What did Stratosphere's building look like before you moved in?
The space was just storage lockers — it was 30 feet high. You'd walk in and it was just this huge cavernous space that went on for 8000 square feet — we just thought how much we wanted to put up a dividing wall. Then we bunkered down for ten months.
And this was after the fire in The Place?
Yeah. I had had a studio for eight years, since I was right out of school. That studio was literally built by myself and some friends. We learned how to drill into the drywall and put up the studs...
So you had really done some basic construction from the ground up...
Well, I was more what they called the lackey. My friend, who is also a musician, would do carpentry work on the side and stuff. I just kind of helped him. This new studio was an enormous step up — obviously financially, technologically — on every level it was bigger. I bought out my partners at the old studio and — I was talking to James Iha and Adam. I was talking about if I buy out my old partners and reform with these guys, that we could maybe find a new place.
Were you able to salvage any equipment from the fire?
The fire didn't affect our space, per se. The flames didn't lap up at our equipment. We were on the third floor. We suffered severe smoke damage and damage to the studio structure and everything else because the firemen just busted through everything to put out the fire. The building was destroyed enough so that they didn't repair it, and they used this clause in the New York State lease that says that in a catastrophic fire a landlord can terminate all leases. So that's what he did. We had fifteen days to get everything out of there.
I can't imagine how you can just pick up the pieces and move on to build Stratosphere.
We almost gave up. At first we were optimistic. "We'll just find another space." Then everything seemed to come together. We got a call, because Billboard wrote a piece on the demise of Stratosphere, the unfortunate fire, our plight and the search for our space. There's a woman who works at Billboard who's kind of an acquaintance of James' and Adam's. She called us up and said, "My father owns a lot of real estate in Manhattan, maybe you guys could talk to him." So we met with him, and he was about as accommodating as you could get. He mentioned that there was one here, which was three blocks from where we lived.
Where did you find this board [Neve 8086]? It's beautiful.
It was in upstate New York... I can't remember the name of the studio. This is a '78. And it's just like your classic gorgeous Neve with GML automation. It's been heavily, heavily modified by Dan Zellman [Zeltech Industries]. I mean, these boards were really no frills. It seems like they weren't back then, but compared to what you'd get with a Mackie today, you know that a Mackie's more flexible than the way this board was designed.
So you're talking mainly functional modifications?
Well, there's lots of modifications that you can do to update it so that it is every bit as flexible as any board you'd buy today.
How deeply involved were you in spec'ing out the board and getting it fit electronically?
I'm not that hands-on with that kind of thing. If a module would go down, I would just call Dan. He's one of the premier Neve guys on the East Coast and he happens to be in New York, which is convenient. And he's totally modified this board so that it's incredibly flexible and can pretty much do anything you wanna do today. It's been totally re-capped as well. By his own admission, it's one of the best sounding Neves that he's come across. We've got a good marriage between old vintage stuff and new solid state, tube. You'll have a Focusrite next to the old Beatle-esque mic pres. So it's a pretty wide selection, fully blown Pro Tools, but we've also got a 16-track, 2" tape machine for those purists who like to do bass and drums on that.
So you are tracking directly to 2" for the most part and dump into Pro Tools to mix?
I always track to 2". Not even just to mix. The tracks get recorded and may only spend their life for five minutes on multi-track tape. And as soon as the band takes a break and has Chinese food upstairs, we're transferring it into Pro Tools through our A/D converters. So this is kind of like the guts here. We've got our 16-track 2", Munchy Crunchy Intermittent, you know, MCI? We pretty much run everything on the Studer [827] over here, just to capture the sound, and then it goes into Pro Tools.
How quickly do you typically dump it into Pro Tools?
It could be as quick as a guy comes in and does two guitar parts and I would say, you know, between those two I could comp together a good one, and he, like, goes to the bathroom or something and by the time he's back. As long as we capture on the multitrack, it can immediately go in.
Where did all this gear originate?
