Carl Franklin
- Carl Franklin
Carl Franklin is a software developer, author, trainer, musician, producer, and audio/video engineer.
A brief overview of Carl's Musical side:
Carl is accomplished at acoustic and electric guitar (since 1977), bass, and vocals, but can also play drums and piano. At the age of 10, after 5 years of piano lessons, Carl started taking guitar lessons from Jesse Casimono, a left-handed southern-rock tele player from New London, CT.After surviving the ego blow brought on by listening to Leo Kottke and Jorma Kaukonen as a kid, somehow Carl managed to keep picking long enough to master fingerstyle guitar by the time he was in his early 20s.
On the electric side of the fence, his early influences were Don Felder and Joe Walsh , Peter Frampton, Brian May, and the like. Once he heard the voicings and phrasings of Larry Carlton and the rest of the great players on Steely Dan's albums, he was doomed. Jazz was upon him.
In his late teens he was listening to Wes Montgomery , B.B. King , Les Paul , Django Reinhardt and that crowd, but he never really got into fusion or progressive rock. He was still digging that hot tube sound influenced by blues players and the 70s rock players that were influenced by them.
He came of age in the 80's where there wasn't really a lot of solo guitar playing in popular music besides the old-timers (Clapton, etc.). In the 90s it was all about strummy-strum acoustic songs and grungy power chords. So Carl was pleasantly surprised to stumble over John Scofield's A Go Go by chance around 2001. That album reassured him there was a market for fine melodic expressive electric guitar playing that wasn't too jazzy or showy, but had balls. That's where Carl likes to hang out these days.
Carl attended Berklee after of High School (1985) with an eye toward performance, but quickly fell in love with recording, engineering, and production. The queue for studio time was long at Berklee, so he enrolled in Full Sail in 1986 where he learned the basics of audio recording and production. It was there that he was lured into the world of computers, which took him away from the music business, into programming, software development, web design, technical writing, speaking at software conferences, consulting, training, and finally podcasting.
Carl started home recording in 1994, and in 1999 co-produced the first Franklin Brothers album, Strange Communication , with brother Jay on a PC in Carl's basement. By 2007, the podcasting was in full swing and Pwop Studios was built to support the podcasting business as well as Carl's music habit. Taking 4 more years to complete and perfect, Carl and brother Jay produced their second album, Lifeboat to Nowhere at Pwop and released it in August, 2011. Shortly thereafter, Carl and Jay formed the Franklin Brothers Band, which has morphed into a Steely Dan tribute band.
In 2013, Carl released his first solo album,
The people who know Carl in the computer world don't really know that he's been playing piano since he was 5, singing since he was 8, guitar since he was 10, writing songs since he was 13, and recording in studios since he was 16. Likewise, his musician friends don't understand the first thing about computer programming. That's okay. A person can have two passions.