The Wicked Awesome Acoustic Holiday starts with DeAngelis’ mellowish-jazzy version “Jingle Bells” followed by Caron’s guitar and sitar instrumental version of “Little Drummer Boy.” Caron also provides uniquely arranged and played instrumentals of “What Child Is This?,” “Last Christmas” and “Il est né, le divin Enfant (He is Born, the Divine Child)” to the disc. “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and “Santa Baby” feature additional vocals by 16-year-old, Bangor, Maine, singer Catherine Howe. She sings with a combination of innocence and sultry tone that makes her performance stand out on both cuts. “Mele Kalikimaka” is a fun Hawaiian Christmas song complete with a modulation and kazoo solo. The recording also includes: “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” and “Silver Bells.” I think the best track of the CD is the DeAngelis/Howe duet of “Baby It’s Cold Outside.”
This is truly a wonderful holiday CD with some fine singing, harmonies, and virtuosic playing. I guess you could call it wicked awesome — it is Rhode Island after all — but this disc is far beyond just a local recording; it is light years better than the versions of these tunes that the radio and store PAs will assault you with from now until December 25. If you need a soundtrack for your holiday, here it is. The CD is available from CD Baby, iTunes, and Amazon. For more, jingle over to facebook.com/FrederickLewisDeAngelis.
Motif Magazine
Roots Report: An Annual Rant by John Fuzek
Press
RANTS AND RAVES
As I write, I am actually listening to a new holiday CD. I know that it goes against everything that I just wrote. Believe it or not, I actually produced an alternative holiday compilation CD about 20 years ago and even had a (cynical) song on it. Well, the CD I am listening to now is strictly missionary. It is a collection of seasonal standards by local musicians Fred DeAngelis and Joe Caron titled The Wicked Awesome Acoustic Holiday. While the CD’s title is a bit odd, they do provide some nice arrangements and interpretations of 12 classic holiday compositions. DeAngelis and Caron handle the vocals and array of instruments including guitar, mandolin, ukulele, banjo, sitar and kazoo. Caron has been playing guitar professionally for over 40 years and performed with rock bands such as Touch and Run21. DeAngelis is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, music educator and producer with more than 30 years of experience and has even performed for a US President.
Contact Information
phone: 401-965-6202 email: fdeangelis@gmail.com
LA: Wow, doing my research on Deep Meadow Farm Audio Recording & Mastering, I researched your background as well and I could do a whole interview on just you. You're a producer, mixer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and music educator with over 35 years of experience. Your credentials are amazing. You have a bachelor's degree in Music Production from Berklee College of Music and a bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Rhode Island College. Tell me about your journey from how you got involved in choosing this career to owning your own recording studio.
FD: I didn't choose this career. The career chose me. When I was a kid I would watch Ed Sullivan at my grandparents. That’s where I saw and heard The Beatles. Their music set me on this path. I got my first guitar at eight, started lessons at 12, and playing in bands at 13. I wrote my first song when I was 10 and I’ve been writing ever since. I couldn’t afford studio time as a kid, and I wanted the ability to stretch out artistically and experiment, so I purchased a 4-track tape machine and taught myself how to use it. From there it was a natural progression to where I am today.
I attended Berklee majoring in Audio Recording (which is now called Music Production and Engineering). After my fourth semester I tried to get an internship back home but the people I encountered were, let’s say, a bit unpleasant. Being young and naive, I believed the negative things they told me about the industry and so I dropped out, a dumb move I always regretted.
I transferred to Rhode Island College, got my degree in Computer Science, and started my career in high tech. However, I never stopped thinking about making music and dreaming that one day I’d return to Berklee. In 2017 I started working for them in a tech position. One of the job’s perks was free classes. I took 26 and two years ago, 40 years after I started there, I earned my degree. I opened Deep Meadow Farm officially in 2021.
LA: You're the founder of Homegrown Music Seminars group education program. Tell me about this …you teach students at all levels?
FD: To me music is a gift that I feel very fortunate to have and I enjoy sharing it. It gives me great satisfaction and keeps me balanced. It’s my form of therapy. If I can help somebody else find that enjoyment, that peace, I’m happy to do it. I primarily give seminars on anything from harmony, improvisation, songwriting, etc. I also try to organize an annual open mic with the proceeds going to a charity or a cultural service. At the last event I think we had 20 artists perform and we raised more than $1,500 for the East Providence Arts Council.
LA: I heard you played for U.S. President. How and when did this happen?
FD: It happened by chance at The Rod and Gun Club in Warren. My band played at a clambake. Jimmy Carter was coming through as part of a rally and the Secret Service asked us if the president could say a few words. They wanted us to play an opening song for him and asked if we knew any Allman Brothers songs. We didn’t so we gave them our setlist. They picked “American Band” by Grand Funk Railroad and had us change the chorus lyrics from “We’re and American Band” to “He’s our American man”. Pretty funny.
