Onyx Lane is a boutique full-service music production and artistic planning company with a focus on composing, recording, producing, and mixing music for film scores and classical ensembles. They are based in Oklahoma City, OK but travel all over the world when recording on location.
Founded by Christina Giacona and Patrick Conlon, Onyx Lane has extensive credits and provides services for projects in a variety of mediums including album recordings, film, television, installations, and live performances.
“We're really fortunate to get to work with so many incredible artists and be a part of their musical journeys... Wouldn't have it any other way!”
What types of projects are you currently working on?
This next month is a little crazy in the best possible way, but also a pretty good picture into the musical code-switching that we do on a regular basis.
Right now we're working on doing the dance compositions, orchestrations, and arrangements for a new musical that will be premiering in March in Farmington, New Mexico based on a sort of fantastical imagining of what might have happened at MGM in-between Gene Kelly starring in The Three Musketeers and shooting Singin' in the Rain. Really cool switches between golden era Hollywood fight scenes (major Korngold vibes) and jazzy, Singin' in the Rain / Summerstock tap, dance, and ballad numbers.
Tomorrow, we'll be producing and engineering a session we contracted for our friend Brian Byrne at his composing and recording studio in Purcell, Oklahoma.
Later in the week, we're recording, producing, and score mixing an orchestra and choir track for a feature film with the awesome people at Green Pastures Studios.
Then, two weeks from now, we're working with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic and recording/producing a classical violin concerto for an album for composer Jonathan Leshnoff featuring the Berlin Philharmonic's concertmaster Noah Bendix-Balgley.
Three weeks out, we're in the composing hole for a commission called Solid, Liquid, Gas that'll be premiered in April by the Oklahoma Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, and then at the end of March we're in Canada performing and teaching masterclasses for a music festival at Brandon University put together by my fellow Canadian Dr. Catherine Wood.
We're really fortunate to get to work with so many incredible artists and be a part of their musical journeys. Wouldn't have it any other way!
Why did you choose the Gypsy Cafe Sample Library?
We Sound Human really came up clutch for us with the Gypsy Cafe library. We were working on a really sweet short film with a family-friendly Western vibe. Most of the cues were in the action/comedy/western world that sample libraries with some live overdubbing do really well, but there was one temp reference track towards the end that was a straight-up hot jazz, Quintette du Hot Club de France - Stéphane Grappelli / Django Reinhardt style cue.
One of my first three cassettes that I stole into my room when I was 3 or 4 was actually a best of Quintette du Hot Club de France compilation, so I've grown up obsessed with that style and absolutely love it.
The issue is that for this film there really wasn't the budget or the time to write out an original chart, hire a five-piece, record it, mix it, and then submit it to the director especially since this would be an underdub (meaning we're doing a live recording without final cue approval). BUT we still wanted that sound, and we were determined to do it one way or another.
Finding the Gypsy Cafe library from We Sound Human ended up being the perfect match, since what we were able to do was basically remix the song structure, mute a bunch of the solo guitar licks, and add in a live jazz fiddle part.
Once we had the chart down, Christina recorded me improvising, and then we went back in and moved things around a little more so the fiddle became the primary voice, then tracked the fiddle licks and solos through our Grace and Millennia preamps.
Finally, to get everything to sound like it belonged together, we gave everything a more vintage feel through a bunch of plugins, put everything in a room together with some Liquidsonics Cinematic Rooms reverb, and mixed and mastered it through an analog signal chain utilizing an 1176LN, two LA-2As, a Shadowhills Dual Vandergraph Compressor, Manley Massive Passive EQ, and Neve Portico II master buss processor.
What you'll hear in the tutorial video are the unmastered track stems.
"So what would have been a 3-4 day affair (writing out charts, contracting, recording in a studio, auditioning and editing, mixing, and mastering) became a half day project AND we had the flexibility to easily revise it to match the final cut of the film."
If you'd like to find out more about Onyx Lane, and I absolutely suggest you do, then check them out on their Facebook Page or Website.
Explore the sounds of Gypsy Cafe!
Travel back to the old country where the soft glow of flickering candlelight lit your way to the band of gypsies serenading the moon at the gypsy cafe. Enjoy this vast collection of old time romanticism in the modern age.
Traditional sounds of the mandolin, gypsy jazz guitar, accordion, wine glasses together with modern instruments like electric guitar, bass and drums gives you that old world vibe your tracks crave. The entire library is hand-crafted and has been painstakingly woven together from a mixture of Gipsy Jazz, Parisian, and Italian music to create the perfect combination of old meets new.
Explore your bohemian side and discover the hidden world of the gypsies.
- Includes: 5.2 GB (9 kits) gypsy jazz music samples.
- Styles: Gypsy Jazz, Parisian, and Italian sounds.
- Instruments: Mandolin, accordion, guitar & more.
- Drums: Grooves, multitrack, loops & one-shots.
- Sounds like: Moody and upbeat swing rhythms.
- Crafted for: Composers, producers, musicians.
- Formats: All music DAWs, loop & editing software.
- Price: $69