Engineer/Musicians Hatch Three Egg Studios In Williamsburg

Williamsburg, Brooklyn: Last year, we reported on an impressive new recording studio that had soft-launched in South Williamsburg, called One.Point.Six Media. The facility had been years in development, its owner and designer working closely with Michael Blackmer of Blackmer Sound to perfect the acoustics. Studios can be complicated businesses, however, and over this past summer, ownership of this facility changed hands.

Brian Penny (left) and Bryan Kane in Three Egg's Studio A control room.

Rebranded as Three Egg Studios and officially open for business as of the end of September, the two-room facility is now being run by engineer/producers Bryan Kane and Brian Penny. Band-mates in the now Brooklyn-based post-punk band Bone Gunn, Kane and Penny relocated from Boston last year in search of better opportunities for their band and production efforts.

“Up in Boston, Kane and I had both been working at Kissy Pig Studios,” says Penny. “I was the go-to house engineer there for awhile and Kane was producing bands, and we were also working on Bone Gunn. We’re trying to push into new territory with our music. Everyone kept telling us that our band belonged in New York. Boston is really a college music scene; it was hard to find bands to play with that would still be around next semester! Plus, people weren’t getting what we were doing. Are you a metal band? No. Are you a folk band? No. What are you? People didn’t get it. We’re doing something different.”

“After awhile, we realized we needed to start meeting people who are in the industry and serious about what they’re doing. You need to meet and play with other bands who are still going be together next year.”

They started looking in Brooklyn and found a building in Red Hook that precipitated their move and their first project. In this space, Kane, Penny and co. setup an art + music venue / collective they call “I Made An Art.” They built a stage in the back and started hosting monthly events, inviting bands they liked to come and play, as well as playing events themselves.

“We have new exhibits every month and put on free music events,” says Penny. “And just by doing that, we felt like we gathered more of a community in less than a year here in Brooklyn than we had in four years in Boston. It was cool to see that happen — people here are really looking to be creative together and collaborate within a community.”

Impromptu jam: Kane and Penny in Three Egg Studio A

All the while, Penny was still traveling between Brooklyn and Boston to engineer records, and working in his home studio. A friend in Boston heard about One.Point.Six being up for sale and told Kane to go check it out. “The former owner wanted to find people who he felt would appreciate what he’d built,” says Penny. “He’d had other offers but he liked Kane and the direction we wanted to take it in, so we were lucky enough to benefit from his labor of love and take it over.”

Three Egg Studios provides another opportunity for community building and growth for both the band and Kane and Penny as producer/engineers. “We were running the day-to-day of Kissy Pig for awhile so we’d already had a really good grasp of what running a studio of this size entails,” says Penny. “Except we were doing it in a college market rather than having the exposure to really serious musicians, bands that are determined to really do something.”

And what Three Egg is providing in Williamsburg will not only appeal to the indie rock set but also to jazz and acoustic musicians and ensembles for its tracking spaces and sightlines for live off the floor sessions. Engineers, according to Penny, will appreciate the room’s accuracy. “Three Egg is the best mix room as far as translation that I’ve ever worked in, period,” he declares. “Learning this room takes half-an-hour as opposed to days. It’s freakish how well the mixes translate.

“We shot out the room and it is quite literally as flat as physically possible for a mix room to be — within 3dB for almost the full spectrum and then a 4dB drop at 115Hz and that’s it. So the coolest thing for me as an engineer is that you come in here and you’re literally hearing what you’re working on, no question.”

Three Egg is impressive looking as well. A Neve 5316 broadcast console sits at the center of the totally symmetrical mission-control-style Studio A control room. From the console, engineers look out to a large live room and two large booths, left and right. The entire Studio A is a done in natural light wood and cream-colored walls, with illuminating light and window boxes accenting the rooms.

Kane and Penny take five in Studio B's recording/lounge/work-space.

Studio B has an entirely different design, kind of an urban rustic log cabin control room with plenty of its own recording and workspace plus tie-lines into the A live rooms. Three Egg is fixing to set up the B room as a 5.1 mix suite. “It’d be perfect for VO and audio post production sessions so that’s our long-term plan, but we’re also open to having a tenant based out of this room.”

Three Egg is equipped with most every DAW platform, including Pro Tools HD3. “Everybody can record at home now which means a lot of people don’t want to pay studio fees for editing time,” Penny notes. “So we built computers that can support all the DAWs — Pro Tools, Logic, Nuendo, Cubase, Samplitude, Sequoia, Live and Reason. We’re going to have Sonar soon. And they all run 48-in and 48-out.

“The premise is that if a client is comfortable working in Logic and that’s what they’re running Logic then we’ll have that running here and it’s seamless integration for you and your project. Or however you want to work; it’s no big deal, we’ve got it all.”

The studio boasts some other musician-friendly features as well. “Jason Rutherford, who wired the facility, has stayed on as our tech,” says Penny. “He wired the whole place for CAT5 so we can do personal monitoring systems in any of the rooms, or set up a monitor and a keyboard in the live room so you can sit there and press play and record for yourself while you’re recording.”

Studio A live room

It’s worth noting that the facility also has a beautiful lounge up front with built-in bar and stereo speakers for another listening environment and meeting space. Additionally, an independently owned/operated 5,000-square-foot photo/video stage downstairs could tie into Three Egg for music video productions and photo shoots.

Penny and Kane seem genuinely psyched to have landed in this facility and are determined to build community around the studio, as they have with their Red Hook art space. “We’re really appreciative of the work that was put into these rooms and we really want to make it so others can benefit from this as well,” Penny shares.

How will they do this? “We want to keep the rates on a sliding scale,” Penny notes. “Being an indie band ourselves, we definitely want to be working on music we want to listen to. And at the end of the day if that means we’re not making as much money, but we’ve got cool things going on, then it’s worth it. We’re also not going to require that clients use in-house engineers. We’ll have an assistant here no matter what, but I want to keep it affordable for bands, especially bands that know how to record themselves.”

If you’re interested in checking out Three Egg Studios (which we recommend you do!), visit http://www.3eggstudios.com and get in touch!

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