Op-Ed: And Another One Gone – What We Lose When Studios Close

It’s part of the cycle of life that things have a life and then move on. So it happens with studios, many of which we have come to enjoy working in. With the recent closing of BiCoastal Music I find myself reflecting.

The live room at the now-shuttered BiCoastal Music.

My first studio was Mediasound on west 57^th Street in Manhattan. Starting out it was a great opportunity to learn from world class people as they made records and national jingles.

Part of what made a studio like Mediasound a great place for them to work in was the environment and the staff. There were dedicated assistants and the people in the production office often knew what you needed on your session before you had time to mention it. The maintenance team was world class, and beyond fixing gear they were often building new pieces.

The studio in the mid 80’s had two Neve consoles (also a Harrison and a Trident) and Studio A (the original West 57^th Street Baptist Mission church) was a great tracking space. The collection of mics was extensive and you had a few flavors of tape to choose from.

Owning a studio was a risky venture back then, and it’s only gotten harder to make ends meet in today’s environment. While our digital toolbox has grown tremendously, studios today present fewer options on the capture side and rely more on the fix-it-in the box mentality.

The Workings of World-Class Spaces

In David Weiss’ recent article interviewing Hal Winer, owner of BiCoastal Music, Hal states, “Unfortunately, if you’re in this business to make money as a commercial studio owner, there’s almost no justification for building a world-class space because the budgets as they are now won’t support it.”

Modern budgets don’t allow for the large support staff any longer, but BiCoastal was a world class studio that in many ways surpassed the grand old studios in what it had to offer as a facility. Modern treatments and construction techniques under the direction of Russ Berger made for a large, open, airy feel that sounded spot on. Acoustically the room provided various tight and roomy-sounding spaces within the main studio space and three iso areas with great line of sight. Monitoring was accessed by individual 16-channel mixers. The gear was all world class and it was located in a rural setting that leant itself to being focused yet relaxed.

What do you do when you get stuck for ideas? Whenever I have worked in a multi-room facility I’ve always hung out for a bit with people from other sessions. Along the way I have picked up insights, ideas, and inspiration. Once in a while I even picked up some great side musicians that were needed for the project I was working on. The whole scene just made you want to go back to your room and be creative!

Stratosphere Sound’s Studio A, which went silent in December, 2012.

Today I see people bringing their laptops to one guy’s home rig and sharing ideas, but they are all working on the same project. Differences sometimes make, well, the difference. I have been inspired by an R&B project while making a retro rock EP, by a hip hop project while mixing a singer/songwriter, and re-amped an ill-fitting collection of drum samples through a Fender Twin for a hip hop mix I did.

So now we have it all in our computers and we have emulations of all that expensive gear. Why do we need the big high-end studio with its expensive price tag? What are we losing anyway?

If you are making a record that is what I call “production music” (virtual instruments and a vocal mic), you have no need for a dedicated studio other than ego. Unless of course you take into account all the support staff that made it possible for the artists, producers, and engineers to focus on their craft.

Of course if you are in a group that features live music, you have a whole different set of concerns.

Big Room ROI

There are many things about record-making I am willing to admit I can be flexible about. The fact that band records are more exciting when the rhythm tracks are tracked together is not one of them! There is no quicker way to suck the life out of a track then by recording the instruments separately. The studio therefore needs to be of a size that will allow for all the musicians to be setup with enough isolation, and still maintaining good lines of sight amongst the players.

I once read an interview with T-Bone Burnett where he stressed the importance of how what you are going to record needs to sound good in the room you record in. Well he is dead right – it’s becoming harder and harder these days to find these rooms that just work as a good-sounding space.

Artists may feel that the expense of these rooms is out of their reach, but when you add up all the time spent piece-mealing the rhythm section track by track (to say nothing of trying to fix tracking issues in the mix) is it really that expensive?

When I work with a band we rehearse until we have all the parts and tempos worked out. When we track, we can lay down an album worth of basic tracks in 2-3 days. After that, the home studio might be perfect for overdubs, but first we had access to a great-sounding space and mics, along with processing gear beyond most artists’ ability to assemble. I’d say that’s great return on investment.

Collaborative Continuity

These types of rooms were a great training ground when I was coming up. Sure you can find a lot of information (and some disinformation) on the Web, but nothing beats sitting in the room and watching what people do, both good and bad.

The mega music-for-picture facility Sound One ceased operations in October of last year.

Coming up, I could compare rare tube mics or versions of ribbon mics and learn how to create a desired sound. If there was downtime we all tried to get in there and experiment. It was magical and it inspired us.

My hope is that as some of us discuss these aspects of studio life, it will inspire the next generation of engineers to reach out and share ideas with their colleagues. Perhaps they will find a way to retain the spirit of those studio days.

Working at BiCoastal Music was inspiring and I will truly miss working there and the opportunity to collaborate with its owner Hal Winer, who loves making records with a passion, as do the many people I have met through the studio. Good luck to Hal, and good luck to us all as we boldly venture out into the new world of record making.

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