The Capacity of Flux: A Constantly Growing Studio in NYC

March 19th, 2025 by Kallie Marie

A gem in the East Village of NYC, Flux is a recording studio that knows the staying power of remaining flexible.

This week, Kallie Marie talks to founder Fab Dupont about the currents of change powering this longstanding and ever-growing New York studio.

The Dangerous Room at Flux Studios. The studio features a 1974 discrete Neve NBC custom console.

In the last few months alone, Flux Studios has been host to artists like Julian Casablancas’ band The Voidz ,The Counting Crows, Lorde, The Chainsmokers, Rauw, Daniel Caesar, and Residente.

With their opening of a newly built Atmos room, new collaborations from innovative gear companies, and more, I sat down with the originator behind this Flux state, founder Fab Dupont, to talk about the origins of his studio, his vision for it, and the community he’s been building at this unique space.

For those unfamiliar, Flux is an eight-room studio facility for recording, mixing and mastering. The studio launched in 2000, in the very same East Village building where it resides today, out of one single room in the basement. From there Fab has expanded the studio to reach throughout the whole building, extending his vision to (actual) rooftop heights.

Since 2021 the entirety of the building has been under his command, having now expanded to every floor.

Each of the rooms are aptly named, such as “The Dangerous Room”, The Fabulous Room”, “The Inspiration Room”, “The Transporter Room” (where The Strokes recorded their seminal album Is This It), and the new Atmos-equipped “Cloud 9″—all with their own specialities and featured equipment.

Two-Decade Takeover

How long has the studio been open?
In this incarnation… It’s very difficult to answer this question. My first room in this building was in 2000. So I was just a roommate with one guy in a room, Graham Hawthorne, the drummer. Amazing drummer.

Then, in 2006 I took this room, which is now called the Fabulous Room. And then in 2009, I took over the fourth floor. In 2011, took over the third floor. In 2016, I think, I took over another room in the basement. And then, in 2021, we took over the whole building, so it’s been incremental.

But Flux Studios as it is, as an entity… Well, the first time anyone has heard of “Flux Studios”, it was 2009 when I took over the 4th floor. 2009 is when Flux Studios was created as a thing, and then it just grew over the years. It’s pretty wild.

So tell us the names of each of the rooms and what their specialties are.
The biggest room, the flagship room, is the Dangerous Room, and it is our bigger live tracking room. It has a 1974 discrete Neve NBC custom (console). It’s a 53-series frame, but it has all sorts of different modules in it. The monitor section has been completely rebuilt to actually be a Dangerous Music ST Monitor disguised as a Neve monitor section from the seventies.

So that is our main room for big tracking stuff, and it has all the usual outboard, and then the thing is that all the instruments rotate. We also have a [Hammond] CV organ; beautiful organ from the forties, and three Rhodes, a Wurly and just about every synth you could possibly want, but they just rotate between the eight rooms.

Audacious from all angles: the Fabulous Room.

The other room is Fabulous Room, which is the one we are in. This is my room, but it’s also available to book, like Lorde just locked it out for a month or so. This is equipped with a Kii BXT monitoring system, which is the most accurate sound system in the universe, in my opinion, and has all the prerequisite outboard, and if you want to sum [it] has a Dangerous 2-BUS.

The Flux Philosophy

Can you tell me a little bit about your philosophy behind how you run Flux Studios?
It’s a community. That’s what it is. We have a lot of social events [and] gatherings, which I sponsor. We keep session prices very affordable. It is a great place to create music. It really is. That’s why all the instruments and amps are there. That’s why I don’t really look at costs when it comes to the equipment.

It is a music creation community. That’s the philosophy. I personally hate traditional recording studios in general. I don’t like walking into a place where the corridors look like a dentist office and there’s a producer desk in the way between the engineer and the artists or the producers are in the back.

I don’t want any of that. I think that stuff sucks. So every room here looks different. Every room has its own super vibey spirit, and every room is basically a living room that sounds great with great equipment in it. That is the idea. It doesn’t look like a regular studio, which throws some people off sometimes. And I don’t mind.

