The SonicScoop Year in Review: Top NYC Music Business News and Trends of 2010

THE FIVE BOROUGHS: 2010 has been busy all right. For anyone involved in New York City’s expansive business of music – producer, publisher, entrepreneur, engineer, artist, and many more – the environment remains fast-paced, ultra-competitive and constantly changing.

With 2011 looming, SonicScoop looked for the news, trends and topics that stood out to us over the past 365 days.

In audio post, it was grow or die in the uppermost echelon. The biggest facilities, including hsr|ny, Nutmeg, and Sound Lounge made serious expansions into audio and/or video:

Sound Lounge opened an ADR Stage and multiple studios.

Nutmeg Post added a strong team and facility when it soaked up Soundhound.

The big post house Mega Playground built out audio capabilities.

Northern Lights added a 5.1 audio mixing suite.

Video house Click3X reversed the trend and added their own audio suite.

Celebrating 35 years in business, hsr|ny continued to expand as a full-service video and audio post facility.

Large and mid-sized recording/tracking/mixing studios kept making capital improvements and expanding:

Premier Studios took over the 8th floor at 723 7th Avenue.

Engine Room opened up its penthouse studio.

Stadium Red expanded with a new studio for Just Blaze and a mastering suite.

Platinum Studios added Augspurgers to Studio K.

Sear Sound set up the Moog-centric Studio D.

Tainted Blue swapped out its SSL for a Euphonix (nee Avid) System 5.

And props to Electric Lady for marking its 40th Anniversary.

Converse (yes, the shoe company) has an interesting business plan for the Rubber Tracks studio it’s going to open in Williamsburg in 2011: no-cost recording.

Advanced smaller studios – independent and within larger facilities — and producer rooms also opened up at a peppy pace:

Chris Theberge’s Music Works arrived on the Upper West Side.

The former One Point Six in Williamsburg was reborn as Three Egg Studios.

Manhattan Center Studios launched The Fuse Box with Public Enemy’s Brian Hardgroove.

Avatar opened up its Studio W writing room.

Sisko’s Min-Max Studios opened up in midtown.

Marc Alan Goodman announced an ambitious new expansion for Brooklyn’s Strange Weather, then blogged about the buildout – step by step – for SonicScoop.

Guitarist Justin King moved his Vinegar Hill Sound from Portland, OR to DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Avid capped off a furious year of reinvention and new products with the release of Pro Tools 9.

Music houses and composers still had a ton of TV, film and video game work to go after and win:

Joel Beckerman of Man Made Music continued to make NYC a TV music powerhouse.

Composer Peter Nashel turned ears everywhere with his work for shows like Rubicon.

Outfits like Expansion Team scored for networks such as the Biography Channel.

Tom Salta understands how to get chosen to score for games like Prince of Persia and Red Steel 2.

Production music and synch licensing remained a solid business, especially for those who got in at the right time or had a smart approach.

NYC’s Kingsize Music was acquired by 615 Music.

And later on Warner-Chappell (NYC) bought up 615 Music.

NYC’s Videohelper released the “Scenarios” music search tool.

Jingle Punks continued to grow.

Mechanical licensing experts RightsFlow kept progressing.

One of NYC’s most controversial music business plays, peer-to-peer file sharing network Limewire, appeared to be finally finished.

Tracking, mixing and mastering at NYC’s established facilities did a relatively healthy volume of A-level and independent work throughout the year:

The Black Eyed Peas, Rivers Cuomo and Kanye West were at Germano Studios.

Neon Indian, Beach House, Matt and Kim, Bear Hands and more were mastered at The Lodge.

MSR Studios handled Kid Cudi, Evanescence and Broadway Cast recordings.

Lenny Kravitz, The Dirty Pearls, “Glee”, and Vampire Weekend were all at Avatar.

Joe Lambert Mastering worked with Moby and Ninjasonik.

New software and hardware happiness abounded:

We elected many items “Buzzworthy” at AES, from Universal Audio, Focal, SSL, Burl, Shadow Hills, Izotope, Sound Toys, Lavry Engineering, Telefunken and more.

Propellerhead released Reason 5.

NYC suffered losses when beloved people and places left us:

Recording icon Walter Sear passed away.

The great hip hop/jazz experimentalist Guru was gone before his time.

Clinton Recording Studios hosted its last session.

