Stormy Chromer’s Ryan King Wins Grove Studios Creative Subscription

Earlier this year, we launched an upviral campaign to promote our cool subscription packages, which allow creatives to purchase studio sessions in money-saving bundles for future usage. Stormy Chromer bassist Ryan King won a Creative Subscription as part of this year’s campaign. We recently chatted with Ryan about his win and plans for using his new subscription with Stormy Chromer:

What prompted you to enter Grove Studios’ upviral campaign contest earlier this year?

When the lockdowns started, operations at Stormy Chromer ground to a halt. We obviously couldn’t play any of the shows we had booked prior and meeting for rehearsal felt unethical. We eventually began meeting, masked and distanced, but for a while we were only meeting on Zoom.

As the situation progressed, livestreaming became more and more common, and we were itching to play on the internet airwaves. But these shows aren’t typically very profitable, and they have additional costs for cameras and venue rentals. When the upviral contest was announced, we saw it as an opportunity to perform online while cutting out the costs associated with other livestreaming spaces.

Now that you’ve won the Creative Subscription, what plans do you and/or Stormy Chromer have for using it at Grove Studios over the next several months? Are you looking at recording new material to release sometime in 2022?

Since live music has cautiously resumed in 2021, we have been fortunate enough to get back to what we do best — play live. So our Grove hours have become much more flexible, and for me, more exciting. We’ve kicked around a lot of ideas — from tracking demos of new tunes to recording a small show with close friends we invite to sing and front the band for a tune or two.

We plan on utilizing the camera setup to pre-record content to be used for promotion and marketing of our live shows. Our first project in Grove will be with a sound engineer present — we’ll be measuring frequency and decibel levels of our guitar players’ tone and effects to better understand how to blend our sound live.

What do you value most about Grove Studios? How do they serve as an integral part of our music community?

Grove provides an incredibly unique opportunity for musicians in southeast Michigan. The dedication that they bring to the table for artists — from providing the space to housing it with professional equipment and management — alleviates a ton of stress for bands who otherwise would be forced to use less-than-ideal rehearsal spaces and confined to hours that aren’t conducive to the creative process.

I’m so glad that my friends and peers have access to this special resource, and I feel that Grove is very representative of the great commitment to creation that is a hallmark of Ypsilanti.

You’re hosting a three-day New Year’s Eve bash at The Blind Pig soon. What do you and the band have in mind for your three-night stay? What will the other bands on the lineup help bring to the show?

We have some tricks up our sleeve, which will be kept under wraps until we take the stage! But for those who haven’t seen Stormy Chromer before, rest assured that each night will be completely unique. We craft new setlists every show and typically won’t play any repeats over the course of a weekend run.

We have some amazing talent joining us for these shows. The music will touch every corner from shredding blues to funk to psych-garage rock to hip-hop to neo-electro soul to house. We are curating each night to have its own identity and flavor. This is the first multi-night New Year’s Eve run I can recall in years of living in Ann Arbor, and having traveled across the country to attend similar events, I can say that this will be an insanely fun time. I highly recommend buying a three-night ticket at a discounted price and committing to spending all three nights with us!