BY DOUG MACKEY for WEEKLY VOLCANO 5/16/25 |
Peter Tietjen has been a fixture of T-town’s music community for as long as most folks around here can remember—playing in bands, booking shows, running sound at said shows, and making records. Oh, and he designs and prints great T-shirts, too. March, however, saw him embark on a new (ad)venture: opening his own recording studio, called Relayer Sound, downtown on Market Street. The studio is named after the 1974 album from seminal prog rock band Yes. “I always thought it was kind of a cool fictional word that I think they made up,” Peter enthused when I visited him recently in the subterranean space. “That album cover is amazing, too. It’s just a nod to where I come from.”
Though Tietjen was born in Tacoma, his earliest musically formative years were as a boy growing up in Graham. “Who knows if Iron Maiden and Mötley Crüe and Judas Priest would have hit me the same if I were in Tacoma and had the whole plethora of musical possibilities. There’s always been more of a scene (in Tacoma),” he admits. Peter moved back to Tacoma just in time for high school, though. “I realized there were people to play with, and that’s when I started getting excited about a scene.”
Like so many kids, Peter started his musical woodshedding at home, “playing drums in the bedroom and annoying my parents.” In early 1991, he hooked up with a band called Deadly Effect. “That was a thrash group that was, you know, Metallica and …And Justice for All–era–type stuff. That lasted a couple years, but grunge came and killed it all.”
Though grunge wasn’t quite his thing, Tietjen’s interests were veering into jazz and fusion anyway. “I was getting into Stan Getz, Weather Report, Charlie Parker, and stuff.” Those influences inspired songwriting urges, and Peter began collaborating with the likes of local jazz saxophone giant Cliff Colon.
Peter eventually felt a little confined even by jazz, so he ventured forth with Orange Balloons, and before that, Umber Sleeping—a band with which he still occasionally performs. When Umber initially ran its course, he started a group called Sky Giants, which signaled his return to rock. “Although I was a better player, my head wasn’t in the right place. I wasn’t quite rocking like I should. I had a little too much jazz in my feel. It wasn’t strong in the right ways. So, then I figured it out for They Walk Among Us, and that’s the group we’re doing now.”
After half a decade running sound and booking shows at the New Frontier, Peter offered his services to the Valley. The Peterson brothers accepted, and he’s worked there ever since. “(The Valley) is great because if somebody hits me up and I think it’s a fun group, I’ll book them. It doesn’t matter the style—they’re very open-minded people there. I could book drag queens every night if I wanted or punk rock or death metal. It’s whatever. That was 10 years ago, so I’ve gotten old at the Valley!”
His newest project, Relayer Sound, has begun operations, even as it continues to come together as a complete space. The gear is up and running, but when I talked to Peter, he was still making plans for some finishing touches. “I’m picking up a mini fridge later tonight,” he notes. “Maybe even something to make coffee, too, but I got a microwave yesterday, so, yeah, I’m just gonna piece it together.”
Accoutrements aside, he has set up his control room, a vocal booth, a live room, and a sonically evolving drum room—from which he’ll be removing insulating foam and putting up sound-friendly wood.
He’s spent much of the last 20 years recording artists at Marcus Simmons’s Pacific Studios off and on, sharing the proceeds with Simmons. That is, until COVID hit. With that, he built out a space in his rental house’s basement. But if Peter was tasked with recording a particularly loud client, neighbors complained. The landlord had other ideas as well.
Enter Guitar Maniacs/Uptone Studio legend Rick King. King had acquired a building on Market that had already been partially remodeled into a studio. Tietjen took over the lease and went straight to work. Though the space is still evolving, the bands are in, and Peter’s behind the board. “I use Studio One (software), which I love. My interface is Thunderbolt 2, and it allows me to get a bunch of plugins, and it’s expandable.”
Beyond the equipment, Tietjen is focused on mastering the basics of recording. “I’m just all about trying to get the right drum tone and stuff to begin with—that’s more where I come from. The gear did not dominate the Led Zeppelin [recordings],” he stresses. “The things that I think I understand the deepest are within the rock category and into prog rock, jazzy fusion, jazz, and acoustic jazz. Those are my two main things: I always have a kind of a jazzy group and have some kind of rock group.”
Though he respects artists who work with one mic and produce their work with beats and samples, that’s not in his wheelhouse. “I come from jazz too much. I want that give and take and just that energy that comes from, you know, acoustic stuff.”
As I left the interview, videographer Caleb Baker was just arriving with a box of equipment. Baker, who is available to effectively light and shoot bands in the studio—in addition to his work capturing performances in clubs around town—shares the space part-time with Tietjen. Together they offer clients a powerful one-two punch: audio-visual bang for the buck. Follow online on Instagram @relayersound