Brick and mortar music retail took another hit when Fat Beats shuttered its last stores.

Baseline Studios, home of Just Blaze and countless Jay-Z hits, closed.

Chung King Studios started off 2010 with a bang by suddenly vacating Varick Street.

NYC-based producers, mixers, engineers and artists became businesses in their own right:

Producer Chris Coady worked on some hugely acclaimed records this year, including Beach House Teen Dream and Delorean Subiza, as well as records with Hooray for Earth, Zola Jesus, Smith Westerns, Cold Cave.

People like Allen Farmelo developed their distinctive sound.

Choice songwriter Claude Kelly made a business of hits.

Shane Stoneback’s career took off via work with Sleigh Bells and Vampire Weekend.

Mixer Mark Saunders embraced multiple aspects of the biz from his studio at Beat 360.

Dream Theater’s Jordan Rudess took his iPad/iPhone app MorphWiz all the way to #1.

Joel Hamilton continued down an immersive production path, working on records with Blakroc, Dub Trio, The Parkington Sisters and Blakroc.

And John Agnello brought his classic production and engineering technique to new records for Kurt Vile, J Mascis, Shayna Zaid And The Catch and Dead Confederate (among others).

The studio scene got a lot more socialicious and FUN:

Flux Studios was always hosting something in the East Village, like Alto and Dangerous converging for a schooling from Fab.

Digital Music NY was one of many popular business-based meetups.

Stadium Red partied down post-CMJ.

20dot20 mixed advertising and music.

And the Connectors connected a LOT of people.

What big stories would you include? And what do you see next in 2011? Don’t be shy – leave a comment and let us know!

– Janice Brown and David Weiss

Marc Alan Goodman’s Building Strange Weather Blog Step 4: Waiting for Permits Part 2

Fourth in the “Building Strange Weather Blog” series by producer/engineer and studio owner Marc Alan Goodman. Click to start at Step 1: Finding A New Home; Step 2: Design; Step 3: Waiting For Permits (Part 1).

Williamsburg, Brooklyn: The building that’s going to house the new Strange Weather is an interesting beast. As far as I can find it was originally built in 1919 as a factory of some sort. The main structure is brick with ten-foot ceilings and nominal wooden joists (the ceiling and floor joists are actual inch measurements as opposed to dimensional lumber in which a 2 x 4 is really 1.5 x 3.25 inches).

There is part of a staircase in the basement that looks like it must have been for the factory. Then, at some point after that, two stories of apartments were built on top. These were built with dimensional lumber and to me look like they were probably intended initially as temporary housing for dock workers from the then newly constructed Williamsburg waterfront. Sometime after that, a hollow cinderblock addition was added to the first floor with slightly lower ceilings and no basement.

As far as the city is concerned, or at least as far as they would tell me, the building was put up in 1919 and a “shed for storing barrels” was added in 1925. There are no other records, no other plans. But in order to work with what we have it was necessary to do a lot of research. And by research I mean tearing open every wall I could find to see what’s going on in between. This brought a lot of both good and bad news.

The Tree!

Since the plans call for raising the ceiling on the rear structure where the new control room is going to sit, the first thing we needed to know is what kind of foundation, if any, was there. Which meant digging a hole. At the time, there was a 50 or so year old tree growing out of the rear wall of the building.

There was no internal damage but it seemed like the roots must be in the foundation, so the tree had to go. With the roots would hopefully come enough concrete and dirt to see what the foundation was like down there. I got six or seven estimates for the work, but one company cut me a really good deal because they were doing a job in the neighborhood and were going to have a truck there anyway.

They came in early the next morning, took the tree down and left the whole thing in my back yard. Plus they didn’t pull the stump up. The team that was supposed to come pick it up never showed, and their phone went out of service and website disappeared. All in all very strange, but they only got half of my money and it wasn’t even very much for the job so I figured something must be up.

A few weeks later I finally get a return phone call saying that one of the men had fallen out of a tree and they were out of commission for a week or two. Two weeks after that I got another call promising that they’d come take care of it as soon as possible as well as do some other work for free.

Well, I’m sure you can see where this is going — they still never showed. So after five weeks I hired Evergreen Tree Service to come in and finish the job. Then, after Evergreen were already on the way to my place, the first company calls and says they’ll be there at 9:30 the next morning. So I call Evergreen and apologize. The next day: again no show. Lesson learned. I called Evergreen back and they took care of it fast. Consider them highly recommended.

