Our Facility

We are a two studio facility: "The Music Room" is our pride and joy, built in 1977 as a world-class, state-of-the-art control room and studio. It is available for large multitrack sessions with a spacious performance area, a variety of live & dead areas, and isolation room equipped with Yamaha Maple Custom Absolute Series drums, while "The Doghouse" is our second 24-track room for overdubs, MIDI music production, and CD Mastering.
We have a wide variety of keyboards, samplers, and tone modules that range from state-of-the-art to classic. The Doghouse is also good for smaller musical projects, voice-overs and spoken word, or pre-production. Multitrack Digital Performer recording and digital editing is available in both studios. We also can make short run CD copies from your master.

Our Philosophy

We founded Group Effort on one basic principle: With today's technology, you can make a great sounding recording, and it doesn't have to cost a fortune if you know what you're doing. We never intended to be one of the mega-buck studios you see in the magazines, only to sound like one! The only reason we are in the recording business in the first place is because there couldn't be a cooler career than making great recordings with great musicians. Through a concious effort to embrace only the most cost-effective, breakthrough technologies, we have been able to achieve our goals and thrive in the process, becoming one of the busiest studios in the Cincinnati area.
Today Group Effort Sound Studios offers an extremely wide range of audio services and formats to accommodate a wide variety of needs. Click to see our extensive equipment list.

Our People

Even though this is an equipment intensive business, we never lose sight of the fact that it's people that make the difference here. When you book a session at Group Effort, you never have to worry about getting saddled with a 2nd-rate engineer who only knows how to work half of the gear or just doesn't give a damn.
Our staff is experienced and knowledgeable both musically and technically, ready to offer a timely suggestion, or just stay out of the way and keep things running smoothly. We have wide range of personal musical interests, both in listening and performing, so we are able to approach any musical genre with confidence and creativity.

A Brief History

In Finneytown, (a northern suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio) stood a house on the corner of Beta and Sanfan Avenues. This house of uncertain impending doom stood right in the path of the Ronald Reagan Cross County Highway! In the leaky basement of this house a local art-rock band named Apocalypse rehearsed and garnered quite a following of good friends and fellow partiers. Every night people would gather and share music, events of the day, or even a good practical joke.

Apocalypse acquired the recording bug but the member that was terminally afflicted was guitarist Dan Murphy. The band would record at local area studios but to Dan, it was never often enough. He bought a Sony home reel-to-reel tape recorder and started recording all manner of things, from experiments in conceptualization(!?), to simple band tunes through his Tapco 6000R mixer (the earliest Mackie!) using only spring reverb and an Echoplex tape-loop delay. In 1974, after seeing a friend's new Teac 4-track (Model 3340 on which you could actually overdub tracks in sync!), he bought one and continued his experimentation.

Since the house was going to be torn down anyway, Dan asked friend Barry Heismann who owned the house and also lived there, if he could build a control room and studio in the basement so the band could record its original material. Barry gave his consent and the next thing he knew people were donating all kinds of materials that would assist in construction like egg cartons for acoustic treatment, a sliding glass door for the control room window, and a bunch of burlap and wood. It took about two months of casual labor to finish; not only did it provide for an isolated listening area, but it also became the projection booth for a special day that would become: "The Film Fest".

All of the people that would come to the band-house brought their original 8mm silent art-films that were hand sync'ed (to the best of our ability in 1979) to music specifically chosen for each film. Large PA speakers were hooked up at the opposite end of the room and a large movie screen was placed between them. Cushions and pillows were scattered about the floor and indirect lighting created the "special mood". The films were shown all day until the wee hours of the morning (the finale was the 16mm version of Young Frankenstein) and they drew an enormous crowd. It was at this point that the phrase "Group Effort Productions" was coined, because it really was. Everyone contributed, everyone shared, everyone respected each other's moment. The participants had such a great time that day, that many wanted to repeat the Film Fest, but for some reason it never happened.

Instead, a working studio grew out of that feeling of teamwork and contribution. As the studio grew, Dan added an 8-track machine (a Tascam 80-8) and updated the mixer (a pair of Tascam Model 5's) along with outboard effects of the day. Word got out and Group Effort became busier and busier; so much so that Dan soon quit the day job at the printing company. All of the money that was made was put right back into the studio, and there was always a new piece of gear to try out.

