John Keane Bio
John Keane is a veteran producer, engineer, and musician who has been involved in the creation of many gold and multi-platinum records. He is best known for his work with R.E.M, Widespread Panic, The Indigo Girls, and Cowboy Junkies. He started John Keane Studios in Athens, Georgia in 1981. John has participated in many music conference panels as an expert on subjects such as record production, home recording, and Pro Tools. These include South by Southwest in Austin, The Tape Op conference in Portland OR, Athfest in Athens, GA, and the Cutting Edge in New Orleans. He has taught a Pro Tools course for the University of Georgia’s Music Business Program, and is the author of the popular Pro Tools book, The Musician’s Guide to Pro Tools (McGraw-Hill). He has also created Online Pro Tools, a series of Pro Tools instructional videos.
He started in 1981 with an assortment of road-worn PA gear that belonged to Phil And The Blanks, a local band he was playing with at the time. He bought a Teac reel-to-reel 4 track tape machine which he mounted in a Kroger shopping cart and started making demos for local bands and taking them to the local college radio station for airplay.
Gradually the hobby evolved into a profession, and in 1985 Keane decided to attend The Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, Ohio. Shortly after that he bought a Amek Matchless console and an Otari 16 track tape machine and began to produce records for acts in the burgeoning Athens music scene such as the Indigo Girls, Widespread Panic, Vic Chesnutt, The Barbecue Killers and many others. His neighbor Peter Buck of R.E.M. began to bring many artists into the studio for collaboration, such as Warren Zevon, Robyn Hitchcock, Nicky Sudden, Billy Bragg, The Troggs, Richard Butler, and Nancy Griffith, to name a few. The other members or R.E.M.; Mike Mills, Michael Stipe, and Bill Berry all brought bands into the studio to make records.
By the early 90s John Keane Studios had upgraded to an Otari 24 track, a Pro Tools rig and a Trident 80-B console. One of the first major-label milestones recorded with this configuration was R.E.M.'s Out Of Time album. Other highlights include Widespread Panic's Ain't Life Grand, The Cowboy Junkies' Lay it Down, The Indigo Girls self-titled debut for Epic Records, Vic Chesnutt's Is The Actor Happy, and Uncle Tupelo's March 16-20 album.
His studio is still going strong today, with recent recording projects by R.E.M.,
the B 52s, Brantley Gilbert, Randall Bramblett, and Widespread Panic's Dirty Side Down album, for which he received a Grammy nomination in 2011.