It turned out to be a really big job removing the stump, which is probably why the first company disappeared. The roots were not growing into the building as suspected, they were wrapped around a concrete bin and digging in about four feet away from the main growth of the tree. It looked like some crazy rain forest root. But since the whole tree was sitting on top of the concrete they couldn’t just take a chainsaw to it, and it took all day with a pick-axe to get the thing out.

If you’ve ever been to someone’s home in Brooklyn you may have noticed that every building has a strange free-standing iron ladder installed in the backyard. These were originally put up to hang clotheslines from, many of which are still around. The ladder at the new Strange Weather was directly in between the tree and its roots. When they removed the stump, the ladder bent all the way over across my yard, through a fence, across my neighbors yard, through their fence, and then into my third neighbors yard about eight inches away from one of his light fixtures.

I tried to move it but it must have weighed about a ton and was still connected to the concrete of my backyard. So, next I had to hire someone to come take it down without ruining my neighbor’s home, cut it up and dispose of it.

And after all this, we still had no information on the building’s foundation. So it was time to get a sledgehammer and a shovel and start tearing the backyard apart. The good news is that there’s a full four-foot foundation with a six inch footing which is plenty for what we need. The downside is that I had to smash up about 16 square feet of concrete with a sledgehammer and then dig a four and a half foot hole to find this out. I know you’re not supposed to dig a hole without permits in the city but I figured I was safe right up against the foundation. Plus it needed to get done. I just wish I could have done it five weeks earlier.

So it was good news in the end! If there was no foundation we would have had to put the building up on stilts, dig out underneath it and install a new one, which would have been, as I’m sure you can guess, extremely expensive. But not all news is good news.

Sinking Feelings

Next up was the insides of the building itself, most notably all the internal walls. The basement of the building has a very old steel beam running its length immediately under the inside of the stairwell for the apartments. I imagine that when they took parts of the ceiling out to install the stairs to the upper floors, they had to move the support wall inward, so they added the beam underneath. It was good thinking. However the second and third floors still sank significantly towards the center of the building.

I needed to find out what was going on, so out came the hammer, drill, and sawzall and I started taking the ceiling of the ground floor apart. First things first I put a hand on the drop ceiling to get at the higher tin ceiling and the whole thing collapsed. Drop ceilings aren’t heavy but they fell all over my Studer 820 machines, which were luckily covered with a tarp. It was a gut wrenching moment.

After the dust cleared I could see a dark spot on the tin ceilings, which showed that there was at one time a wall up the middle of the ground floor. My guess is that between removing that wall and cutting a hole in the ceiling for a second stairwell they weakened the beams enough to start to dip the middle of the house. And if I hadn’t pulled the whole ceiling down on my head I never would have known!

Since I don’t want the whole thing to collapse in five years we have a problem. However it is a fixable problem and our solution is to attach new steel joists to all of the wood ones, effectively replacing them, in a process called “sistering.” It’s a big expense but it’s necessary for the longevity of the building so there it is. I suppose it’s about what it would have cost to pour a new foundation in the back. You win some, you lose some.

Next time I’ll get into the rest of the pre-permit process. Feel free to write with any questions!

Marc Alan Goodman
strangeweathersound at gmail dot com
http://strangeweatherbrooklyn.com

Marc Alan Goodman is a producer/engineer who’s worked with artists such as Jolie Holland, Marc Ribot Shudder to Think, Dub Trio, Normal Love, Alfonso Velez, Angel Deradoorian and Pink Skull.

Marc Alan Goodman’s Building Strange Weather Blog — Step 3: Waiting for Permits (Part 1)

Second in the “Building Strange Weather Blog” series by producer/engineer and studio owner Marc Alan Goodman. Click to read Parts I and II.

Today is the five-month anniversary of my purchasing the building and official work still hasn’t begun. I’m expecting approval of my plans some time in the next few days, and after that we can start pulling permits to do work. But a lot has happened leading up to this…

The New York City Department of Buildings

In 2010, budget cuts hit the Department of Buildings hard, and most if not all of the staff have been cut back to three days a week. What this means is that a difficult process just got even more difficult.

