About Cat’s Away

Cat’s Away Studio is a comfortable, low-key space located near the western edge of Cary, NC, a few miles from the Chatham County line. It’s a recording studio and music room devoted primarily to acoustic music, and also houses my woodworking shop. My name is Miner Gleason, and I’m the owner and operator.

I bought my first open reel decks while in High School, and began my first experiments in recording, overdubbing guitars, vocals, violins and percussion while bouncing tracks from one machine to the other. In college, I began recording the school’s orchestra concerts and friends’ bands with an inexpensive pair of dynamic mics plugged into the deck’s mic inputs. Results varied, but one of the orchestral recordings turned out particularly well, and the conductor kept the tape. In most cases, it’s probably fortunate that none of those recordings have survived the passage of the years, but I do wish I still had that early orchestral recording.

In 1981 my wife & and I settled in the mid-Hudson Valley area in New York. I’d upgraded the mics to a pair of Beyer ribbons and built a nice little battery-powered preamp from plans in Audio Amateur, and gained experience recording chamber orchestras, jazz ensembles, chamber music and choral music throughout the 80s and early 90s.

In 1993, we relocated to the Research Triangle region of North Carolina, and with the purchase of a Tascam 488 cassette porta-studio and some more microphones, Cat’s Away Studio began. Initially it was a bedroom/garage project studio, with sessions happening mainly during “cat’s away” time when the rest of the family was out, and though it was used mostly to record demos, my band Whirled Peas recorded and released an EP (Green Chunks) at Cat’s Away.

Since the mid-2000s, the studio has been housed in a 2-story addition to our home. Downstairs is the combination woodworking shop and practice/recording space, and upstairs is the music studio / control room. It’s still something of a work in progress (it needs some sound treatments), but is otherwise fully operational.

Some of the clients who’ve recorded projects here:

More About Me

Music has been my lifelong passion. I have distant memories of picking out tunes on my mom’s piano when I was barely tall enough to reach the keyboard, and thanks to her I’ve been able to read music notation for as long as I can remember. I began violin lessons when I was 8, joined the church choir a few years later, and have played and sung in various ensembles and bands ever since.

After spending a couple years as an engineering student at another university, in the mid-70s I was accepted as a violin performance major at Montclair State College. As a kid, I’d seen Harpo Marx play “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” on the harp on an episode of “I Love Lucy” and was absolutely mesmerized. That began a lifelong love of the instrument (and led to a collection of over 100 LPs and CDs featuring the harp). I never dreamed I’d one day have an opportunity to learn to play, and was thrilled to be able to study harp as my secondary instrument with the late, great harpist and teacher, Dr. Rosalie Pratt. I have a wonderful memory of playing a holiday concert with the Montclair State College harp ensemble at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC.

With the dawning realization that the prospects of making a decent living as a musician looked slim, I left Montclair State in 1978 to work full time, marry my sweetheart, and resume pursuing an engineering degree. In 1981, with degree in hand, I took a job with IBM in the Hudson Valley in NY, and a few years later was able to afford a lovely Salvi McFall lever harp and resume harp studies. For a brief time I had a trio with a violinist & cellist, but by the late 80s was playing violin with a chamber orchestra and string quartet and singing with a chamber choir, and between that, a growing family and a heavy work schedule, there was little time for the harp. It languished unplayed, and we needed the money, so (with some regrets) we sold it.

Fast forward to December 2017, when serendipity put a beautiful Lyon & Healy Troubadour lever harp within reach. In February 2018 I began lessons with Leigh Stringfellow, a fine harpist and teacher based in Carrboro, NC. She’s rekindled my passion for the harp, and in July 2019 we bought a gorgeous, 20-year-old, near mint Lyon & Healy 85E semi grand pedal harp. We’ve since added a Dusty Strings Ravenna, a small, easily-portable lever harp for playing therapeutic music.

These days I gig regularly with electric Jerry Garcia tribute band Liquid Garcia, and jam (and record) occasionally with my old friends from the acoustic Second String Band.