Matthew D. Guarnere is a recording engineer, musician, singer and songwriter who grew up in Greece. He graduated from Greece Olympia High School in 1988 and says growing up in Greece was the foundation for his success as a musician and a recording engineer. “Greece is a very important place to me. My family home was by the Mall and that is a very resourceful place for someone who wanted to be in music. There were music stores and electronics stores all within a bicycle ride away.”
Matthew’s father, Joe Guarnere is a former musician, a jazz crooner from the 50s and 60s, his stage name was Joey Vincent. “My father had a music collection that my brother and I would listen to. He had recorded acetates of his music that were our favorite. Those acetates were what planted the seeds for my obsession with recording and sound,” Matthew said.
All through his childhood Matthew’s father was very supportive of his interest in music. “Regularly my father took my brother and I around to music stores and studios and I always came home with some new musical information from someone that I met and talked to or from the newly purchased 45 rpm record of my choice,” he said.
Once Matthew started developing an affinity for the recording arts he started “messing around with a tape recorder” in his bedroom. During his high school years at Olympia Matthew developed some serious musical skills. He taught himself how to play instruments, how to sing and how to capture and record the sounds he was making. “I wanted to be really good and to understand how everything worked. I decided to take an electronics course at school. That is when I met Earl Gates, the electronics teacher at Olympia, and a specialist in the area. In the beginning he was pretty hard on me, after he found out about what I was doing with a tape recorder he understood that I was serious. I learned a lot from him and because of him I had many opportunities to explore in the field,” Matthew said.
Matthew learned a lot during those high school years. He made recordings of his songs, he sang them and played all the instruments. He said, “I always kept my ears on the big picture. It is very helpful to listen to your own voice over and over and over again on tape. When you listen to yourself on tape you get used to how your voice sounds, and you then start hearing everything else going on. I’m a perfectionist, but I do have the ability to know when something is finished.”
Over the years Matthew honed his listening skills and developed the best ears in the business. In the late 80s he moved into the City of Rochester and opened his own professional recording studio What’s Real Unlimited. He engineered and produced hundreds of recordings, many that were his own. He also became a much in demand live sound engineer at local clubs and music festivals.
As with many during pandemic, Matthew’s work as a live sound engineer just vaporized. The pandemic also presented a different opportunity, something that Matthew has been wanting to pursue more extensively. “I now have the time for my favorite thing, to reunite people with their audio memories. Most families have audio or video tapes or recordings in their basement or attic, memories that were recorded years ago and have been tucked away, voices on recordings that they feel will never be accessible. I have the experience, ability and the equipment to reunite them with these memories. It’s a thrill for me to help other people to get reconnected with their early memories. I have had clients that have had to step away from their dreams of music and go into another career for whatever reason. I can help them resume their dream. It is a thrill for me,” Matthew said.
There is also the people that have recordings or videos of their loved ones that are no longer living. It may be relatives that family members have never met, but through the recordings the spirit, stories and history lives on in the tape. Matthew has the equipment and skills to retrieve approximately 11 different formats of past audio and video tapes.
“It is really a thrill for me to save this material and that it is not lost. The recordings talk to me. I focus on the source material that needs to be saved and bring it back to life without too much trickery. I don’t want to hear the impurities, I am always trying to get back to the original tape. It is the ability to restore a moment in time for others, I do enjoy that. If I do my job right, the listener may not even realize that the music playing or the voice speaking was once a tape or a disc. The sound just returns to being a pure life event that can cheat time again and again for generations to come,” he says.
Every job that Matthew does has it own set of circumstances and there are many variables in the process to retrieve information for many formats. “I always work case by case on pricing and try to make it work for everyone that needs my service. Listening to people’s memories is a great honor and a very personal thing. I have made many friends by doing this work,” Matthew said.
You can find more information about Matthew and his services on his Facebook business page What’s Real Unlimited.
Photos by Karen Fien
