Friends and Neighbors w/ Dewey Boyd of Forty-one Fifteen Studio | Inglewood Instruments S1.Ep4
In today’s episode of Friends and Neighbors, Ryan from Inglewood Instruments grabs a coffee and chats with Dewey Boyd, one of the visionaries behind Forty-one Fifteen Studio.
Nestled in the heart of Inglewood, just a few miles from downtown Nashville, Forty-one Fifteen is a recording studio like no other. Housed in a near-century-old bungalow with stunning acoustics and a warm, inviting atmosphere, the space is designed to inspire musicians to push creative boundaries. Dewey shares the story behind the studio’s creation, its unique approach to capturing timeless, emotionally charged performances, and what sets it apart in a city teeming with music history.
Ryan and Dewey chat about their long time friendship, bluegrass, recording backgrounds, Ricky Skaggs, and more.
More than just a studio, Forty-one Fifteen is a refuge for artists—a place where real, provocative music comes to life. With its beautiful, natural room sounds, world-renowned gear, and the collective experience of its passionate team, the studio is helping musicians craft recordings that truly resonate.
Tune in as Dewey and Ryan discuss the magic of Forty-one Fifteen, the art of producing authentic music, and what it takes to tell stories that stir the heart.
Edited Transcription:
I'm Ryan with Inglewood Instruments. Today I am at Forty-one Fifteen Studio, over here in Inglewood, actually still in East Nashville. I'm with Dewey Boyd, who is one of the owners, the owner of, Forty-one Fifteen Studio? The singular owner of Forty-one Fifteen Studio. Dewey and I have known each other for a long time. He has been gracious enough to help me in using the studio at different times for different projects, not just Inglewood. I'll let him answer a lot of different questions we've got today. I know this is a bit different than some of the other interviews we've done, where we were talking with musicians and artists. Dewey comes at things from the engineering and production kind of side of things. Dewey, welcome to whatever this is.
Yeah.
How do you remember we met? I have interesting memories of that.
Oh man, I literally just remembered the first memory I have, and I hadn't thought of this before. I just stepped in doing sound at City Church, City Church of East Nashville and it was the first time I had done it in that building behind Rose Pepper.
Oh, way back then.
Way back then, like Circa 2009. I think you got there a little late, and I had done sound check and everything. I'd assumed incorrectly in that room that it would get a little bit quieter when the room filled up with people, and so it was a smidge on the loud side. You came in and immediately confronted me about it, and I was like the monitors are at this level, and I can't change that. I have to be this loud to be louder than the monitors for it to sound any good out here, so it just is what it is. It's going to be fine. You grilled me with two or three questions. You were like, well you answered all these questions correctly, I'm satisfied and then you walked away.
Did I just leave you to run the sound?
You totally did. you left me alone because I think I checked all the boxes like oh this guy probably does actually know what he's doing, okay.
Most likely knows more than I do.
It's gonna be a little bit loud today.
For those who don't know, live sound is a completely different animal than Studio sound. I studied Studio, my only live sound experience is having been at what we would call a very setup and tear down, grassroots situation for the church we have met at and attend. Dewey very quickly became the one who was authoritative enough to give a better opinion on live sound than I ever was. So now I'm speaking about live sound for just a second. You currently do a couple things for income and one of them has become live sound. I don't think at the time you were doing any live sound, right?
No, yeah I wasn't. So yeah I started a recording studio here back in 2012. This one and as probably any recording studio owner would tell you, it's tough going.
Yeah.
I realized that you know, I’ve done live sound since I was a kid and that was a great side hustle. So I started doing live sound for a wedding band for two or three years and honestly kind of fell backwards in the touring gig that I have now. I'm the touring front of house engineer for Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder. And then I just got through filling in with some other people. I occasionally go out with the Dan Tyminski band and I'm also his tour manager, as well.
Is he Bluegrass as well?
He's Bluegrass.
For people who are not familiar with some of these different genres now I think of Ricky Skaggs he's Bluegrass straight up and down. I think I would describe him recently to someone as the grandson of Bluegrass.
I mean he might be more like a son.
Yeah, all right. Well, that's the live side of things, but we're in a recording studio today for those who didn't know. A lot of the demo videos we've done for the Cumberlands have been shot here. My buddy Dave, who’s based in Florida, and I have actually recorded here, too, when we were in town. We did a fun cover of Here Comes the Sun, which I will never release to anyone—so you can’t even ask. Anyway, give us a sense of where you are in the landscape of music these days. Obviously, you're running front of house and you've got the studio here when you're not on the road. So, where are you with things?