Flux Studios’ Revolution Room.

We have an incredible amount of repeat [business]. Everybody who has a session here, they just come back because the vibe is cool, because the crew is awesome.

My team is amazing. What I mean is that a studio isn’t really about the gear. Everybody can buy the same gear, you know? But it is about the spirit of the place and about how people relate, and how it feels.

You can’t buy that.
No, it’s hard to infuse.

How have you seen the New York City recording studio scene evolve over the last few years?
It’s died. Because of real estate pressure mostly. Because of that pressure, if you’re not hosting the top 1% rock stars in the world, then few people can afford what it costs to hire a studio at this level. And the prices we practice are so low, it’s a bargain, but a lot of people still can’t afford that. So we balance the thing. We have rooms that are more affordable so that people who really want to work in a good environment can get into a professional studio. And we have rooms that we have to keep at a higher cost because they cost a lot of money to maintain. And also the rent is pretty staggering.

For a recording studio in Manhattan, the problem is that it’s very expensive to maintain. The rents keep going up, electricity keeps going up, and coffee keeps going up. And the only thing that’s not going up is the hourly rate for a studio session. So it’s very hard to balance. The way I managed is by having a strong community, pricing it right so that people always come back, and growing horizontally or actually in this case vertically. So adding rooms and different services has allowed us to be in business when everybody is shutting down.

It’s like you’ve grown a very strong tree, with very deep roots, that’s branched out….
By doing a lot of favors and helping people in need. And I mean, there’s some crazy stories like… I mean, you should also talk to Daniel (Sanint, Flux studio manager) about this, because he’s at the heart of a lot of these initiatives.

Take Sammy Ray for example. Sammy Ray is blowing up all over the world. She’s sold out SummerStage. She sold out like a 5,000-seat venue, just her, in two years. She started here and she had no money but we believed in her. And Daniel said, “Look, we’re going to hook you up” and she turned that help into a thriving career. And the number of artists that we helped like this, get started, and they have careers and then they come back — not that it’s a condition, but they do.

It’s wonderful to see the amount of artists that are gravitating around here because of the vibe and because of the fact that we support them and we are there for them, and things like that. Some of them come for the crazy microphone collection of course.

The Dungeon features a recently installed 1970’s Neve Melbourne board, refurbished by Joe Russo.

Artists First

You not only run the studio, but you’re also an active mix engineer and producer. So can you tell me a little bit about your philosophy behind how you make music and work with your clients?

“Don’t forget that it’s their record:” that’s my philosophy. A lot of people forget that detail but I always remind myself that I am there to make sure that their record makes them happy. I have my taste. And in theory they come to me because their taste aligns with my taste. But sometimes there are diversions, sometimes they want things a certain way that I wouldn’t do if it were just me, but it’s their record. And so I’m there to give an opinion, provide the insurance that’s as good as it can be, but I have to do what they want.

So one way to keep them happy is to be very careful when you choose who you work with and make sure you work with somebody who, A, can take feedback on something, and B, is flexible enough to understand that maybe that stuff they’ve been listening to for the last six months, and is part of their DNA, the vocal is, 8 dB too loud and maybe it’s time to put it back into the fold. And so some people cannot get there. So I try to not work with those people. Because in the end, your name is on it.

So I am very careful about the records I make. I say “no” a lot because I don’t want to be in a room making music I don’t want to make. That’s not [why] I started making music. The collision of art and commerce is very difficult to navigate, but I have made my peace with it. I’m like, “I’d rather eat pasta than make a record I don’t want to make.”

I’ve been very lucky to extremely rarely be caught in situations that I don’t want to be in. It happens. The expression is, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” It happens from time to time either because of people, somebody who’s an amazing person, but maybe not an amazing musician— but you want to help the amazing person. Or people appear one way early on and then they turn out to be somebody else through the process of the record.

That is disappointing.
It happens a lot. Fortunately, I have a pretty good nose for that, so I haven’t been caught in that situation very often, but when it happens, it sucks.