LA: Deep Meadow Farm provides music production services including recording, mixing, mastering, audio repair, restoration and audio post-production. Tell me when you started and how it started.
FD: My interest in doing this initially was to be able to record my own music. That branched out to wanting to record stuff by my friends. Then I thought well, I have all this gear and what I’m producing sounds pretty good, so .… It was a logical progression. Over the course of this journey I’ve built four recording studios, the first one in my parents’ basement.
LA: There are a lot of recording studios in Rhode Island. What makes Deep Meadow Farm stand out from the rest?
FD: You would want to come to me for my taste. As a producer I try to take your song and elevate it to its highest emotional potential. For example, local artist Mark Cutler allowed me to produce a song for him called “Suffering”. He’s brilliant and it is a beautiful and powerful song. Together we reviewed three candidate songs he had and picked this one. Then we reviewed his lyrics, the chord progression, the arrangement, and the instrumentation. As a producer you do whatever the artist needs you to do. You can offer a lot of stuff but the artist makes the final decisions. Mark, with all his accomplishments and talent, graciously entertained my suggestions and even accepted a few of them. So why would someone come to me? You would come to me because you like the work I’ve done, because I can guide you through the production process, because I can take on the parts of this work that would distract you and take your energy away from your performance, and hopefully because I’m easy to work with. Also, you don't have to hire me as a producer. You could just come in to record, or you could hire me to mix the tracks I record or tracks you’ve recorded somewhere else, maybe in your home studio.
LA: You've worked with some big names in the industry including multiple Grammy Winner Prince Charles Alexander who worked with Sting and Usher. Matthew Ellard who worked with Queen, Paul McCartney and Ozzy Osbourne. Former AES president nominee Jonathan Wyner who worked with Bowie, Springsteen and Aerosmith and Mark Wessel who worked with Sony, CBS and Paramount Pictures. When did you work with them and can you tell me the most important thing you learned from them?
FD: They were all my professors at Berklee and I stay in touch with many of them. They shared lots of tips and tricks, and ways to be more efficient through the process. But the most important lessons were about the soft skills. Recording can be a nerve-racking process. Knowing how to make the artist comfortable so they can give their best performance is an invaluable skill. Before my clients step into the studio I have the entire session prepared for them including any creature comforts they may have requested (within reason). I do everything I can to make the artist feel at ease, and make every dollar they spend as cost effective as possible, and earn their trust
LA: That's an amazing list of technology and gear you use at your studio. Tell me about which ones you like to use and what some of them do.
FD: Pro Tools and Logic Pro are my Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) of choice. That’s where I spend most of my time once the artist leaves. In my opinion Pro Tools is better for tracking, editing and mixing. Logic is superior for anything MIDI (Music Instrument Digital Interface). Of course I’ve got favorite microphones, outboard gear, and software but the DAW is at the heart of it all.
LA: How has technology advanced since you started?
FD: It is a different animal altogether. When I started we were recording to tape and you had to get the “take” just right. You could manipulate it but it wasn’t easy. Now it's an entirely different ballgame. The tools allow us to do things today we couldn’t even imagine back then. However, the artistic part, the human part, remains the same: delivering a quality performance, knowing how to capture that performance, inspiring the artists, managing the budget and timeline, selecting instrumentation, the arrangements, writing quality lyrics, etc. It's the way that it's captured and the way it can be manipulated that has changed, and some of this stuff is pretty complex with a significant learning curve.
LA: What was your favorite recording that you recorded at the studio?
FD: That would be the song I wrote for my wife. I wrote three. The first two, after they were finished, I realized didn’t capture the person she is and the way I feel about her, so I threw them out. With the third one I got it right. It’s called “A Real Woman”. Here’s the YouTube link to it. https://youtu.be/hnHEsege9fA
LA: Who is your dream artist that you would love to record at your studio?
FD: Jeff Beck
LA: Lastly, besides owning your own recording studio, making videos and music, what else do you do for fun? What is your favorite Rhode Island restaurant ?
FD: Spending time with family and friends and my dogs. Me and my wife like to hike and do things that make us laugh. My favorite restaurants would have to be Hemenway’s and Pan e Vino.
Coming May 1, the release of his new song, ‘Top of the World’, addresses wealth inequality in the United States. The music video illustrates the stark contrast between the absurd, some might say obscene, excesses of the top one percent and the rest of us. It was written and performed by Frederick and the brilliantly talented Mark Rodrigues, Ronnie Fellela, and Gregory Scott Arruda.
Shop in RI Magazine
By L.A. Reilly
East Bay Life
Local Music Scene
Meet Fred DeAngelis: Engineer and artist, songwriter and teacher
The Beatles inspired him, Berklee embraced him (twice), and the artistry motivates him to create every day. Fred DeAngelis wears many hats in the music world, from playing guiter and singing, to writing his own music, engineering and teaching others.
