Stu

Stuart Delk grew up in east Tennessee in the mountains just north of Knoxville in a very small town called Oneida. The first concert he attended was the AC/DC Who Made Who Tour at Civic Colosseum. The energy that the band portrayed that night made me know I wanted to be part of events like this one.

The first step towards reaching this goal came after seeing a man in a top hat plugging in a Les Paul and ripping out Sweet Child O’ Mine. This is the point where I started looking for the guitar he was playing and found one I could afford at a local pawn shop.

Having no idea how to play guitar, a kid came up to me at school one day and said he had heard that I owned a Les Paul. I said yeah, then he asked if I wanted to start a band. When I mentioned I had no idea how to play it and only knew 3 chords, my new friend told me not to worry, that he would teach me.

5 months later after practicing every day for hours on end learning 5-7 songs per week the band was booked to perform the first show. Realizing we needed a sound system for this show, I knew a guy who had a small Peavey PA. So, when everyone is a musician in the band, someone always ends up setting up the sound gear and that guy became me.

At this point I started buying my own gear and renting it to local events. When high school graduation came and I had no idea what I wanted to do other than play guitar, my father insisted on a back up plan through college. So, I found a college that offered a 4-year degree in music studio engineering at Middle Tennessee State University.

While attending MTSU a friend’s roommate offered me a job at a large rehearsal facility called Nashville Cartage & Sound off west end. The next 3 years was spent in class during the day and working nights and weekends learning how to spin up monitor mixes at NCS. One night in the 3rd year working at NCS during a rehearsal a manager asked me if I wanted to go on tour because he saw potential in my skillset.

At this point my first tour became “Deryl Dodd & the Homesick Cowboys” and then moved on to “Sons of the Desert”, “Lila McCaan”, “Gary Allen”, “Ty Herndon”. I was with Ty when 911 happened and my roommate was doing merchandise for a new band called “Rascal Flatts”. The sound guy for that band decided he was not going to travel anywhere due to the 911 events. Management for “Rascal Flatts” reached out for someone to fill in and 18 years later, 2 Parnelli Awards, Stage Pro Award & CMA nominee for Monitor Engineer of the Year the pandemic brought it all to a screeching halt. Loving the fact of being home for 18 months I took a sales job at PRG for a year and left to come over to the DCR family the beginning of 2023.