Darryl Swann

Producer

Darryl Swann has had a very successful and dynamic professional career in the entertainment industry.  With broad training and experience in record production, audio engineering, programming, song writing, performance, live sound, and arranging for the last twenty years, Darryl has viewed the entertainment industry from a unique vantage point and gained a broad perspective of all its components.

He began reading the popular “Modern Recording Techniques” recording handbook at the age of nine to quench his fascination of how devices such as microphones and tape recorders work.  This technical tinkering paralleled by his growing blues and classical guitar playing technique led him to both playing lead guitar in the Ohio based garage band “The Lab Rats”, and also doing live sound for other local bands throughout his teenage years.

In 1984, Darryl and his new rock band “Haven” relocated to Los Angeles with dreams of making it big like so many other Midwest kids.  Haven did the entire L.A. circuit playing gigs with then up and comers Poison and Warrant.  This then led to a trip to London, England, and a subsequent tour of Europe to promote Haven’s independent E.P. album.

Returning back to the States six months later, Darryl began work at Silverlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles.  Ready for a new experience, he left the band and became a full-time second engineer.  His debut second engineering session was in 1986 with the hit production team LA and Babyface as they produced the hit song “Rock Steady” for R & B vocal group “The Whispers”. 

One month later, Darryl became the new night manager/ first engineer.  This was a pivotal point because it forced him to literally live at the studio learning on the “Trident Series 80B” console.  During the late nights after sessions, he would experiment with primitive drum machines and record artists for free simply for the experience and then continue for a full day of engineering for regular booked clients.

After four years, Darryl took a break from music and graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in history/modern trends.  During this time, he hosted a morning jazz show on UCLA’s radio station.

In his junior year at UCLA, he got back into the studio as a full-time engineer at Straight-Arrow Studios in Van Nuys, California.  Once again, Darryl used the dead hours after sessions to continue to cultivate his own production skills.  During this time, he wrote, produced, and engineered his first release on a major label.  This was a song on the Motown Records girl group “Pretty in Pink” featuring Chaka Khan’s young daughter Melini Khan.

Always pro-active, Darryl embarked on creating a personal musical body of work without any creative restrictions.  This soul-searching manifested into a major record deal with Sony/ Epic/ New Deal Records.  Film director John Singleton of “Boys in the Hood” fame had just inked a deal with Sony Music to fund and distribute his new record company venture.  Mr. Singleton signed Darryl’s group “Cultural Revolution” to a record deal.  Cultural Revolution was a rootsy-urban collection of featured artists similar to British soul group “Soul 2 Soul” meets “Arrested Development”.  John Singleton then placed Cultural Revolution’s single “Nite & Day” in his next film “Poetic Justice” featuring Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson.  Darryl then goes on to establish a twelve week audio engineering school at Paramount Studios to both give back and scout new talent.

Beginning in 1997, Darryl begins writing and producing with Macy Gray.  Macy had just been released from a recording contract with Atlantic Records where she recorded a rock and roll album.  Darryl, Macy, and a few fellow musicians go into a demo studio one night, and the next morning come out with the first version of the smash hit “I Try”.  This demo is immediately placed in two movie soundtracks, and subsequently gets Macy’s deal momentum rolling into high gear.  Over the next three months, Darryl and Macy end up with fifteen solid “demos”, all of which go on to become the multi-platinum selling album “Macy Gray, On How Life Is”.

Darryl proceeds to produce her second album, “Macy Gray, The Id”.  Unfortunately, this album was released seven days after Osama Bin Laden leveled New York’s World Trade Center towers.  Darryl then continued to produce a number of other major release albums, many of these receiving critics’ choice approval.

Darryl Swann has also been developing a music-related video-game geared for the Sony “Playstation 3” and the Microsoft “X-Box 360”.

It has been an ongoing tradition for Darryl to give back what he has received by always allowing recording studio “runners” and interns to participate in the recording process of all projects he works on.  Over the years, Darryl has developed a very systematic but extremely intuitive method of producing and recording records and at this time has a strong desire to share these techniques and concepts with a new breed of up and coming audio alchemists.