Yeah, so what I realized in my time as an intern and an assistant before I had my own recording studio was that, even if you're doing the recording studio thing or being an engineer or producer—even if you're kind of booked wall to wall with projects—you are still probably not actually doing one of those projects every day, or you're not using most of your equipment every day. So, I wanted to make a space where other people could be creative as well, and use my toys when I wasn't using them. That was kind of the thought behind putting this place together. Now that I'm touring and doing these other things as well, that vision has just kind of extrapolated. You know, I'm doing a smattering of producing and engineering for other people, and I also do studio mixing for others. But in all the time that I'm not actively recording here, our aim is to have other people in here using the space.
Yeah.
So we rent it out commercially as a recording studio to other engineers and producers or for video shoots.
Yeah. Things like that.
So that's a bit of how you got where you are. Any particular plans on where you're headed next? Sort of like, where are you with that? Do you have a preferred type of project to do when you're working out here? Is there a genre, or a method of recording, or anything like that?
Yeah, that's a good question. So, a lot of why I have the space that I do is because there are so many different ways to record music.
Yeah.
What I really like to do is to record a group of people, you could say it's like ensemble recording, or a whole band recording full band tracking. I personally like, from a personality standpoint, and musically kind of thrive on the interaction between different musicians playing together. other people are really well suited to do one thing at a time or, you know maybe some producers are mastermind track builders, and they can take someone's idea and build it one piece at a time. But for me, I want and really need to get a group of people together to take the idea, take the spark, and ignite it but unfortunately that takes a lot of space.
Yeah.
Which is also expensive because you have to hire multiple people to do this, and that's why I have the space that I do that can accommodate that. So, as far as where I'm going, or what kind of projects I like to do... The kind of projects that I find myself in, and largely because of my live sound work, it's been mostly in the Bluegrass world, and so I've become known and I have a whole lot of practice at doing Bluegrass or doing things that are acoustic based or folk or Americana. I really, really love that style of music. A lot of my musical background is more in sort of like 70s pop.
As far as where I'm going, I'm excited to keep doing a lot of the things that I'm doing. I think there's room to grow and do, you know, even more recording here and to take on more projects, so I'm excited to see the calendar fill up with the kind of music that I work on.
Yeah, so we'll take a brief tour a little bit later on. You've got four main isolation rooms, or room kind of spaces, in the areas you think about.
Yeah, yeah. One of them is pretty isolated.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is one of my favorite rooms.
It's a great room, and then in the front, there are three rooms that are connected across the front. There's a room where the drum kit usually is, and then there's the two other rooms.
Yeah. So cool, while we're on the topic, are there a couple of projects either past or kind of future by the time this, we're in late 2024 so you know people might be seeing this in early 2025, is there anything that is sparking your current creativity list, or something that you think is a great example of work you've done in the past that would be good for people to check out?
Yeah, yeah. Well here's two projects. There's one by an artist named Zeb Snyder. He is in the Bluegrass world. He's putting out more of a Blues oriented acoustic project, sort of Blues/Bluegrass acoustic project. He had himself, and a large part of the band from Tony Rice's Manzanita album. So, which is, if you're in the Bluegrass world, a really big album. So it's Sam Bush on mandolin and Todd Phillips on bass. They both played on that album.
Okay
Then you had Jason Carter play fiddle, and he's Del McCoury's fiddle player. Big incredible band. Incredible songs. Zeb did such a great job performing. So it's mixed now, it's going to be mastered at some point, and released at some point.
And so this is sort of a fun project for him, but it's really, really good. I'm excited for everybody to hear it. On a very different end of the spectrum, there's this project that I do a lot of work with, this group called Psallos.
Oh, okay.
Which starts with the p, so it's like the Psalms. P s a l l o s and they just released a two EP project for the Christmas season.
Okay.
Yeah, so there's an Advent EP and a Christmas EP. And it's this composer named Cody Curtis, and he's done several albums and I've mixed all of them, and I've done some degree of recording on all of them. This most recent one I did a lot of the recording with, except for the vocals and the woodwinds .
Wow, he had Woodwinds!
