Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Pete Wheeler. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Pete , thanks for joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

One of my most memorable exposures to music at a young age was a show called “Hee Haw”. For those of you that have never seen it, I highly suggest you head over to YouTube at some point and search out some of those clips. The show was chock full of comedy skits and musical numbers. As a kid, I can remember the whole family sitting around and watching, and there was something innocent and honest about the show. The show starred Buck Owens and Roy Clark. I found myself drawn to Roy and his ability to play the heck out of pretty much anything with strings. I still think of that to this day, and that’s probably why I play as many instruments as I do. I know that many country artists nowadays use the amazing studio musicians available to record their albums, but for me and the Durham county band and Pete Wheeler music, I play pretty much everything myself with the exception of fiddle as I have the amazing grandmaster fiddle champion Scott Woods, who lives around the corner from me and is always available for a chat and a session on a new tune.

Pete , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

At a fairly young age, I picked up the guitar and found myself hooked. I went from practising in my basement to playing stages in the matter of a few short years. At the time, I was playing rock music and enjoyed it, but always found it limiting, as I enjoyed so many different kinds of music and I found playing just one kind of music was unfulfilling. Through that experience, I was able to work in the studio with quite a few different talented producers and really caught the studio bug. The whole studio idea really aligned with the fact that I was starting my own family and had a very strong conviction of family first. Being on the road as a musician certainly wouldn’t work well, and family was the priority, so I hung up my guitar for a few years. The problem is music always calls me back.
After another handful of years, I found myself working with others, either recording at other studios, building new home studios, or recording and producing new acts. There was something magic about being in the studio and working with so many different artists and different genres of music. I could be doing a rock song in the morning and working on a country song at night (who am I kidding? The rock stuff was always at night).
I spent quite a few years doing many different types of projects and styles of music for film and TV as well as producing other acts under my company www.SD-Tunes.com. I love that part of my career, I made many life long friends, and also made a living making music. There’s a key to life right there: find out what you love to do and figure out how to make enough money doing it.
The more recent flurry of activity is really attributed back to doing a country demo for a friend that garnered national radio play. At the time it was a demo, and I’d never really thought it was more than that yet radio really seemed to like it and picked it up. That got me thinking back to my roots and how much I enjoy the more organic real side of country music and decided to put pen to paper and fingers to strings and see what came out. What came out was a flurry of about 12 songs in a row that hit national radio under Durham County Band and a few under a solo project Pete Wheeler.
The byline for my studio production company is “capture the moment.” I think that says a lot about the emotional component of music that I hope people hear when they listen to DCB and Pete Wheeler songs. Yes, the guitar should be in tune and yeah, things should be in time, but there’s something beautiful about the nuances of a mistake or a note that is straining to get where it’s going that brings a raw emotion that’s not heard as much these days. There seems to be a lot of focus on perfection, and I think that’s where we loose something special. You have to think, Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson wouldn’t make it through the first pass at one of these TV show vocal competitions they call entertainment, yet they sing the songs of a generation and are timeless. I hope listeners hear just a little of that in my songs. I have to be contemporary but can still have a little “Hee Haw” in there!

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

To best serve artists, I think people need to understand the diminishing returns that are occurring for many musicians. Gone are the days of the sales of physical medium, meaning CDs, tapes, albums, etc. These revenue streams for many indie artists were the corner stone of promotion and a means of creating revenue. With the new streaming music model, the purchase of CDs etc. has gone the way of the dodo. Buskers playing at a venue often get paid little to nothing and survive on tips. With most people not carrying much cash around anymore, it’s hard for them to offer a tip for a great tune and difficult for the artist to stop playing to let them tap their phones get a tip. Streaming services offer next to no payment for plays. Artists are compensated .003 cents per stream or less. If you do the math 100,000 streams is only $300 and trust me getting 100,000 streams isn’t easy anymore. The people that listen to streaming services often like a playlist and let it play and very rarely pay attention to the artists that they are hearing or explore a cool song, and artist to find more about them.
Support your artists by going to the website and downloading music directly. The dollar or so that they may charge per song goes directly to the artist with a very small amount going to a processing fee. If you like an artist, go to their streaming site and look for other songs you might like and add them to your playlists, play them a parties, and share their name to friends. If they have merch buy their shirt and wear it proudly!

Have you ever had to pivot?

Pivot is my middle name! The music industry is ever-changingand often a cruel mistress. Starting out in a band, I learned quickly there are many people in the industry with their hands out who do very little. There are also many people that make promises they can’t keep and often don’t intend to! I decided to focus internally and write what I felt and learn to produce my own music. My love of the studio kicked in after working with Arnold Lanni (Colin James, Our Lady Peace, Finger 11) and Nick Blagona (David Bowie, The Tea Party, Bee Gees, Wilson Picket, Chicago). These guys instilled a love for the studio and the magic that happens that still intrigues me every day.
Pivot 1: From the band daze (yes I spelled that correctly), I quickly changed gears to working in studios and producing other artists. This was earlier on, before anyone with a laptop and a microphone called themselves a producer. I worked with many great artists Trace Nine, Goddo, The Partland Brothers, Saga and many more, but this sadly changed as the technology grew cheaper and more portable and many studio facilities closed.
Pivot 2: With recording budgets and client lists shrinking, a rework was needed and I focused even more internally on my own music and writing; from there, I honed in on film and TV sync opportunities. At the time, a few good placements could really bolster your pocket. This too began to change quickly as bigger acts dropped their prices smaller indie artists dropped off many music supervisors’ radars.
Pivot 3: Turning even more internally, I realized there is a point where it’s about the music and my diverse love of many genres needed to be addressed to satisfy my artistic sanity. This is when I really started to branch out in the many facets of my musical personalities. Page 2, singer songwriter music with a focus on simplistic and meaningful music. This is a collaboration with a life-long friend Mark Smith and we have a plethora of music past and present being released regularly. Pete Wheeler, my love of New Country and slick production continues to inspire me to pump out songs that make me wanna get up and go! Of course, there’s Durham County Band which is a slightly southern rock/country vibe with a focus on guitar riffs and lyrics that ring true. Many of these tracks garnered national radio play but even that changed quickly with the corporate buy-up of many radio stations that now won’t play any indie artists.
Pivot 4: Back to the rock! As radio play simply seemed to vanish over the course of months, it was time to reinvent the musical wheel again. A 25-year-old song created as Sonica Disturbia was featured in Showtimes YellowJackets TV show. This created the need to revisit the rock music I had written in the past and is another “pivot”. Digging through backups of hard drives, I am now loving the discovery phase of unreleased material and tweaking and releasing as I go and I must say it is such a wild ride of emotion to revisit some very turbulent times in my history!
I could go on. The reality is my mantra has always been “What’s your Plan B, C and D?” because Plan A will hit the fan at some point!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.SD-Tunes.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DurhamCountyBand
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOQ4pKmvIyE
• Other: Here’s a video playlist of a bunch of DCB. Pete Wheeler and Page 2!