I wondered how DeAngelis views himself and what it means to him to be a musician.
“At the end of the day, I’m an artist and a creator. I can’t ever stop doing that. It’s just in me. It’s always been there,” said DeAngelis. “I don’t exactly know why it’s there, but I’m happy it is. I feel like it’s a privilege to be creative. There’s a balance, a satisfaction about being an artist. It’s like therapy for me. I think people that are creative have something else, something extra, going on. It doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘art,’ as the masses view it, to be creative. It could be cooking, gardening, teaching, things like that. But I think creative people share a common feeling and bond. It’s like a secret club.”
That Beatles influence
Like DeAngelis’s Baby Boomer generation, he got turned on – courtesy of four lads from Liverpool – to the prospect that musical and artistic expression were not exclusively reserved for the 1950s moody, beatnik culture crowd, but could be something enjoyed and embraced by everyday kids of the 1960s, in all classes, within all types of neighborhoods, in every locale, across the Globe.
“I had seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and it changed my life. I was just shy of 4 years old, but believe it or not I remember it. I wanted to play guitar because of them,” said DeAngelis. “They appeared on the TV, and they had a fresh look, and they were radiating excitement and happiness that they felt through music that seemed to represent their feelings. I was hooked.
“It’s still amazes me how impactful The Beatles were when they performed that night. In that limited media format, with a black and white screen and the music coming out of this little television single mono speaker, in a very short amount of time, less than 10 minutes of performances combined. It was the bare media essentials, yet it changed my life as well as countless others. “
After DeAngelis’s Sunday night epiphany, his aunt bought him a guitar, which was enough to get him started. He teamed up with a friend in the neighborhood who had set up some buckets and boxes, thus becoming the drummer. DeAngelis strummed his guitar, as he recalled, “just to make noise. It was a blast.”
“I kicked my guitar around for some time, but started getting serious, taking lessons, at 12 years old at Silva’s music in Bristol. I’m playing into my teens and things were cool. I’m hanging with Neal Vitullo, Mike Costa, Steve Hughes, that wonderful gang, and we were all in bands, kicking, playing around and everybody’s getting better,” said DeAngelis. ”There were even battles of the bands back then, and everybody was involved. The drinking age was 18, so I was playing clubs. I wasn’t quite of age, but they looked the other way a lot when it came to the bands. I was still in high school. We could sneak into the clubs to play. It was a don’t ask don’t tell kind of thing. Mr. T’s was a hot spot in Bristol, as I recall, and I played a lot of gigs there.”
A Berklee Beginning
After high school, DeAngelis applied to and was accepted at Berklee School of Music in Boston. At Berklee he was an excellent student. He studied hard, became a good sight reader and made the honor roll every semester.
“I was studying performance and doing well, but my parents didn’t trust me being a performance major. They persuaded me to go in as an education major to be a teacher.
“I did that for one semester, and when my parents weren’t looking, I switched back to performance, “ chuckled DeAngelis. “I ultimately switched over to audio recording. The reason being, I used to be able to go down to the practice rooms and check bands out. There was a band called Morning Thunder, which was Steve Vai’s band. There’s the legendary Steve Vai. He was a student there at the time, and when I saw him play, I thought, ‘well that’s the level of expertise you need to be a performance major’ – a level I wasn’t sure I could attain. So, I decided to broaden my horizons and not put all my eggs in one basket.”
DeAngelis wanted to expand his options in case he could not launch a career in performance. “Maybe I could do other things in music. MPE (music production and engineering) perhaps. I had a class in recording and engineering, and when I went to the studio, I realized I wanted to write songs and could use the studio as a tool to record them. In those days, rates were high, so experimenting in the studio was very expensive. I thought if I learned this technology, I could use the Berklee studio as well as create my own studio at home and experiment to my heart’s content.”
Writing His Own Music
While at home on a school break, DeAngelis visited a local recording studio and spoke to the proprietor. Things didn’t go well and DeAngelis left the visit disillusioned.
“I was told by the owner that everything I had learned at Berklee was useless, and if I really wanted to learn the craft of recording and engineering, I would sign up for his six-week, four hours each Saturday class, and they would teach me everything I needed to know,” said DeAngelis. ”I came away from that a bit confused and a lot discouraged. I was young and trying to find my way, so I took a break one semester that turned into two semesters. Luckily my father advised me that I needed to do something while I was figuring things out, so I dropped out of Berklee and applied to Rhode Island College, where I ultimately got my bachelor’s degree in computer science. But as all musicians know, once you have the bug it never leaves you. You can’t deny it, and you can’t stop it. You’ve got to keep doing it. If you stop doing it, you’re not going to be happy. So, I graduated from RIC and began a good day job and career but never stopped writing songs, playing my guitar, gigging and building studios.”