When I started to try and contact the department before I bought the building it quickly became obvious that they just weren’t going to be very helpful. It’s a classic New York story: You go to the DoB to find out information on your property. They tell you that there’s no information and no way to look it up. But the moment you start construction, the inspector is there and suddenly they know exactly where the property lines are, what the air rights are, the existing certificate of occupancy and so on.

The Certificate of Occupancy is a really great example of this. This is the paper that proves you have the right to use a property for a certain purpose. It is vital when it comes to things like getting insurance.

When digging through the DoB’s records I was able to find that the building does have Certificate of Occupancy. However there was no digital copy of it. So I contacted the DoB office to see if I could come look it up. Apparently I’d have to wait for permission. How long would that take? Who knows. So I let it go, relying on the fact that one does exist somewhere and that it should theoretically work in my favor.

When my Real Estate lawyer was finally able to dredge up a copy we found it to be a photocopy of a carbon copy of a scribbled paper from 1925. It was totally illegible. So we had to wait until someone could read it. Apparently my building is officially a “shed for storing barrels,, at least as far as the city is concerned.

That’s all well and good, but I happen to know that the previous tenant was a Physical Therapy office. There’s no way they could operate without insurance, and there’s no way they could get insurance without a Certificate of Occupancy. So — somewhere — there is one stating that it is legally either an office or a medical office. If it says “office” then all is well, however if it says medical office I may have to file to change it. And there’s absolutely no way for me to find out until someone complains about the studio (which will hopefully be never, though musicians have been known to get drunk and smoke outside of my place while conversing loudly). Then, suddenly, the DoB is bound to have exactly the information they need to give me a hard time.

Having seen all this in a very short time it became clear to me that I needed to hire an expeditor. I got a referral for Alexis from CODE LLC. Basically she’s the middle-woman between myself and the DoB, as well as any other city departments I may have to deal with. Without hiring an expeditor I have no idea how you could do any construction in this crazy city.

Good, Old Fashioned NYC Steam Boilers

The next thing to become an issue was the building’s existing steam boiler. I now know more about boilers than I ever thought I would. Apparently steam boiler systems are extremely rare everywhere in the world except New York City. I was told the statistic that there are more functioning steam boilers in NYC than the rest of the world combined. The reason is that it’s a very, very finicky system.

At one point boiler explosions were the number one cause of death in the United States. It took decades of trial and error to bring them to a point where they were safe to use. Since a large portion of existing New York was built around the start of the twentieth century this was the technology implemented, and since it’s so expensive to replace, the existing units keep getting repaired, piece by piece.

The previous owners of my building had installed a brand-new steam boiler two years before selling the place. Since the rest of the infrastructure was already in place it was probably the cheapest option available on hand. However they didn’t bother to go through the proper permitting process and ended up with a bunch of citations for possible fines from the city.

As we learned earlier, trying to get information from the city is a long and often impossible task. We knew that they had failed inspections in 2002, and that they were cited for not being inspected for the following two years. But there was no available record of anything after that.

Fines for steam boilers can be extremely high (remember how dangerous they can be), and it’s entirely possible that there were thousands of dollars in back fines associated with the lack of inspections with no way to find out for sure until the city decides to send you a bill.

Luckily my lawyer was smart enough to spot this issue during the sale and got a large chunk of money held in escrow until they dealt with it. To this day it’s still unresolved. What I do know is that if they haven’t gotten their money yet it means this process has been extremely difficult and expensive. When purchasing a place, be absolutely sure that there are no DoB violations on the property, or at least have money put aside to ensure that the seller deals with them.

Inheriting Tenants, Rent Stabilization, Landlord Stuff!

The previous owner left me the gift of one tenant in the building when he moved. If my sarcasm isn’t clear enough let me put it this way: crossover tenants are a huge pain.

I got lucky and the woman who was living there was actually very nice and easy to deal with. However there were a couple problems. First off she was only paying $600 per month for a two-bedroom apartment on Graham Ave. In my business model I’m relying on at least $1,500-2,000 per month rent in order to meet expenses. So there was no way I could afford to keep her.

Secondly she had been living in the apartment for fourteen years. Fifteen years is where rent stabilization laws start to come in to effect. If I waited until construction was finished I risked having to spend a long time in court to clear the place out, and in turn losing myself all that potential rent.

