Studio A - “The Barn”
Studio A lives inside a fully renovated 150-year-old barn. Designed to accommodate any and all recording projects, the A-room was inspired by the great tracking rooms from the golden age of recording, and meticulously curated to make artists feel instantly at home.
Studio A’s live room is 800 sq ft. with 12 ft gabled ceilings. The sound is partially controlled by thick gobos around the perimeter & ample wall treatment. But also - with no two walls in parallel - a rich and focused room sound is present.
The live room is exhaustively de-coupled from the adjacent control room for precise monitoring. Adjoining the live room is a sizable iso room, a green room area separated by thick curtains for semi-isolation, and a hallway with sight lines into the main area. Above the control room is an echo chamber which doubles as a site for additional isolation.
Among the instruments available for performers are a Yamaha U3 upright piano which was factory-reconditioned in Japan, as well as a ‘70s Rhodes 73, Wurlitzer 200, & Farfisa Mini Compact.
At the heart of the control room is a 24-channel Auditronics “Son of 36 Grand” 501 console. Made in Memphis, TN in the 1970s, the 501 is known for its thick, musical 4-band inductor EQ and Jensen transformer-based preamps.
A refrain I hear from artists a lot these days is, “as soon as I walked in, I felt like I was home.” In my design - from the color scheme to the furniture choices to the custom cherry gear racks and diffusers - I endeavored to make the space feel rooted but elevated. For much of my acoustic treatment, I recycled wood that we removed from the siding of the barn during our rebuild. In the live room, between the Altec live room speakers, there is a full wall of barnwood siding in a sawtooth pattern to throw it out of parallel with the opposite wall. Throughout the design, the lines between indoor and outdoor, the naturally-occurring and acoustically-engineered, are smudged. You are inside a live room straight out of ‘70s Los Angeles, while you are simultaneously in a former Hudson Valley horse barn.
To get a greater sense of working in Studio A, check out the floor plan.
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