A Return to Berklee
DeAngelis enjoyed a successful 30-year career as a Technical Director at Oracle, but the nomadic nature of his position began to take its toll. In an ironic twist of fate, an opportunity arose that he could never have imagined.
“I was working for Oracle, and they had me traveling a lot. Oracle had just reduced my bonus, so I was slightly unhappy and I was tired and weary of getting on airplanes. By chance, I’d noticed that Berklee had an ad for a computer person in the same field that I had been working in,” said DeAngelis. “I applied and to my amazement I got the job and was back at Berklee! I always felt like I had made a mistake leaving Berklee, and I had this dream that maybe one day I’d somehow return. I left Berklee in 1981, and I went back in 2017 in the capacity as an employee and also, to my delighted surprise, as a student.”
Berklee employees are eligible to take classes for free, and DeAngelis was not about to miss that opportunity. “I seized full advantage and took 26 classes while I was working there,” he said. “Nights, lunches, breaks. Whenever I could, I took a class. I learned to sleep and study on the train to and from work. The school was also very flexible and helpful giving me space as a worker and a student. So, there I was, nearly 40 years after I first stepped onto the campus at Berklee College of Music, I earned my degree in MPE, graduating magna cum laude.”
Today, with two bachelor’s degrees in completely separate fields, one in computer science and the other in music production and engineering, DeAngelis says he feels “happy and blessed” to have found a balance for all the things in his life that he loves and cherishes.
Work-Life balance
“I lost my job at Berklee when Covid hit. Things got tight and they laid off hundreds of people and I was one of them. I applied and got a job at Federal Service Credit Union, a company based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It’s one of the best companies I’ve ever worked for in my life,” said DeAngelis. “One of the benefits is that they allow me to work from home, which means I get up in the morning, practice my guitar for half an hour, do my exercises, and then go to work. I’ll put in a full day at my home office, and after five I try to be a good husband and a good father. I’ll cook up a little dinner, help clean up, make sure everyone is good, then I’m back down to the studio to work on my music or a client’s studio project. I may be down in the studio from 7:30 to 9-ish, and sometimes I’m down there from 7:30 to 1:30 in the morning.”
Presently, along with recording projects for outside clients, and teaching students one on one or at seminars, DeAngelis is writing music. He has 50 original songs backlogged, either written alone or in collaboration with others. He’s working to finish and release them all in digital form. His song and corresponding video, ‘Top of the World’, featured on YouTube, deals with mega wealth and the inequality that it may encourage. It’s a biting, acerbic rocker displaying a series of images and information that may prompt the viewer to reconsider the fascination and lust for capital that some believe permeates society today.
I asked what advice he might give to musicians and artists of all ages.
“The first thing I would say is never measure yourself against anyone else. You can look at other people for inspiration and ideas but don’t gauge yourself against them. Just be true to yourself. Tell the world who you are. Color outside the lines.”
I wondered how that advice could benefit an artist.
“Hopefully it will inspire them to create and develop their own individual voice, and maybe they will bring a new influence all their own into the world. Being involved in anything artistic makes you feel good, and if by chance it allows you to help others, that good multiplies. Maybe you’ll have a message that will help them get through hard times. A message that may introduce them to a new way of thinking about a certain subject from someone outside their sphere.”
Who or what did that for you?
“Well, I get that from the family and friends who loved me and supported me and from artists like the Beatles that told me it was OK for me to be myself,” said DeAngelis. ”So, I picked up a guitar then and I’ve been myself ever since, because being yourself is the only way a person should have to be.”
Look for Fred at www.frederickdeangelis.com and on YouTube.
Michael Khouri is a Barrington resident writing occasionally about the Rhode Island music scene. Reach him at mkhouri@cox.net.
‘’Never measure yourself against anyone else. You can look at other people for inspiration and ideas but don’t gauge yourself against them. Just be true to yourself. Tell the world who you are. Color outside the lines.”
By Michael Khouri
Audio engineer, producer, guitarist, singer/songwriter, music teacher Fred DeAngelis is a study in determination, patience and endurance. As a teenager, he fostered a dream to achieve a degree in, and a life of, music, but as time progressed, his dream was put on hold.
After decades, replete with hills and valleys, twists and turns, marriage, family and a completely separate career, he at last, in nearly miraculous happenstance, accomplished his goal.
At his quiet, spacious, cozy Barrington home, I had the opportunity to chat with DeAngelis over coffee (a latte macchiato to be exact, made fresh by my host), about his life in, and devotion to, music. He was articulate, methodical and candid with the facts, while displaying great humor and lightheartedness regarding the folly and fun of a musician’s existence.