“Make it Better”

What is your vision for the studio going forward?
Just make it better, which drives my team crazy. Every room I take over, I inherit whatever the hell is there. And so it’s not always good…actually, it’s never good. So every time we have to go in and augment or fix, and it’s difficult because every time it is tough on the team. But this is not a situation where we are going to drop $2 million and go in debt and have to raise our prices to pay back the loans. We are not doing that. So I’m very careful about what I do to make sure that we can stay who we are, but keep offering the best studio experience for everybody.

The “Inspiration Room” at Flux.

My vision is just, make it better. I just want to make it better. Make it better and make it more relevant.

It’s very difficult to change things in an existing studio because of wiring and of the disruption and the downtime and the costs and the wear and tear. But if you don’t do that, you become irrelevant. Like production technique, recording techniques, habits, the social elements of a recording studio function in the universe have changed drastically over the last few years, since the pandemic, before the pandemic, it changes all the time.

The rooms that were designed to fit the need from 10 years ago are completely irrelevant right now. And so I’m adapting the rooms, and the team. We are adapting the rooms so that they’re relevant to people and to the way people want to work. What people need is very different from what people used to need. And so that’s why I keep bettering things.

The big salient point is Atmos. There was demand for Atmos. Great. We built an Atmos room. That takes time, that takes money and it’s downtime and it disrupts the way the room functions. There’s speakers everywhere. The room doesn’t feel the same.

We built the Atmos room and then realized, “Okay, cool, that’s great, but it’s not compatible with the tracking room. It just doesn’t feel right for people to be in there. They can’t lean against the wall because there’s a rear speaker, there’s a left surround speaker. Atmos moves the mixer position back for it to be compliant with the Dolby requirements.”

After a year and a half of that, I realized this was not working. We [had originally] put it in the room called the Dungeon. The Dungeon was no longer good at…It was not good at anything. I mixed lots of successful Atmos records in there, but there were always scheduling conflicts with people who wanted to track. And then the people who wanted to track would bump into the speakers and the mixing position was too far back so we could put less people in the control room. It just didn’t work.

So we yanked the Atmos from out of Dungeon and we built Cloud Nine to just be the Atmos room. And so that’s iterative, like I am trying to make it better and more relevant. Now the Dungeon is a tracking room and it is awesome for that. And there’s nothing in the way. It just works. And that’s great. And Cloud Nine is a great Atmos room built exactly to spec within an inch, and it’s placed right and it feels right and it’s decorated right for that vibe.

And in the same vein, this room we’re in right now [the Fabulous room] was already awesome, but I wanted something that made people dream. So I re-built it. Now I’m done with it. And next is going to be…I think I want to do some Feng Shui in Dangerous. I just want it to feel a little more, I don’t know, cosmic.

Surrounded: Atmos abounds inside “Cloud Nine” at Flux.

Embracing Change

You’re clearly not afraid of change or continuing to be malleable and adapt, and to redo things, and not be stuck.

Yes. For example, a while back we realized that some of Flux’s rooms built-in computers were not getting used as much. Clients tend to come with their personal machines and connect to our Thunderbolt systems. Anybody can come in with their computer, any computer, any Mac — I don’t see a Windows machine ever— and then they take over any room at Flux within one minute.

So we decided, “OK, enough with this, we need to adapt resources.” As a result we now have a couple floating computers with very well-stocked and very up-to-date systems installed. In Cloud Nine for example, there’s no built-in computer, but if you come work there, and you are an artist who wants to do an Atmos mix but you don’t have your own system; we have a floater that has everything on it that we can drop in so you’re up and running in a minute. If you have your own system with all your plugins and media you can use that instead and save a lot of time at the top of the session.

Community Contact

I know that you have a strong community spirit at Flux, and you do some community outreach. Can you tell us a little bit about what that looks like and what types of outreach you’re involved in through the studio?

I feel very lucky. I have built a good network of collaborators and I don’t really have to worry about work coming in. I realized that not everybody is that lucky.