So I had to ask her to leave. It was certainly a difficult thing, especially considering the fact that she has a young son, but the previous owner had intentionally left the tenant situation very vague in our conversations and this is where I was stuck. Realizing that no matter what I did she could still hold me up for months simply by refusing to move I offered her a lump of cash for moving expenses, hoping that would keep the process moving, and I’m lucky I did. Without it I think I’d be in court right now dealing with an eviction.

As soon as it was clear that she actually had to move her demeanor changed quite a bit, and she stopped paying rent. To be honest she asked me if she could go without rent for the last few months, but she included a veiled threat by saying that she knew she could potentially hold up my whole project.

So I compromised, took part of the rent out of the security deposit that I was giving her (which, by the way, there was no record of and she was certainly not actually owed) and let her get away with part of it. For a couple hundred bucks it was my cheapest way out.

Tune in next time for Part II of the New York City building permits saga. As always, please feel free to write with any questions you may have!

Marc Alan Goodman
strangeweathersound at gmail dot com
http://strangeweatherbrooklyn.com

Marc Alan Goodman is a producer/engineer who’s worked with artists such as Jolie Holland, Marc Ribot Shudder to Think, Dub Trio, Normal Love, Alfonso Velez, Angel Deradoorian and Pink Skull.

Marc Alan Goodman’s Building Strange Weather Blog – Step Two: Design!

Second in the “Building Strange Weather Blog” series by producer/engineer and studio owner Marc Alan Goodman. Click to read Part I.

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN: Since I opened the first Strange Weather, I’ve considered myself an amateur acoustical designer. I’ve always had to look at the space available to me and figure out how to best use it, and the new studio started no differently.

The first thing I did was pull out all of my studio design books and re-read them. I highly recommend both Home Recording Studio: Build it Like the Pros by Rod Gervais and the older but still accurate Building a Recording Studio by Jeff Cooper.

Now, for the first time in my life, I’m working with a completely blank space, a rectangular frame in which I can do anything I want, which presents me with a completely different list of problems and questions. In the past I’ve only had to worry about things such as “How do I beef up the sound reduction of this wall?” or “Where do I place the console to get the most even reflections?”

Now those questions have become secondary to “Where should the walls go?”and “How will the electrical and HVAC systems work?”

INTELLIGENT DIY DESIGN: LEARNING WHAT YOU CAN AND CANNOT DO YOURSELF

As in the past, I decided the best way to learn is to do, so I opened up Google SketchUp (a free AutoCAD program, which I highly recommend toying around in even if only for fun) and started laying out the space. I made myself a simple shell and moved the rooms around in various ways, always trying to find what the problems were with each subsequent design.

After I’d gone through a few and the problems became less obvious I headed to a few online studio design forums to get some outside advice.

It’s unbelievable to me the community of people who spend their time online talking about just designing studios. Almost all of the main recording forums have flourishing studio design sections, and there are a few where it is the only topic.

The one with the most technical replies consistently turned out to be the John L. Sayers Recording Studio Design Forum. John is in his own right an internationally-known studio designer and he hosts a forum where not only he but a number of other well-known designers regularly mingle with home studio owners.

It only took two real postings for me to realize I was going to need some help.

People were helpful if a little harsh in their commentary (like all web forums there’s still a good amount of unrestrained argumentativeness) and I felt like my designs were being torn apart. It took a day or two for me to realize that it wasn’t a personal affront. I am not a professionally trained architect or studio designer — of course I don’t know what I’m doing. I realized that it would take years for me to accumulate the additional knowledge I would need to design this space well.

Armed with that trinket of information I went back to the bottom line: my budget. The only thing more expensive than building a recording studio is rebuilding one.

In previous spaces I’ve run up against the issue very clearly. If I build a wall, and it doesn’t do what I expected it to do, I have to tear it down and build another wall. And it costs me twice as much. Since all of my spaces have been temporary it hasn’t been a significant problem, but the whole game changes in a permanent space. If I build it right the first time I should never have to change it. And now understanding how little I really know about design, I decided that a greater part of my budget should be put towards architects and engineers.

I can paint, I can hang drywall, I can even learn simple plumbing and improve my framing techniques, but I’m never going to learn a lifetimes worth of design in that same period of time.

FINDING A STUDIO DESIGNER

So where does one look to find studio designers? There were a bunch of names I already knew like George Augspurger and John Storyk, having heard their names a thousand times, as well as Rod Gervais from his book and John L. Sayers from his forum. I’d heard a number of Augsperger and Storyk rooms but before contacting them to find out about costs, I discovered a designer named Wes Lachot.

