Axon Entertainment's Recording Studio featured in the Azle News Fine Arts Issue.

The Cabin

Written By Bob Buckel
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Copyright 2009, The Azle News. Reprinted with permission.

If God had his own recording studio, this is what it would look like.  In fact, this one is His.  “It’s God’s studio, not mine,” says Chuck Ebert, CEO of Axon Entertainment.  Axon is a full-service sound and recording consulting business located at 1510 Riverbend near Azle.

Ebert, a Grammy award-winning sound engineer and producer, has built his dream studio inside a metal barn on four-and-a-half acres behind the log cabin where he and his wife, Katy, live.  It was a six-year effort, but to hear the sounds this gifted musician and technician can record there makes it all worthwhile.  “A lot of people helped me,” Ebert says. “The floors were donated, the doors where donated – it’s all so we can do God’s work in here.”

“Basically if your music is positive or Christian I’ll work with you.”  Ebert has recorded many Christian artists – he has twice been nominated for Dove awards along with his seven Grammy nominations and one win, in 2002. He has worked with James Blackwood, the Light Crust Doughboys, Don Henley, Sting, Brian Setzer, the Dixie Chicks, Craig Chaquico, Denver Moore and Kris Kristofferson, among others.  But he’s never been in a better studio than the one he has built right here in Azle.

The 2,400-square-foot studio inside walls and ceiling are finished out with logs that Ebert and friends put up themselves, along with acoustical panels. All the materials are natural – there’s even a plan to power it all with wind-generated energy.  The logs lend a unique look to the high-tech environment of a studio. But Ebert loves what they do for the sound.  “It’s a very efficient way to break sound up, to get it naturally reflecting and refracting in the room,” he says. Acoustically, the tracking rooms are very “live” and bright, since the repeated rounded surfaces help control the sound.  “I’ve been in a lot of studios over the years and have helped design them as well.  I know what works and what doesn’t.” he says. “This one combines the best of elements for a natural sound.  It’s music to the ears!”

The main tracking room is big, 800 square ft, with a Yamaha concert grand piano sitting at the side. The spacious control room looks into the tracking room through multiple glass doors, and down the sides are four other, smaller tracking rooms where artists can be put in for recording additional instrumental or vocal tracks.  Behind the big room, separated by big sliding barn doors, is an even bigger space that will eventually be finished out. Altogether, Ebert will have enough room for a full blown orchestra.

In the control room a huge console sits on a raised platform, with all of its cables running underneath. There are boxed-in cable runs along the baseboards as well – hiding the high-tech guts of the place behind rich wood surfaces.  The state-of-the-art 80-channel mixing console is both analog and digital. Ebert talks about amps and pre-amps, mixing through the console in analog and mastering it back into a digital format for a rich, analog sound that’s digital – but to the non-technical, all of this technology is just there to make it sound good.  It sounds good!
   
Ebert played tracks of several songs in the control room, tinkering with dials and knobs when he wasn’t directing or adding an enthusiastic air-guitar accompaniment. Although they are still works-in-progress, the sound quality was awesome.  This is what Chuck does, and he’s very good at making things sound great.  One of the tracks he played was him “back in the 80s” on a fast-wailing electric rock-n-roll guitar – “with hair down to my butt” – no video available, we were told.  He also played a local Fort Worth area artist named J.R. Byrd who he is very excited to be producing.  A song titled, “Here I Am” is a bona fide hit, Ebert said.  And while we were there, Azle High School sophomore Tori Martin came in for a session – another young singer he is extremely high on.
   
Ebert was playing guitar by the age of 12 and was in the studio producing, engineering and mixing by the time he was 18. There’s not much in the music business that he has not done, from writing, co-writing, arranging, composing and performing.  “I grew up in the studio,” he says.  As a producer, what Ebert does is take the artist’s ideas and turn them into something.  “You have to be open to what the artist brings you and the unique qualities each one has to offer. It’s a bunch of clay.”  He adds this, removes that, tweaks this. Writes a riff or turns a gifted bass player loose. Puts in drums or backup singers, or just leaves it spare and clean. With over 20 years’ experience as a producer and master sound engineer, he has a lot of tools in his toolbox.  “It’s nice to work with talented people,” he said. “All these guys are ‘A’ players. It’s good stuff. I love it.”