Musicians liked the vibe of the place so much, that they would just leave Hammond B3's, drum sets, guitar amps, and even a baby grand piano for all to use! The feeling of a "group effort" was totally ingrained in the spirit of the place. Dan soon realized he needed a logo; something that would visually depict what the studio was about.

Dan was getting so busy that he really needed help! He ran into Wayne Hartman (a fast-talking salesman at Swallens Pro Audio) and realized that they had something in common. Both were terribly addicted to the studio thing and neither were wrapped too tight! Wayne and Dan formed a partnership that lasted for many years and they built quite a reputation for offering a great sounding studio without that annoying high hourly rate. The whole house gradually became wired as they moved the grand piano upstairs for isolation, added a huge plate reverb, purchased another 8 track (all told we went though four of them), and even considered jacking the house up on stilts to gain a higher ceiling!

In late 1981, Dan and Wayne were approached by slide-guitarist Jeffrey Seeman of the local band Wheels (who used to rehearse next door). He had heard that the old Forum studio building (a state-of-the-art room) in Crescent Springs KY (just across the river) was going to be available soon and that we seemed to be likely tenants since the highway was coming through "eventually", and also the fact that we were staying incredibly busy. Jeffrey joined with Dan and Wayne and we formed The Group Effort Corporation. We acquired a new 16-track, another new mixing console, new monitors, and a bunch of wire and installed it all with pride in our new facility. Jeffrey was not only talented as a musician, but as a computer programmer, and started to work on a program that would help keep the financial side of the studio running.

Moving the studio to the Northern Kentucky location was really like starting all over again. The studio business at this level (quadruple the rent) was an unknown quantity and we struggled for the first few years. During this time, the studio never lost sight of the balance between art and business. As operating costs climbed, we decided to open a second room to enable us to do more business. We didn't actually have any equipment to fill this room with yet, but we figured that would work itself out eventually.

In 1986 a call out of the blue came from Bill Gwynne who was running his own basement studio in the Finneytown area half a mile from our old location! Bill had a well appointed 8-track setup and we had an empty room, so we worked out a deal and Bill became another contributor to the Group. Bill helped the studio integrate computers into the way that the music was starting to be produced. These new technologies and capabilities opened up many new markets for us.

In 1990 Wayne had decided that it was time to make some real money for a change, and now that his family had expanded, he had to bid farewell to the studio biz. Jeff Monroe is an accomplished drummer and recording enthusiast and we tapped him to handle the overflow caused by Wayne's departure. Jeff used to record with us back in the early days and had kept in touch all along so this was a natural move. .

Business was really picking up now, and Christmas of 1990 saw our main studio go 24-track. For four years it was nothing but onward and upward. Jeffrey Seeman moved out of town in 1994 to pursue other interests in the music and computing fields moving to the Nashville area. We later expanded our second studio and made it a 24-track room as well.

In 1998 we made a huge step up by buying the AMEK big 44 console with automation and full knob recall capability allowing you to truly continue a mix in progress, or store a complicated tracking setup, giving us a level of accuracy and consistency achievable in any other way. We made the move to multitrack digital recording that year with ADATs and DA-88 machines (we'd been recording in stereo digitally since the mid 80s).

2001 saw the arrival of 5th generation multitrack digital hard disc systems with good quality affordable hardware interfaces so we began the process of switching over to all computer based recording, while still doing some projects on the trusty 2-inch where advisable. The Doghouse got upgraded to the awesome Mackie Digital 8-bus digital console giving that room true one-button recall of projects as well as pristine audio clarity. Both rooms are running in 24-bit digital mode now which means each track we record is recorded with better than CD quality fidelity to capture true accuracy and nuance.

In 2004 we purchased two of the powerhouse Dual Mac G5 computers running exclusively in OS X for the ultimate in reliability of a computer based recording system, continuing the move towards complete workstation style recording with all the incredible things you can do that can't be accomplished any other way.

So now Dan Murphy, Bill Gwynne, and Jeff Monroe are here to provide professional, high quality, low cost recording on your next project in a comfortable creative atmosphere. If you'd like to become part of the Group Effort story, give us a call.

Like the time Barry bought himself a huge fish tank--but no fish. It turned out he just liked the sound of the bubbles! So the guys hanging around the house did him a "favor" and went out to a lake caught a bunch of large fish so when Barry comes home the tank is just packed with these huge lake fish. Problem was though, it was a heated tank so these fish all died and it wound up being a huge tank full of dead fish! [back to history]