Wes is from North Carolina and started out as a recording engineer and musician. He’s been running Overdub Lane Studio in Durham NC for years but at some point branched out into studio design. Since then he’s built rooms for Mitch Easter, Mike Mogis (Saddle Creek Records) and Doug Van Sloun, and designed the completely ridiculous carbon-neutral uber-studio soon to open in North Carolina, Manifold Recording.

Looking at photos of his designs and speaking to a number of people who’ve worked with him online, my interest was definitely piqued, and I decided the only logical thing to do next was go listen to one of his rooms.

By a strange coincidence the room he had most recently completed was Charleston Sound just outside Charleston, SC. One of my best friends in the world had moved down there and I hadn’t had an opportunity to visit her yet, so I hopped on my 72 Beemer and rode down in a day. (As a side note I don’t recommend spending 14 straight hours on a motorcycle. I love long rides but it was a little much for even me.)

Wes and his wife Lisa who runs the company with him (along with their one employee, draftsman Rob Warren) were down in South Carolina for an annual visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright house. We all met up at Charleston Sound and I got an opportunity to walk through it with Wes, hear about his ideology and his reasoning in designing the place, and give the control and live rooms a serious listen.

I was floored.

Wes is a proponent of the RFZ (Reflection Free Zone) school of control room design. This means building control rooms where the reflections are absolutely minimized at the listening position.

While the ideas behind this aren’t new, the technology has improved dramatically in the last few decades. But what I heard when sitting at the console wasn’t any of the technological data. It was simple and beautiful sonic balance. We skimmed through a couple records and to this day I can’t believe how deeply I could hear into what was going on.

But that’s not the only thing that sold me. The real trick was when I went to sit down on the couch.

As every engineer knows, the sound on the couch — usually in the back of the control room — traditionally sounds pretty damn different from at the console. I find myself constantly reminding clients that when they’re giving a serious listen, they should pull chairs up to the front of the room. But sitting on the couch at Charleston Sound was an entirely different story.

I won’t claim it sounded exactly like the sweet spot, but it was so close as to be almost indistinguishable, and it was definitely a significant improvement over even the sweet spot of any control room in which I can remember working. Right there I made my decision, but I tried to hold my cards back to see how much it was going to end up costing me.

Over lunch Wes and I realized we have very similar outlooks on what a recording studio is, should be, and what life inside one should be like. I just folded right there and told him he was designing the new Strange Weather.

WAIT, I NEED ANOTHER ARCHITECT?

Now it was time to go through the whole thing again, but in another direction. While certainly competent enough, Wes is not a licensed Architect in New York State. So I was going to need a second architect to go over the plans for any local specifics and to submit them for permits due to it being a commercial space.

On top of that, since the building contains more than just the studio, I needed another architect to help design the apartment for the second floor.

It all fell into place relatively easy. I got in contact with a few friends looking for recommendations, and my friend (and great musician) Sam Barron put me in contact with Hannah Purdy.

Hannah’s designs fit perfectly into my aesthetic for the apartment, plus she was extremely excited about getting to work on a recording studio and learn more about the specifics of soundproofing and acoustical design.

ROUNDING OUT THE CREW…

So now there was only one piece of the design puzzle left. We still needed a licensed engineer to deal with structural issues in the building (soundproofing weighs a lot!), as well as to finalize the HVAC and electrical systems.

Again I got lucky and Hannah suggested I get in contact with Bruce Merdjan at Brooklyn-based Advanced Professional Engineering. Not only does the man know everything about his profession but he also rides a 90’s BMW bike. Maybe it’s not the most obvious selling point in the world, but you really do have to get along with the people you’re working closely with.

TIME TO GET TO WORK!

That’s the team I’m working with, and how and why I selected them. Obviously the case may be totally different for anyone else but I couldn’t recommend any of these people more highly.

Next entry we’ll start getting into the oh-so-fun world of New York City building permits, as well as the realities of having become a landlord. As always please feel free to write with any questions you may have!

Marc Alan Goodman
strangeweathersound at gmail dot com
http://strangeweatherbrooklyn.com

Marc Alan Goodman is a producer/engineer who’s worked with artists such as Jolie Holland, Marc Ribot Shudder to Think, Dub Trio, Normal Love, Alfonso Velez, Angel Deradoorian and Pink Skull.

