Music

Stranger Sounds at Big Nice Studios in Lincoln

Big Nice Studio encourages bands to dig for weird and wonderful music

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Brad Krieger gives bands just enough pizza and let’s them take the kayak out before a vocal take. He is a jack-of-all-trades musician and is probably the best band therapist in Rhode Island. All that and more is what his Big Nice Studio is bringing to the table and, whether bands know it or not, it’s just what they need.

After helping to build and establish Hanging Horse Studio in Norwood, MA, Rhode Island native Brad Krieger was looking to branch out and start a studio all his own. He comes from a history of growing up in the Rhode Island music scene. Since a property in Lincoln with the largest live room he could find caught his attention in late 2015, Brad has been working to make this studio a place all his own.

Brad has been a performing musician for many years, but it was a series of small steps that brought him to the world of recording. “Like a lot of millennial musicians, I started recording my own music when I was younger with programs like Sony Acid and Garage Band, and the passion just grew from there,” he says. A BFA in Sound Design and Audio Production from Emerson College pushed Brad to seriously pursue studio work.


With his “little bit of a lot” approach to musicianship, Brad works to inform whatever he helps to create. Along with Chaimes Parker, engineer Jared Detsikas and house drum aficionado Lee Preston, Big Nice works to capture the sound of bands in a post-genre age.

“Genre music seems a bit outdated,” he says, “and more and more I find that artists are creating work that reflects the grab bag, all access, internet and social media world we all inhabit online.”

With the same basic rock n’ roll set-up to work with most of the time, it is interesting to think that with the proliferation of sub-genre after sub-genre, Brad might be tapping into what is actually the absence of genre, replaced by sounds that simply are what they are without any need of explanation. Brad and his partners are in search of quality sound and getting the best out of what a musician has created. They encourage their artists to push boundaries, try new instruments and stray out of their comfort zones all while maintaining the integrity of the music and what made the band create it in the first place.

Regardless of where a band places themselves on the sonic map, artists seek out Big Nice for the sounds they bring out of people. This past month, Big Nice wrapped up recording the new Rice Cakes record and Brad is hoping that the studio will become a bigger part of the “weird and wonderful” Rhode Island music scene.

“I try to push people far outside their comfy musical boundaries with the caveat that if it totally sucks, we’ll trash the idea and move on,” Brad explains. That’s what an artist does; she or he creates. A producer, a band therapist and a musician all enter into a space where the art becomes something new and exciting. It is not static. In the mind of the musician it is a freeform, malleable thing that hopefully will reach an unseen potential, a place where it is no longer just a riff and some verses, but a challenged piece of music.

A good studio makes what we hear and hey, if it sucks, they move on and create more. What more could an artist ask for?

Big Nice Studio 
25 Carrington Street, Lincoln
BigNiceStudio.com

big nice studios, brad krieger, hanging horse studio, Emerson COllege, Chaimes Parker, Jared Detskias, Lee Preston, providence, lincoln, providence monthly

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