Jim Heffernan

Sep 24, 2013: My good friend, and an extremely talented composer, Dave Porter, was discussing the music he composed for the series ‘Breaking Bad” in the Speakeasy blog of The Wall Street Journal . It was quite nice of him to mention my playing the signature guitar riff for the main theme. It’s a cool article and frankly, The WSJ is probably the last place I thought we’d see either of our names pop up.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/09/24/meet-the-composer-behind-the-eerie-breaking-bad-theme

Dec 9, 2013: Starting work on a custom music library for Discovery Communications, which broadcasts content across multiple channels available here and abroad. Writing, producing and performing across multiple genres makes this project both interesting and exciting. Final mixes and sub-mixes to be delivered in early March of 2014. Glad to be on board with these guys!

April 9, 2014: Discovery Communications = Awesome.

Jan 19, 2015: Sorry… A bit of a lag since the last update. Recently, I’ve been working with Dave Porter – Composer for “Breaking Bad”, “The Blacklist” – on the new BB spinoff spinoff series for AMC called “Better Caul Saul”: retained as a guitarist for the show’s underscore. Wish I could say more, but it’ll be airing shortly in Feruary. It’s a solid show – as one would expect – and yes, it’s been fun!

Here’s the series trailer for “Better Call Saul”. Clever and irreverent. I mean… It’s Saul! Composed by Dave Porter and Adam Dornblum, and performed by Dave, Adam, me, and the very cool Junior Brown on lead vocal and guitar solos. I contributed a bunch of rhythm parts on Tele, Strat, Emperor Jazz box, lap steel and baritone guitar. But Junior is the glue… He owns it and rips it up!

 

Feb 21, 2017
Lunchtime!

Added some great new analog gear to the studio. Various modules packed into an API Lunchbox 6B. It’s pretty deep stuff, and proves that well-designed analog and digital gear coexist beautifully! The first two Lunchbox modules are mic preamps that Jens Jungkurth voiced specifically for transients of acoustic guitar and hand percussion. The middle two modules are a stereo pair of Kush Electra 500 EQs. These sound nice across the main mix bus, but are useful on whatever’s in their path. The last is a double-wide (stereo) Elysia Xpressor 500. It’s designed as a VCA compressor – similar to the compressor found in the master section of an SSL console – but it also possesses some unique feature sets, which I’ve never seen or heard anywhere else. All modules are quite impressive.

Those two small boxes on the right are a Radial J48 DI (top) for electric guitars or basses,. It Splits the output between the amp and recorder. The other (bottom) is a Radial X-Amp for re-amping. The X-Amp steps the recorded DI signal down to instrument level. This comes in very handy when experimenting with different amps or stomp boxes. The tiny box on the left is just a 2 channel audio interface for Mac Pro slave machine #2