Beech Tree News Network

If you take Hwy 31W north out of Bowling Green, and travel for about fifteen miles then hang a left for a few minutes, you’ll find yourself in a small community called Chalybeate.  Once there, you’ll find a Dollar General, a Baptist church, a cabinet shop and a cutting edge recording studio.

Darren Doyle is owner, producer and engineer at Studio DD, an impressive five-room studio situated at the edge of his front yard.  In the cul-de-sac where Doyle’s house is situated, there are adjacent homes belonging to his uncles and his grandparents.  “We call it the family compound,” he says, then grins at the reference. 

Each Sunday after church, the entire extended family—all fifty-two of them now—meet at the grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner.  As long as Doyle can remember, there have been two constants in his life:  family and music. 

Doyle’s earliest memories include music.  His mom and dad and many in their extended families sang in gospel groups.  There was always music in the house.  Darren, as a youngster, picked out tunes on the piano that his great grandmother bought for him, an 1880s model, now housed in the studio.

“I was the dorky kid in the way,” Darren says of those early days.  The dorky twelve-year-old quickly came into his own though, and by his eighteenth birthday, he was touring with The Crossmen, a gospel quartet that landed twelve dates at The Grand Ole Opry, in Nashville. 

After three years with the Crossmen, Doyle joined the southern gospel group, Perfect Heart.  The group did 250 dates per year, virtually living on a Silver Eagle tour bus.  Success came quickly for the group.  Their very first song became the Southern Gospel Association’s song of the year. 

As a traveling musician, Doyle found that more and more he looked forward to the recording facet of the industry.  “At every session, I would latch on to any willing engineer or producer and worry them to death,” he remembers.  “There were a couple of them who saw potential in me and took me under their wing.”  Eventually, the draw of recording was too much for him to resist, and Darren began spending every spare dollar he could come up with on recording equipment.

When Doyle left the group, Perfect Heart, he joined up with an eclectic group of musicians who formed the band, Dry Land Fish.  Their music was anything but gospel, which might seem like a bit of departure for Doyle, but it was really a natural evolution for a guy who grew up listening to his parents’ recordings of sixties and seventies bands like the Beatles and Chicago. 

Playing dates with Dry Land Fish in the evenings, meant construction jobs during the day.  Saving the scrap lumber and carpet pieces the companies threw away, Doyle was able to build a recording studio of his own.  “I started with this,” he says, as he pulls out an eight-track unit that fits neatly on his lap.  He used the unit during the time that he worked out of his house while his studio was a work in progress.  “My wife (Debbie) put up with a lot of crap,” he says in deference to her tolerance.

The hard work and patience eventually paid off—in a big way.  Studio DD is an amalgamation of sight and sound that lends itself to the creativity of the amateur and the professional alike.  The studio opens to a room fitted with retro-sixties furnishings, complete with red and black couch and Formica kitchen table with vinyl-cushioned chairs.  Elvis swivels his pelvis on the wall next to Cincinnati Reds and UK basketball memorabilia.  Doyle’s dad, holding an infant Darren and a vintage Gibson guitar, stares out from a photo near the door that leads to the rest of the studio. 

The same guitar hangs on a wall with several others (My friends when no one else will talk to me, Doyle calls them) in a room that houses the piano on which Doyle learned to play as a child.  Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker face off above the ivory keys.  The piano is home to other action figures from his childhood as well. 

Behind the drum kit, in a room designed for actual performance, is a mural of a Peyote.      The mural is a nod to his grandfather (his dad’s dad), who carried a sterling lighter sleeve etched with the image of the bird, which he called a thunderbird.  When Darren asked his grandfather about the bird’s significance, the patriarch said, “Whatever you do, you ought to do it with thunder.”  That sounded like a good philosophy to Doyle, who adopted it as his own, using the image of the bird on the Studio DD business cards. 

Doyle works with many singer-songwriters who don’t know the ins and outs of getting musicians together.  That’s where his expertise comes in.  He plays guitar, bass, drums and keyboards himself—yeah, he’s that guy—and finds specialty musicians as needed.  He then produces and arranges the material into a recording.  (Doyle has also set up a publishing company.)

In the control room, Doyle, surrounded by state-of-the-art equipment, brings up a sixteen-track recording of Carry On Wayward Son (Kansas) that he has arranged and performed himself.  It is an a cappella version—Doyle sings all of the parts.  The tone is pure, the lines are clean, the harmonies unbelievable.  The production sounds flawless.  Doyle is simply demonstrating the quality of the product his studio releases.  The flawlessness is subsequent, a predictable outcome of, not just talent, but hard work.  After all, it is the standard Doyle has set for Studio DD.

[Contact information for Studio DD:  Darren Doyle, (270) 791-8930,  www.studioddrecording.com] 

Story by Cheryl Hughes, Beech Tree News