There were Woodwinds. Oh man, yeah, if you listen to any of these projects you'll be like—oh yeah, of course the woodwinds! So there's a version of O Come, O Come Emmanuel that sounds like what if Radiohead had done O Come, O Come Emmanuel. That's out now you should definitely check that out.
All right, we'll link to that here in the description, or on the page, depending on where you're watching things. Cool, we're gonna take a tour of a couple of these ideas together and come back and finish up.
[Tour]
Okay, Dewey now one of the things that I find particularly fun about recording is just the process of getting going. Like how am I going to approach this now granted, most of the time I'm recording, I'm at my house by myself.
Right.
So there's not a whole lot there, but you've got a larger format space.
Yeah.
You've got different artists that you're coming with you're not necessarily working with all the time, I understand this question is a very large potential topic of books, but what would be some of the first considerations you'd have when beginning a project with an artist and thinking about the space you have recording and stuff?
Yeah. so I think the place where I start I mean it's listening. It’s just listening. That's literally what I'm being hired to do—is to listen and so step one is to listen to the artist and their music and what their constraints are. In doing that, that kind of opens up a lot of clarity about what it is we're actually doing. Like what's the instrumentation going to be? What are the budgetary constraints? What kind of experience do they want to have while they're recording? I listen to their songs or their work tapes. What limitations are there in their performance that I might need to account for in recording so that I can either give them more chances to get it right, or give myself some digital leeway to do some surgery on the back end? Kind of putting all of those things together to make some sort of plan that would actually play out and in successfully recording the music the way that they want to. I would argue that with that means, I want to consider for myself, and I want everyone to consider, especially in a town like Nashville, what is the right space to record in? It might not be here and then and that's totally okay. I want to have the freedom as an engineer, and I want other engineers to have the freedom to listen to the project and say—what paint do I want to squeeze in my pallet for this project? A huge consideration of that is like, well, which studio are we going to go to? Which may dictate budget, it dictates what instruments are available, and what gear is available.
Yeah.
There's just so many different ways to record, and so I think it's kind of a disservice to an artist to assume one of those pieces out of the gate, and then try to force the project through all those little holes. So yeah, the first step is just to listen and then for me there's a good bit of iterative process of going back and forth, and a lot of times I'll ask for some references of what musical adjectives are hard.
Yeah.
It's really hard to say what you want to sound like.
Yeah, purple.
Purple. Yeah, exactly and so I like to collect some references not to be overly referential but to have a sense of what's going to be sonically permissible, or maybe there's some commonality across these things that might give me some clues for what they're looking for. Especially if I'm the producer, and wearing the producer hat on the project. Then that gives me either some homework to do, to listen to try to have some sonic empathy about what in the world does this person actually want. How can I help them achieve their vision rather than just like my own preferences, my own taste? I have to kind of get inside what it is that they're doing, but part of figuring that out is this vulnerable exchange of going back and forth. Like oh, what about this and then they’re either like well I really hate that, and bat it down, or yes, that's exactly it, more, more, more! That's when you know you're heading in the right direction, is when your instincts start to align with what it is they actually want, and you're able to articulate the fine things that they weren't able to articulate yet. So then you know, oh okay well gosh now I know which drummer we are going to call, or now we know where we ought to be, or what instruments we need to use. Once you start coalescing that information into a plan, then you can start doing the more boring part of okay well you're going to need this amount of time probably. You start building out a budget, we're gonna need these people, we're going to need this place, we're going to need this much time. This is what it's going to take and really from there you just start setting in motion, kicking around the work of the songs, and working on the songs themselves, writing out charts, figuring out what state the arrangements are in, is there anything that that we'd want to look at changing, and teeing all that up as best we can before we invite the other players into the room, and making sure we're unified on what the vision is. That way when the players bring their own ideas to the table, we kind of both have a sense of, oh wow yeah that's great I never thought of that, or nah that's not really the vibe.
Yeah.
Yeah. So that way you don't burn too much studio time trying to figure out what you really want, but if you have a vision you know kind of where you're going. If somebody comes up with a better idea, you know, and you can accept it and move on.
Yeah, yeah, and then the question I've been wanting to ask lots of people, my final question is if you could record or live mix any artist alive or dead?
Oh man.
Give us, you know, an answer.
Yeah, an answer. You know I can’t possibly make a final answer.
No.
Well I alluded to them. Today's answer, the Doobie Brothers, are on my mind.
There you go. Well, thanks for joining us and having a chat.