“I played my first show in three-and-a-half years back in June so I’m really just getting started,” Reed said. “I was out of doing anything in public for those years. It was tough. It was basically having years stolen from you, so it felt great to get back into playing live. When you start back up after having shutdown for that long, you feel a bit creaky, but it worked fine. Everything was great.”
Watch Preston Reed perform “Love in the Old Country” live on stage:
Home studio sessions
Reed released his debut album, “Acoustic Guitar,” in 1979. He has released 16 other albums, including “Metal” (1995), “History of Now” (2005) and “In Here Out There” (2013).
“I’m currently writing music and working on my next album,” Reed said. “I’m kind of old school about wanting to work in a recording studio. I like having to do takes for the engineer, who is behind the glass window, but I don’t have that luxury these days. There’s no one around where I live in Scotland who has that kind of skill level, unfortunately, so I’ve been building my own studio for a couple of years.
”
Reed never saw himself exploring home recording, but he has been pleasantly surprised with the results.
“I do the front end of things here with some good microphones, a good Mac and Logic Pro software,” he said. “I’ve always been a technophobe, but I had to learn it. It was quite a huge leap for me to have to learn how to use software but it’s not so bad once you finally get into it. It’s not as difficult as I thought so I’m pretty happy about it.”
Credit: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
Credit: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
A digital world
Reed has also embraced streaming music.
“All of my albums are available on Spotify, Apple Music and all those places,” he said. “That’s actually an important royalty income stream for me each month.
While Reed enjoys the flexibility of digital recording and the immediacy of streaming music, he admits he’s not as savvy as many modern musicians about other technical advances.
“The world of tech and social media is moving so fast,” he said. “Every musician is just throwing themselves at Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. In the old days there was the phrase from academia — publish or perish. Today’s musicians think if they don’t post several times a day, they don’t exist at all. It’s hard to get a feeling of how you fit in, so you pretty much have to start throwing yourself at it as well.”
Contact this contributing writer at 937-287-6139 or donthrasher100@gmail.com.
HOW TO GO
Who: Waynesville Music Guitar Series presents Preston Reed
Where: Waynesville Music, 198 S. Main St., Waynesville
When: Friday, Oct. 6 at 7 p.m.
Cost: $25 in advance and at the door. The concert is sold out.
More info: 513-897-0602
Artist info: www.prestonreed.com
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