Richard Harrison - Owner/Engineer/Happy Guy, Grass Shack Records
I grew upon the Bar-Quarter-Circle-C horse ranch in Colorado, and fell in love with music and electronics. Played coronet and accordian, and became an Amateur Radio Ham at the age of 12, and went on to a master's at University of Colorado in Electrical Engineering.
After CU, I took a dream job at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder designing digital and analog electronic circuitry and flight control systems for high altitude unmanned scientific ballooning. (Typical flight: 500 pounds of electronics taken up to 140 thousand feet by a balloon 600 feet in diameter. Cool or what?)
Traveled all over the US, Ascention Island, Dakar, Senegal in Africa in the course of the "dream", eventually falling in love with sailboats and a sailing girl. Sailed away from Boulder in 1977 and ended up sailing in the Hawaiian Islands for 1-1/2 years before deciding to stay forever. Married the sailing girl (first smart move). Started Grass Shack Records (second smart move) about eight years ago and have been having so much fun recording, mixing, mastering and producing music with scores of really inspiring musicians that sometimes I get jealous of myself.
I finally figured out that the magic is that all of us walk through that door into the studio with a vision, and every single one of us wants to do the best job that we can possibly do in bringing that vision creatively into reality.
We all leave our egos outside, and in doing that we all become a team in creating the best possible space to do the best creative work we can possibly do. That's exciting.
I love doing this!
Richard