Marc Alan Goodman’s Building Strange Weather Blog — Step One: Finding A New Home

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN: As far as small, privately-run recording studios go, my own Strange Weather has been pretty nomadic in its short lifespan. Since 2003 when I first opened under that name as a home studio in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Strange Weather has seen five different locations, each one a significant improvement over the last.

I returned to Philadelphia after spending five years in NYC as a student and musician with a plan to make recording music the rest of my life. The studio’s fourth incarnation saw a move back to NYC with a small, single room space in Greenpoint, and the fifth landed us in our current two-room, control-room-centric space in South Williamsburg.

Now, we’re preparing to make our largest and hopefully final move into a new space in Brooklyn, as well as to transition into a fully commercial enterprise. The new space is being designed by Wes Lachot, and will be acoustically viable to compete with the city’s most famous surviving rooms while pricing itself low enough to be affordable to the average musician. If that sounds like a tough spot to squeeze into then you’re starting to see why I’m writing this!

I’m hoping this blog will give home studio owners insight into how to apply professional and long-lasting design concepts to their own space while also giving potential commercial studio owners ideas on how to keep build costs as low as possible. So let’s start with a little bit of background…

WHY NOW? WHY GROUND UP?

Up to now, the focus at Strange Weather has been on building up a high-grade gear list while keeping overhead (and hence pricing) low. All of our previous spaces have been rentals and we’ve done our best to keep infrastructure costs to a minimum by seeking out spaces that already suit our needs as closely as possible. The business model has worked, and as we’ve opened our doors more and more to outside engineers they’ve been very happy with their experience. However there are a few major limitations to our current space.

First off our live room is very small. It’s large enough to record great sounding drums but not for the entire band to play together comfortably. Do most musicians really record that way nowadays? Not in my experience. However everyone wants to feel like they can, and I sure as hell want to be able to when possible. I’d say that about forty percent of our potential work gets turned away because the live room doesn’t meet the client’s needs.

The second major issue is that the control room is mostly untreated and no matter how much time I spend trying to make the room viable for outside engineers it still takes them time to adjust. Ideally, to run a commercial space I would like to have a control room that anyone can walk into, mix a song, and when they get, home have exactly what they expected. This is only possible in a room designed from the ground up to be acoustically accurate.

So, in order for the studio to continue to grow, we need to find a larger space and be able to invest in genuine infrastructure. As anyone who records sound knows the two most important factors in making a great recording are the source and the space it’s being made in. It’s more important than any microphone, any preamp, or any piece of gear. Without a good sounding source in a good sounding room, it’s nearly impossible to get a good sound. Strange Weather has come as far as it can investing in all of the other facets of the process and now, it’s time for the final, big move.

LEARNING THE BROOKLYN REAL ESTATE MARKET: PROPERTY TYPES, FAR RATINGS & MORE!

The first hurdle in moving the studio was, of course, finding the space itself. Rental properties pose a very difficult question for recording studios: How much can we afford to spend on build out if our lease is only for a limited period of time?

In NYC in particular, everyone has to assume that they’ll only be in a space as long as their initial lease. If things go well and you can stay then great, but realistically if business is good that means the space is now worth more than when you started which means the price is likely to go up. Knowing this, my goal was to purchase a property.

By being able to spread the construction costs across a 30-year mortgage rather than a five or ten-year lease we’ve opened up a whole world of possibilities, but everything we’re doing should be equally applicable to a long-term rental space.

Before even looking at our first building we had to assess what we could afford, and the ups and downs of different property types. Many of Brooklyn’s studios seem to be built in previous industrial properties, specifically lofts or warehouses. These have had the advantage of being relatively inexpensive per square foot as well as having few neighbors to bother with noise (or rather few noisy neighbors to bother the studio!).

In addition, in most of these properties a recording studio would be considered “higher use,” which means that since it’s commercial rather than industrial, getting the necessary zoning adjustment should be a relatively simple. However, particularly in Williamsburg, these spaces have been rapidly disappearing over the last few years.

Rezoning and tax abatements have caused a boom in construction that revalued the land these buildings sit on at far more than what they’re worth as warehouses. In turn they’re mostly being torn down, and the price for the remaining ones has been driven through the roof. If you drive up and down nearly any street in this northern corner of Brooklyn you’ll see brand new condos built into every possible space. From my estimations it would be nearly impossible for a recording studio to compete with these condos in value per square foot. So even if we were lucky enough to find a long-term space it would be over the day the lease ran up.

