New Room: GSI Studios – Manhattan, NYC

A few blocks down from Penn Station’s 24/7 hum, there’s a new facility coming on like a freight train.

The underground rumble is from GSI Studios. On the eighth floor of a W. 29th Street office building between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, it’s in a West-side corridor that hosts dozens of music studios, both public and private. Engineers, mixers, producers and composers have long been setting up shop on these mercantile blocks – it’s a fluid situation, where long-term recording tenants reside right next to studios that open and close in a blip.

Among the upstarts in the area, bet on GSI Studios to stick. Founded by serious jazzheads that bring a rock attitude to recording, the facility has been busy since Day One in April. It’s an upgrade space for Daniel Rovin, Austin White, Eric Harland, who toughed it out in a smaller studio downtown and then decided they were ready to make a move, ramping up their clients (Questlove, DeJ Loaf, Dave Holland) to this more ambitious operation.

GSI Studios is equipped with a 32-channel API 1608 console and ATC monitors, under the supervision of Head Engineer Josh Giunta and Chief Tech Mike Bocchino. Their control room looks out to a live room that has something special for Midtown Manhattan – make that FOUR something specials. There’s a “secret weapon” B Room, a creative atmosphere where work and play is equally encouraged, plus an in-house record label that central to the business model.

Are you ready to get on board? Co-founder Daniel Rovin dives into the details.

GSI Studios’s Studio A, with a 32-channel API 1608

New Room

Facility Name:  GSI Studios

Location: Midtown, Manhattan (146 w29th Street)

Date of Birth: April, 2017

What We’re All About: Tracking live music & mixing

Key Personnel:

Owners – Daniel Rovin, Austin White, Eric Harland

Head Engineer – Josh Giunta

Chief Tech – Mike Bocchino

Before We Started This Studio: Austin and I met growing up playing music in South Carolina. By 2007 we both had moved to New York and in 2011 we decided to start GSI Studios just as a project studio. We became fast friends with jazz drummer Eric Harland after meeting him at the Jazz Standard in Manhattan.

(l-r) GSI Studios founders Eric Harland, Daniel Rovin, and Austin White, with Head Engineer Josh Guinta

We decided to partner and take the leap from a project studio to gut-renovating a brand new state of the art space. Eric also introduced us to our now Head Engineer, Josh Giunta, who was previously engineering at SweetSounds Studio. Our Chief Tech, Mike Bocchino, was a chief tech at Electric Lady.

Our team is unique in that we’re all musicians, so we have a similar vision of creating music in the most pure way possible.

What We’ve Done: Our biggest clients since opening in April have been Questlove and DeJ Loaf. We’ve also worked with a whole host of jazz artists. You name them, they’ve been here – from Dave Holland, Chris Potter, Joshua Redman, Reggie Workman, Taylor Eigsti, Larry Grenadier, and the list goes on.

Location Location Location: We were already on 28th street before the renovation, but having a centralized NYC location was always one of our biggest assets that we didn’t want to change.

Studios in the area are closing every day. And not many studios in the neighborhood have the kind of live room and state-of-the art facility that we have. Since we work with a lot of touring musicians who aren’t from NYC, it’s more appealing and accommodating for them to come to midtown rather than Brooklyn or Queens, where a lot of studios now exist.

Design and Construction: This was a completely raw space. We built 100% of everything in here, which was by design, because we wanted to design the exact kind of studio we envisioned. We’re friends with Joe Salvatto from Salvatto Sound (who has built and worked at many NYC studios over the last 30 years) and we worked with him to design the studio.  He was actually the one who also connected us with Mike, our Chief Tech.

The Studio A Live room is adjoined to four iso booths.

The challenges of building a studio on the eighth floor of a commercial building were not few and far between, which was another reason why Joe’s expertise was so important. I can’t tell you how many permits were involved, but we took great time and care into making sure our sound didn’t disrupt the other tenants, and more importantly that their noise doesn’t infiltrate ours. Of course in NYC we also have to be extremely conscious of street noise…you never want a take to be going great only to be ruined (or improved??) by a siren!

Our wiring expert Matt Snedecor basically wired the whole place — he was a huge asset in building the place from the ground up.

The Equipment List: (Head Engineer Josh Giunta) We decided to go with the API 1608 for two main reasons: 1) we wanted a new console instead of an old one in order to minimize the amount of maintenance. 2) The sound of the API complements the styles of music we record the most; acoustic instruments, bands, and musician based projects.