Ebert is a member of ASCAP, the Audio Engineering Society (AES), the Heritage Registry of Who’s Who 2008-2009 and a voting member of the National Academy of recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) – the body that selects the Grammy’s.  Another track he played – the one he’s most excited about right now – was recorded by his wife Katy on piano and vocals, accompanied only by a guitar and upright bass.  If all goes well, it may be the main title song for the movie version of Same Kind of Different As Me – a true story that takes place largely in Fort Worth. Samuel L. Jackson has been tapped to play the main character of Denver Moore, a homeless black man who is befriended by Deborah Hall, the wife of a wealthy Fort Worth art dealer. When she dies of cancer, she charges her husband with getting to know Moore and helping take care of him.  The bond they develop in this unlikely friendship is the core of the book.
   
The movie is being produced, Ebert said, by the same production company that has done the Will Smith film, The Pursuit of Happyness and the Tom Hanks Oscar-winner, Forrest Gump.  “I got involved when they made a DVD documentary about the book, which has aired on Channel 8,” he said. Reading the book was an inspiration in Ebert’s life, putting an even more proactive element into what was already a deep faith in God.  “It’s an amazing book,” he says. It’s a very impactful book on everyone I know who has read it.”

One day, Ebert said, he came home to find Katy “just tooling around on the piano.”  “She told me I ought to write a song about the book.  At 2 a.m. that morning I just sat up, wide awake, and in five minutes I had this song.”  The next morning, he showed it to her and they played it and recorded it that day.  Katy is the music and worship arts director for Lighthouse Fellowship Church, located on Robertson Road just across the Eagle Mountain Lake Spillway from Azle. She is, Chuck says, “the most talented musician I’ve ever known.” A professional singer and pianist, she also plays violin, cello, guitar, accordian and teaches.

A few weeks after they recorded the song, Hall and Moore came to their church. Katy performed the song for them and it got a standing ovation.  The song is titled “Same Kind of Different as Me” and it is a powerful testimony to the book’s message.  “I’ve done a lot of cool things in my life,” Ebert said, “but having our song up there on the big screen would have to rank right up there.”

Ebert hopes to be involved with the movie production when it comes to this area – but whatever happens there, it’s a sure bet that plenty of recording artists will beat a path to Azle once word gets out about his studio.  The remote location is no problem – in fact, combined with Azle’s proximity to D/FW Airport, it’s an advantage. “It’s very quiet out here except for the F-16s that fly over, and a gas pipeline compressor station nearby,” he said. “But it’s quiet most of the time.”
   
While Ebert spends a lot of time in the studio, he also has a mobile studio and can record his clients on-site, then bring it back, mix and master it in the studio.  Consulting is also a big part of his business.  “We do sound and video consulting for churches,” he says, citing the recent renovation and addition at Azle’s First United Methodist Church as a good example of his work.  “We designed the sound and video system for their new Family Life Center,” he says. They also consulted with Lighthouse Fellowship for their audio video installation.  “We teach them on their board, hands-on, how to do what they need to do,” he says. “When I work with a church, I’m not selling them gear. I’m working for them, helping them, and saving them thousands of dollars even after I get paid.”  At Lighthouse, Ebert saved them over $40,000 on their equipment.  “It’s sad, but people will go in and rip a church off, sell them a bunch of stuff they don’t need,” he said.

Chuck and Katy live in an old log cabin that once sat on Highway 199 in Azle, where it was known as Feghali’s Steak House. But the building’s history goes back even farther – it once belonged to Willie Nelson and was one of many possessions he sold when he got in trouble with the IRS several years ago.  It has also been through a fire.  He said Katy had always wanted a log cabin, so buying and remodeling it was a natural. It’s a work in progress, but that’s probably true of anything Ebert is involved in.

The “log cabin” theme won’t stop with the house and the studio, either. He is planning a guest house on the property where visiting artists can come and stay while they work on their recordings at the studio.  It’s going to be a log cabin, too.  “There’s enough space – we can do anything in here,” he says. 

Don’t doubt it. After all – it’s God’s cabin, not Chuck’s

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