I also realized that the cost of connecting with other people in New York has become very high. A cocktail’s 15 bucks minimum, plus tax plus tip. So if you are in New York and you’re a really great music maker, but you need to connect with other people to be able to grow in the scene, then it’s going to cost you 20, 30, 50 bucks every time you go out. It’s insane. I had flashbacks of when I just had moved to the city and the idea of spending $50 to go out was unthinkable.

Make some Magic!

And so I started putting together events where I would buy the booze, usually champagne, and then open the doors to the place and welcome the community to come in so they could hang out and not go broke. And so yeah, a lot of people show up — they don’t show up for the free booze, they show up because it’s a cool place with cool people, no mosquitoes. And of course there is champagne.

We filter who we invite and it is just a scene and I get the most amazing feedback on it and the most amazing testimonials of the fact that it is absolutely worthy to be doing that. So that was the impetus: create space for people like me who may be at a different level of advancement on their path, to feel connected to other people who do the same thing, in an environment that’s productive for that. And it’s working out pretty good. [Social events are every second Tuesday during warmer weather months at Flux.]

Getting to the Gear

What pieces of gear are you most excited about at Flux right now, and why?
My Kii Three BXT system is rocking my world. I love it. It is my favorite speaker system that I’ve ever heard. So I’m very excited about that. I’m very excited about the Osmose keyboard because whenever I can pry it out of the hands of clients, it’s my favorite new keyboard. Love it. I’m a very minimalistic person. I wasn’t in the past obviously because all the gear at Flux in these eight rooms I bought for myself. So clearly I was not minimalist for a long time, but I have recently realized that what I care most about is the song and the feeling I get when listening to the music. And I really do not care how I get there. I no longer have this craving for new gear for myself. All I care about is that what I hear is what I get. I care about the fact that when I work, I don’t have to second guess what I’m doing.

Chris Tabron, the producer, was here with The Voidz downstairs and he showed me this little pedal called Chroma Console. And I was like, “I don’t care.” But then I heard what he was doing with it and I was like, “Wait. That is awesome. It’s practical, it’s quick, and no plugin can do that, just like that. This is a great resource for the Flux people.” So I bought one. And I did use it as I was just producing a record, I used it on that record and I loved it. And so I was excited about that for a few weeks. Also, at the same time I was on Reverb. I bought a 1985 Sequential TOM Beatbox with a mod in it that has all sorts of really crusty eight-bit things — it has 16 kits in there.

So I’ve used that for two weeks and now, it’s in what we call the “general population,” meaning that anybody at Flux can use it. Which means I rarely have access to it anymore unless I reserve it. So I get these little G.A.S flashes, but honestly it’s really purpose-driven. I don’t need much for myself anymore. I care about my BTXs, my headphones, I use Meze Elites — I love those very much, and then my little Apollo; I’m a happy cat.

Flux Studios is a transporting experience — inside the Transporter Room.

I do have a thing for Auratones too. The new owner of Auratone, Alex, is awesome. Since I travel a lot and I like to mix on a mono Auratone quite a bit, I had him make me a “shallow tone.” We call it a Shallow Tone because it is basically an Auratone cut in half so that it fits in my computer bag. It’s awesome. I was just in California for two weeks and I had to make music, and that was my rig: Apollo Twin, Shallow Tone, [Meze] Elites, and my MacBook Pro M3. That’s all I need.

That’s phenomenal! What a way to travel and be flexible with your work.
The freedom is incredible. And then when I’m here, I use the gear here, but when I am not, I don’t. It’s OK. Very often, I actually don’t use the gear in here because I know I’m going to travel with that song, so I cannot be tethered.

So finally, tell us about the new room, and how it will integrate into the current family of rooms at Flux. When will it officially be open?
It’s open! Cloud 9 is now officially open for business. It’s aimed to be our hybrid Stereo and Atmos mixing room, although we also added basic tracking equipment in case someone wanted to do writing or production in there. It sounds bananas and it feels great to work in it for hours. I just mixed a couple songs in there as a test run and they translated perfectly. All the hard work the team and myself put in definitely paid off. I’m very excited to see how people take to it.

— Kallie Marie is a contributor to SonicScoop. She is the author of “Conversations with Women in Music Production“, available now from Backbeat Books.

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