Phil Reese
Phil Reese was born in Westborough, MA, and has spent his entire life as a musician, audio engineer, and acoustics consultant.
Developing a passion for music early on, he started classical piano lessons at age 8, followed by the trumpet, drums, guitar, and bass before he found his way back to the piano freshman year of high school when he found true love in jazz and improvisation and the pure joy of playing in his first live band.
At 16 he bought his first Hammond Organ and a Leslie soon followed. The raw power of playing Santana behind a vintage Hammond and Leslie was enough to confirm, that this music thing is for life.
Graduating high school in 2001, he was awarded a cash scholarship to be used in the pursuit of his music. Phil decided it was finally time to try out an auction website he’d heard so much about called eBay. Suddenly he had access reaching anywhere in the world to find instruments. Before this, he had been stuck with the local music shop, and recently the Guitar Center that opened up nearby.
He searched for weeks, and then suddenly one day, the keyboard he had been waiting for appeared online. A mint condition Honer D6 Clavinet. He patiently waited for the auction to wind down over the next week. In the last few minutes of the online auction, he went all in and won the auction. He also managed to secure pretty beat-up but functioning Fender Rhodes in the process as well.
He spent the summer recording and playing shows with his high school band before heading to UMASS Lowell’s sound recording technology program.
At Lowell, he was the guy who showed up to gigs with a minivan full of keyboards and PA equipment. Always pushing musical boundaries and striving for excellence, every project he joined became a must-see event.
He was mastering the professional studio recording process by day on a full-size API console. Full access to UMASS Lowell’s incredible microphone selection, and racks of vintage outboard gear, and fully appreciated the incredible experience of recording to 24-track 2-inch tape while also syncing the tape machine to a computer using SIMPTE time code, as more and more audio work was starting to move to digital solutions.
Nearly every night he was either practicing or performing with one of his bands.
He made it through the very challenging program with just 16 other graduates, and wanting more, he helped create the master’s program and was its first graduate. Awarded graduate student of the year in 2006, he focused on acoustics, learning to design recording studios and using easily available materials and construction techniques.
During this time he formed the organ trio lowercase p, and would go on to perform over 200 times while Phil was in school. His most successful band yet, they would release an album and play as far away as Taiwan before they were done in 2008.
After graduating, he began acoustics consulting, working with architects around Boston on churches and music rooms. Some highlights included building a recording studio at UTEC, the United Teen Equality Center in Lowell MA. Designing The Space, a 5000 sq foot studio and rehearsal room complex in Lowell which included 5 rehearsal rooms, a recording studio with a control room, and a huge fully isolated live room with a floated cement floor.w
In 2014, he began designing a studio to call his own in Conrod, MA. This became his most personal and ambitious build yet, the first iteration of Digital Viking Studios in Concord, MA. A full gut and rebuild of a two-car garage with floated floors, room-within-a-room construction, and innovative muffler designs on the isolated HVAC system.
Phil started working at Sonos as a Senior Engineer on the Beta team, where he helped launch many of their most popular products including the Sonos One, Beam, Arc, Move, and many more and serving as an integral team member bringing voice control to Sonos. Phil took impulse measurements of typical homes and ran his voice through custom wake word automation, and was a key player in the successful launches of Amazon Alexa and Google Voice on Sonos.
Leaving Sonos and Concord at the end of the COVID pandemic, Phil relocated to Rhode Island to work with longtime friend and collaborator Matt Lynch as well as the audio engineer Brandon Downs, also the bass player in Phil’s bands since 2001.
Given an incredible opportunity to move Digital Viking Studios inside 2 rooms in the Rhode Island Philharmonic’s Carter Center Music School, it was time to start building and living the dream.
After a year of design and construction, the new Digital Viking Studios is ready to meet the world. Full of custom acoustic devices and stacked with the incredible gear Phil has been collecting his entire life, the studio is undeniably one of the most unique and inspiring audio playgrounds in New England and is prepared for the highest caliber of musicians, producers, bands, engineers, and creators to do their best work.
Come check out what Digital Viking Studios can do for you, email us at create@digitalvikingstudios.com or visit digitalvikingstudios.com for more info.
-Phil Reese, January 2024
To hear some of Phil’s music:
lowercase p: the album “When Your Fingers Find the Shapes” is available on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4WThicromZNMyiFEcmuXMd?si=amaBGwlYQ7yFBvVv0xhuTw
lowercase p liveyoutu.be – https://youtu.be/EAxSvGHzHdw
360 video shoot recorded live in 2016 from Digital Viking Studios 1.0 in Concord, MA:
Influences: MMW, Vulfpeck, David Bowie, Prince, pfunk, Dr Dog, Fleetwood Mac, Hall and Oats, Madonna, Janes Addiction, Sun Ra, Paul Simon, and more
Genres: psychedelic, experimental, jazz, blues, funk