Frozen Lake captures local music

Recording studio expanding with Valley scene

By JOHN DAVIDSON-Frontiersman reporter

MAT-SU -- Jeff Morgan's basement is a birthing room for music. Everything from rap to country to techno to big band to rock-n-roll to jazz and classical have been recorded there, brought to life and stamped onto a CD in Morgan's Frozen Lake Studios.

What began six years ago with a digital eight-track recorder, a tangle of wires and microphones and a stack of amps heaped into a small living room has become the Valley's only state-of-the-art, full-production professional recording studio.

The old eight-track recorder is gone, replaced by a 24-track digital recorder hooked up to a Mackie digital 72-channel board.

And the studio has gone underground, into Morgan's basement, where he has built a sound-proof isolation booth and is moving forward with plans to build a separate recording room for drums and another booth for vocals.

When he first started, Morgan's bread and butter was high school punk bands and the like -- guys who weren't comfortable in a snazzy recording studio setting.

"A lot of young guys have been able to get into music recording because of Jeff's studio," Mike Pinkston, one of Jeff's clients, said. "There have been plenty of guys who were just learning and needed help, and they were able to get in the door because of this studio."

But these days most of his clients are serious, professional musicians. And they are all from the Valley.

Morgan's list of clients includes such local notables as Josh Fryfogle, whose recent album was recorded at Frozen Lake.

"Jeff takes care of musicians," Fryfogle said. "He takes the time to let the artist be the artist. Every musician I've talked to lately is talking about Frozen Lake."

And there are more artists around these days. As his studio has grown, so has the caliber of musicians who record there. Morgan says that quality musicians are proliferating in the Valley, with more variety and better musicians all the time. He even recorded a local high school rapper recently.

"That was an interesting experience," Morgan said. "He brought in his Casio keyboard and everything."

Although business tends to come in waves, Morgan is working on several full-length, fully produced albums right now for local artists.

Despite pressure to raise his rates to match those of Anchorage studios, Morgan said he wants Frozen Lake to serve all kinds of local artists, not just the pros.

"My goal when I started this was to make professional recordings available to the average guy -- pro quality at a reasonable rate, and that's where I want to stay," Morgan said. "I can get local artists in here to record an album, and they can afford it."