About Us
Hello! My Name is Nate Stombaugh and I'm the owner/founder of Duck Pond Studios. Duck Pond Studios was born out of my love for Jesus, music, mixing, and a desire to get better. It started as a simple instagram page, but now God has allowed me to make Duck Pond Studios an actual free-lance business. So far, Duck Pond Studios has been involved in several successful studio projects in multiple diverse genres, as well as extensive experience in the live sound realm. Duck Pond Studios has also become the unofficial audio/video streaming service for the University of Kentucky Trumpet Studio.
My Story
I started playing music around 3rd grade when I started taking piano lessons. When I got to middle school, my parents asked if I wanted to join band, so I followed in their footsteps and played the trumpet. By late middle school, I decided to get involved with the worship team at my church, where I began to play keys with the youth worship band. By the time I reached high school, I was a full fledged member of the worship team and was beginning to take trumpet playing seriously, however at that point in my life, I thought I wanted to go to the Air Force and be a fighter pilot. In 2016, at a Christ in Youth event, an organization I would later work for, God very clearly called me into music and music ministry. This was also about the same time that my father began to teach me how to mix audio. Junior year was a big year for me. Around that time, my church needed bass players, so I learned bass and became one of my church's primary bass players for several years. Audio began to play a steadily larger role in my life as my church built a new building with new digital consoles and a high end PA system. I became one of the primary broadcast engineers and eventually moved to front of house. I also started to really take trumpet seriously and aimed to major in music in college. When I graduated, I was able to do just that and landed a spot in the trumpet studio at the University of Kentucky, where I was able to play in the marching band, jazz band, and wind ensembles. Around this time, I also decided to learn guitar and by spring of my freshman year I landed a spot on my campus ministry's worship team on bass and electric guitar. I also began attending new, larger church in college where I was able to get even more opportunities to get better at mixing. Through COVID, I was forced to focus more on studio mixing, taking up a few small recording projects. 2021 was huge for me when I was offered a job with Christ in Youth as a touring engineer. I was blessed to return to this job a second summer in 2022. Currently, I am finishing up my Music Education degree at the University of Kentucky while regularly playing all of my different instruments at multiple churches/ministries around Lexington and spearheading multiple large scale audio projects.
