Industry engineer opens studio in Huntington

HUNTINGTON -- Keith Barnhart knows there are a lot of recording studios in Huntington and in the Tri-State.

In fact, he was getting his cell phone at Sprint and the guy opened up the back door, and guess what?

Yeah, a recording studio.

But the Huntington native who has moved back from Nashville to start his recording studio, The Music Plex on 9th Street in downtown, thinks he can carve out a niche back home.

He's got good reason to think so.

Barnhart, who graduated from Huntington High School in 1979 and from the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1985 with the school's first degree in music production and engineering, has the kind of resume and musical life people dream about.

As a keyboardist and recording engineer, he worked for years in the music business, first in New York and then in Atlanta and Nashville.

One of his first gigs in New York City was playing keyboards and programming on Chaka Khan's platinum record, "I Feel for You."

Though Barnhart still carries a humble and gracious West Virginia spirit, he can -- if prompted enough by nosy reporters -- drop names like Rambo drops bad guys.

He's had a career of recording gigs with such acts as Paul Simon, Sting, Duran Duran, Janet Jackson, Jamiroquai, Brian Wilson (of The Beach Boys), Dionne Warwick, Bette Midler, Quincy Jones and countless others.

He's sold more than 100,000 CDs as a solo artist and has been on tour and/or played on stage with such acts as Steve Winwood, Debbie Gibson and John Entwhistle.

Interestingly, it's that first love of sitting at the piano and creating music and songs that he hopes to focus most of his studio efforts on in Huntington.

Barnhart, who also has made a musical living through extensive publisher and writer royalties, wants to become the production company in the region for creating music for TV and radio stations, local ad agencies, indie film makers and video production companies.

Moving back home a few months ago to be near his aging parents, Robert and Gloria Barnhart, "Plex" as he's been known in the business, wants to make the sounds for the region whether it is music for a TV news program or scoring for films.

"The music that most places get now is coming pre-fab from California or Texas, but I can do that right here," Barnhart said.

Barnhart co-wrote the international "True Voice" campaign for AT&T, wrote the jingles for Macy's national ad campaigns from 1990 to 2004, and is a writer for four production libraries (Aircraft, Bonanza, Stephen J. Cannell and Friendly Giant). His compositions have been used in more than 40 countries in just about every format imaginable.

Barnhart, who has created music for lots of TV shows such as "America's Most Wanted," and even a trailer for "Natural Born Killers," said there is nothing like the joy of sitting down and creating music.

Playing piano since he was five, Barnhart creates music as natural as he breathes.

"It's simple one cannot deny themselves happiness and what makes me happiest is the thing I do best," Barnhart said lounging at the studio that has two live rooms, a kitchenette and a lounge set up with high-speed Internet, HD and Blue Ray. "I could never deny being creative. That constant desire to create is what keeps the music fresh and fun."

Featured multiple times in such magazines as "Downbeat," "MacWorld," "Wired" "Electronic Musician," and "Keyboard," Barnhart said the '80s were the best of times for studios and musicians. An expert in MIDI technology, Barnhart has about 20 synthesizers in his studio. He said the business was wide open then as was experimentation as he experienced the advent of MIDI, digital sampling and CDs.

"Everybody was working and all the studios were going strong," said Barnhart, who's worked on everything from gangsta rap to Bette Midler. "It was so good that you could really just focus on doing one thing -- now that would be impossible."

What has changed is that digital downloads have put album sales in a free fall and prompted widespread shrinking of the traditional music industry in hubs such as New York, Atlanta and Nashville.

According to the last issue of Rolling Stone, album sales were down last year 36 percent from their peak year of 2000.

In 2000, a record 785.1 million CDs were sold, while only 500.5 million were sold last year.

The No. 1 record of 2007, Josh Groban's "Noel" sold less than the No. 13 album in 2000, Limp Bizkit's "Chocolate Starfish."

"When something bad happens long enough, people accept it as normal," Barnhart said of illegal downloads. "Even though Napster was a bad thing that took money out of the pockets of writers and artists, I can't blame people for downloading music. I blame the industry for not coming up with the technology to stop it in the beginning."

Barnhart moved out of New York City after his son was born and said the musical ponds in Atlanta and Nashville have kept shrinking, leading him on a path back home.

"In Nashville, I realized it was going to take much longer to break into that inner circle of acceptability," Barnhart said. "It seemed to make more sense to return back to a marketplace where I still had musical connections and to try and do something that hasn't been done here before."

Located near the Cabell County Public Library, Barnhart's studio is now open for studio appointments and he's looking to work with some of the area's polished acts and serious projects.

"Technology makes it so that everybody can do some type of recording," he said. "But it still takes a musician and someone adept at engineering to make it sound good. You still have to know how to assemble sounds and make music."

Howie McCormick/The Herald-Dispatch

Huntington native Keith Barnhart recently moved back from Nashville, Tenn., known to many as “the music capital of the world,” and uses his expertise in the field in his downtown Huntington studio, The Music Plex.­

Howie McCormick/The Herald-Dispatch

Keith Barnhart works with industry-standard technology from all of his audio decks and synthesizers to keyboards and microphones.

Howie McCormick/The Herald-Dispatch

Among Keith Barnhart’s many accolades is a platinum record for his work on Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You.”