Most of the stuff in here is just all the gear that we have amassed between the three partners since we were kids. That CP-70 was my first keyboard that my parents bought for me. I've been waiting for a studio big enough so I could take it from my parent's garage and bring it up here.
How hands-on are you managing the studio?
We have a studio manager who runs the place, and I'd say that the lion's share of the business has been coming by what we call in-house stuff. Projects that I bring in that are my projects... Tahiti 80, some Japanese bands that I have worked with, Mexican bands...
Lots of internationally-flavored stuff?
Yeah, I seem to be a little like the United Nations producer. France, Spain, Mexico and Japan.
How are you finding all this stuff? Are they finding you?
Tahiti 80 started it. They had a massive, massive hit on their first record in Japan. I guess I already had a profile from my work in Ivy, but it was more like kind of indie-underground in Japan. But the Tahiti 80 record was one of the biggest records in Japan when it came out. Their first record. So that led to a lot work from like higher profile Japanese artists who wanted to work with me.
Word gets around...
You need your one little big break to kind of jump-start things.
Are there any other projects that come in from the outside that have caught your ear?
Yes, I'd say most, 70% of our projects have come from the inside. I mean, studios have been just dropping left and right. We've been fortunate that most of the work, since we've opened a year ago, has originated through projects we had something to do with. For example, the first projects since then have been Ivy doing the Shallow Hal score, then a Mexican band I did, then I did the Tahiti 80 record, which took us to Christmas. Then Adam did a whole bunch of stuff here. Adam and James, they have Scratchie Records, did their first big signings with Scratchie Records here.
It's really comfortable in here. It doesn't seem too clinical or clean, like many other upscale studios around town.
Well, we gave [studio designer] Francis Manzella a mandate which was that sonically, it had to be every bit as competitive with studios that were twice as expensive as this. But we wanted to kind of keep the vibe a little funky and we didn't want to go too nuts on all the finishings, because to us that's what also can make it very corporate. The word corporate came up a lot as something we wanted to try to find whatever the antithesis to that would be.
So your primary instrument was keyboards, right?
I started off as a keyboard player and a frustrated drummer. I think I was maybe technically a little better on the drums, but mostly, because I was a composer, I was writing on the keyboards.
So that's obviously your best vehicle for composing?
It was at first, but then I met Dominique and then we fell in love and she thought that keyboards weren't cool — all her favorite bands were guitar bands. So I immediately sold all my keyboards and bought a guitar.
Now you're back to working more closely with keyboards...
Well now I think we kind of like... now it's a little of whatever we grab.
Guestroom is a very electronic-based record.
The last five songs were songs that we have done over the course of our career.
And the first few songs were new studio songs, correct?
For that, we took three weeks here and we just recorded those five, which was a blast. It's so much fun when you're not working on your own songs.
Because when it's your own material, you are overly critical...
Yeah, there's a psychological, liberating element like you're disconnected from anything... any kind of over-analytical kind of approach that you usually have with your own music. [We walk into live room.] We have tied all the rooms into each other. For example, in the little room if you are mixing and not using the live room but the little room wants to do a piano track, or a John Bonham-esque drum track, in the live room, they can do it because the rooms are all tied into each other. The only thing we don't have is like a video screen where you can see each other, but the talk back systems work.
So you can work all rooms simultaneously.
Yeah, and the rooms are also tied in upstairs. We ran out of money, so we don't have the stereo system we wanted where both rooms would feed into the stereo system so you can hang on the couch and listen to the mixes in progress, but it's coming. All the wiring is there.
Tell me about the materials specification. Was all this done primarily by Fran, or did you folks kind of prescribe some of the things you wanted? Is this aluminum above the console?
That is brushed aluminum. We were really hands-on. Not to take anything away from Fran, because I think he's a genius. I can't say enough about the job he did, and how way above and beyond the call of duty he went. It became a labor of love, and it was just so clear after some point that you just can't stay on the clock for everything or the bill would just be too high.
