulous new Triple Colossal Studios in Hoboken, New Jersey. Happy to report that, once the water receded and power came back on, our families, homes, studio and vehicles were all completely unscathed by this year’s Hurricane Sandy! Sad to say that the same can’t be said of a good deal of our beautiful little town – thousands here (and all over the region) lost everything. Please help support Rebuild Hoboken to bring this town back to life.

It’s been a great year so far (with a couple weeks of hurricane madness) at Indie Studio Drummer, with more amazing and inspiring projects coming up. Contact us if you need drum tracks for your project, and we look forward to working together!

Apparently the Kanye West / Jay-Z track “Power” I played drums on is prominently featured on the show “Gossip Girls!”  If, like everyone here at Indie Studio Drummer, you are dying to find out just what happened on the episode, it’s chronicled in exhaustive detail here:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2010/10/gossip-girl-recap-the-greatest-aphrodisiac.html

Never a dull moment with Blair, Juliette, and Serena!

The job on the Indie Studio Drummer end was to exactly recreate the original sample underlying the tune, a funky and obscure old soul track with lots of cymbals and percussion. Hard work, and extremely meticulous, but damn fun.  I listened to A Tribe Called Quest’s brilliant record The Low End Theory about a zillion times in my youth, so it’s a personal thrill to play on a track with Q-Tip, too!