The sound of the API makes everything gel in a way that makes music sound more complete and more cohesive.  The board sums audio in a way that connects the harmonics of the individual instruments, resulting in heavier and richer tones.  It makes music sound wider and deeper, with a broader range of space that the ear can fixate on. It makes it easier for an engineer to get finished sounding tracks, it does so much of the heavy lifting for blending a songs parts together.

The more of the boards circuitry you use, the more it adds. I use all of the console for my mixes, summing out all of my tracks to the board, using the groups, using the EQs on each channel, and using the analogue sends.

Looking back into the Studio A control room.

Some other gear highlights for the studio include:

Manley Massive Passive Stereo EQ – Love how this opens things up on the top end and cleans up low end on the mix buss, piano, drum overheads, vocal groups, etc…

BAE 1073 mic preamp/EQ – My favorite for vocals, kick or snare, bass.

Sony c-800 – One of the most detailed mics I’ve ever used.  Most vocalists say the same.  I’ve also loved using it as a mono overhead on drums, or as an omni room mic.

Telefunken U47 – a favorite for acoustic bass

Retro 176 limiting amplifier – smooth compression, and sexy feel to the knobs.  I like this to keep peaks in order and also to darken up bright instruments.

Instrumental List: A Yamaha C6 grand piano, tons and TONS of drums including a custom Palmetto drum kit, plus tons of basses (and we are NYC’s only Alembic dealer.)

Monitors: (Josh Giunta) When we opened the studio we had Barefoot Mini Mains in our A control Room.  After a few months of trying to work with them, we decided that they weren’t a good fit for our room.  Each speaker has dual subs, so the bass was too inaccurate for me as an engineer. I prefer having a main that is accurate for detailed mixing, in addition to sounding huge and impressive.

The ATC SCM50’s are a much better fit for us… more balanced, a bit darker, and very accurate and revealing of weaknesses in a mix. We also have Amphion One15 passive studio monitors which are awesome – bright top end, fat low end, they translate well and sound amazing. I do most of my mixing on those.

Livin’ Live: We have four iso booths surrounding the main live space, including one that’s big enough for the piano or the drums.  It was important to separate us from the other few spaces in Manhattan that have similar size (or more) space.  To be able to get absolute clarity from every instrument is essential for us, especially for the mixing process.  We can also record from studio B or even the lounge in conjunction with studio A, basically using the entire space as one studio.

Shhhhhhhhh, Studio B is the multipurpose secret weapon.

The B Room: The B room is our secret weapon.  It’s just a small production/mixing/tracking room, but it allows us to not have A tied up by just an edit or a small mix.  We also use it a ton for vocals (hip hop, voiceover etc…) and we’re integrating it soon to be able to edit video.  There is also a camera in the booth, so if you wanted supreme isolation while recording with a band in A, you could have a singer from a rock band in B booth and via the camera everyone could watch them in A on the big TV.  Naturally we have several big TVs!

Creative Space: This is the other unique aspect and selling point of our studio: Our bottom line is creativity.  We want artists to be able to create their work at the highest and most creative level, that maybe they even found impossible to do in other environments.

We didn’t just build this facility to be a great state of the art studio, but to transform the creative music scene in NYC, which we felt has declined into a bottom-line ($$) business.  Having a comfortable lounge with a wine fridge, PlayStation 4 and also a Studer A 827 combination is something I think you might not find in another top-of-the-line facility in Manhattan!

Label Us: GSI Records is very important to what we do here.  Kind of a mix between a grassroots label and a major label, we will soon be dropping some great albums with well-known musicians.

We take artists – who we call family – that we believe in and let them make the art they want to make.  A lot of jazz, but also some hip-hop and rock too.  There has definitely been a learning curve but the record label is at the heart of what we do.

Blatant Shout-out — what working artist do you fantasize will come and work at GSI? Wow tough question!  We’ve had so many jazz greats through here already, but for me, because I’m a sax player, it has to be Sonny Rollins.

Not only are we birthday twins (September 7!) but he is in my top five sax players and jazz musicians ever, and the only one still alive.  He doesn’t play much anymore but to have him in here would be legendary. Being as connected in the jazz world as we are, my hope is that this is actually an attainable goal!

A Studio A iso booth.

Doors closed on the booth.

Hit the lounge.

Remember the name!

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