“It’s humbling that they chose me,” says Matt Molchany of Shards Studio in Southside Bethlehem, who’s been tapped to contribute a Bethlehem-based collection of samples to BandLab’s cloud platform library. BandLab’s free music-making software is a powerful tool available to anyone with an internet connection. Its huge libraries of professionally-made royalty-free loops and samples from producers across the world are made available to creators with no subscription or obligation to credit, creating a democratizing, collaborative playground. Millions of people are drawing on this incredible resource to make original music, and that music can now include sounds from right here in the Lehigh Valley.
“It’s super cool,” Molchany says, “because I really feel like there’s something special about this area, the people here. There’s a really good creative force.” Between Molchany’s Shards Studio and Tape Swap Radio run with Shamus McGroggan, he’s seen lots of underground bands come out of the Valley, and helped distill their sound. “I take what someone’s doing and capture it, what we agree upon as the soul of it,” he says. Curating and cultivating, Molchany’s been sifting through the sounds of the Valley music scene for years.
He attributes this wider recognition in part to the impact of the pandemic. While the in-person studio closed for business, he kept busy with remote work. With cherished events like the Punk Rock Flea Market and Tape Swap’s filmed Rooftop Sessions going into hibernation, the world of remote production opened up to Molchany. “I learned how to work better remotely and was doing stuff from the West Coast, Brooklyn, a town I’d never heard of in Indiana.”
He started going to the studio every day and just making loops and beats for hours on end. When he made them available on Shards’s BandCamp, he discovered that musicians were willing to pay for them. With the added publicity of a popular Reddit thread, Molchany had the attention of a BandLab rep.
A second pack of sounds for BandLab is also in the planning stages, this one focusing on reverb and ambient noise to enrich music-makers’ creations. “I got a sample of a burst of noise in the old Bon-Ton building at the Westgate Mall,” Molchany says, “and I can make anything sound like it's in that space now.” It’s details like this that can take songs from cobbled together to polished piece.
“BandLab makes music creation accessible to anyone, regardless of socioeconomic status and location,” Molchany says. “Their app is free and the creative process can be social. With millions of users worldwide, it's not far off to say that someone in a somewhat remote village in another country might opt to use samples and phrases I made here in Bethlehem!”
And on the local side of things, weekly Rooftop Sessions are starting back up and the Punk Rock Flea Market returns on May 28!
