Keith
Hanlon

Music and recording have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. As a kid I was tinkering with tape decks: recording my brother’s saxophone onto a portable cassette deck, capturing my friends on my dad’s RCA reel-to-reel, overdubbing with two cassette decks to record my high school band because I couldn’t afford a 4-track. A drum set came into my life around the same time, thanks to my brother. I played along to records by Kiss, Led Zeppelin and The Police. That led to a band at 14, and I’ve been playing music ever since.

I studied audio production at Ohio University and interned at the legendary Ardent Studios in Memphis. After graduation I toured the US and Canada with The Black Swans and Parker Paul, and simultaneously started releasing my own experimental electronic music — first as Zapruder Red, then under my own name, concentrating on ambient and post-rock. As of 2026 I have seven albums on my own imprint, Scioto Records.

As a producer and engineer I’m equally at home in the analog and digital worlds. I love experimenting with microphones and effects to create a unique recorded world, but I also love a band tracking live in the studio — the old-school process of capturing energy in real time. I’ve had the privilege of working with artists like indie rockers Golomb, Americana songwriter Lydia Loveless, ambient improvisors Autophonia, and rock & soul band Doc Robinson.

One record I’m especially proud of is Ed Askew‘s For the World — a beautiful album by a psych-folk legend, which found a whole new audience when it appeared in the Netflix series Baby Reindeer.

After a decade recording at Musicol Recording Studios in Columbus, I opened Secret Studio in 2020 — part recording studio, part art gallery, part gathering place for artists of all kinds, tucked into Columbus’s Franklinton Arts District.