The defining factor in this is a building’s FAR, or Floor-Area-Ratio. The FAR tells you how many times the buildings base square feet you can build. If a property has a FAR of 3 it can legally have three times the square footage of the lot. That means either three stories that take up the whole property, or six that only take up half of the ground floor, etc. If a building has a FAR of somewhere between 2 and 4 and you’re only using the ground floor you’re passing up on the majority of the lot’s value.

Most industrial buildings are only one story and end up being more valuable as tear-downs. The bigger ones are prohibitively expensive.

I looked at quite a number of industrial spaces and they presented both positive and negative qualities. Many of them had very high ceilings, which — even when taken down by a few feet to accommodate HVAC — would provide a very comfortable recording environment. Also, most of them already had commercial power and gas lines, as well as the additional rear exits required by fire code. But none of these things could overcome the value lost by not using up the available FAR.

The only way to make it work would be to sell the air rights of a property. Essentially, you can sell your unused FAR to other property owners within a limited area. However this only becomes viable when the building market is booming and since the city’s economic slowdown, these sales have come nearly to a halt.

Another option is to find a space that is already zoned “commercial,” specifically a storefront. Again, cost becomes a major issue in that these properties are highly sought out and mostly made up of actual storefronts. That means noisy neighbors, noisy traffic out front and high monthly costs. Also many of these spaces have the same lost value as the industrial buildings.

A relatively new development in this market is the commercial condo. They’ve been popping up around the city but as of now there’s only one in the Williamsburg / Greenpoint area. This could be an ideal space for a recording studio, but they have two major downfalls: first, they are in extremely close quarters with up to six potentially noisy neighbors and second, most new large developments are built very poorly.

PUTTING YOURSELF IN THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME

What we finally settled on is a mixed-use property. Much of Williamsburg has been rezoned as mixed-use in the last few years and many spaces on residential or commercial blocks are grandfathered in that way.

What mixed use means, in short, is that the space contains both commercial and residential properties, such as a store with apartments above it. This way, the ground floor can be used as the studio while the additional air space is still providing income as residential rental properties. The other upside of this type of building is that many of them are located on quieter, more residential streets.

Most realtors’ first reactions to my looking for a recording studio space was to suggest somewhere that neighbors would not mind the noise. However what we really want is a quiet environment where outside noise won’t be bothering us! If we do our job properly soundproofing the place noise shouldn’t be a problem to the neighbors anyway, and it’s a lot easier to keep the sound of a drum kit in than it is to keep trucks passing or the elevated train out.

Searching for the property itself was a long, slow process. Most sources for commercial listings are not very organized. As opposed to residential, most commercial buildings are not exclusively listed with one realtor. And the realtors themselves can be tough. Most of them seemed to be trying to sell whatever they could as quickly as possible and weren’t willing to spend time identifying my personal needs. However, with a purchase this size I really couldn’t rush it. From the time I looked at my first building, it was nearly two years before I found Strange Weather’s new location.

Internet searches and Craigslist in particular led me to a huge number of realtors and privately sold buildings that I wouldn’t have found elsewhere, but it’s also mostly filled with the same repetitive spam and can be tough to sort through.

I also spent days at a time riding around the neighborhood on my Vespa writing down the phone numbers on “for sale” signs. While this didn’t lead to any particularly helpful results in my case, I can only imagine that it’s where the best deals lie: going directly to aging owners who don’t really know or care exactly what their property is worth. A lot of it is about being in the right place at the right time.

In the end I found my new property through an unlinked web page on a realtors site. I happened to be fishing through Google and came across it before it went live. Frank at Castoria Realty in Williamsburg was extremely helpful, and I found myself in a classic Brooklyn situation where the current owner owed someone a lot of money and had to sell fast. After years of searching I finally found myself in the right place at the right time and ended up with a building I think is viable.

GRAHAM AVENUE, HERE WE COME.

The last thing to do before committing to the purchase was to have the building inspected. Hal Einhorn at Old House Inspections had come with me to look at a number of earlier properties and was extremely helpful in teaching me what to look for. The current space was at one point a doctor’s office, but I encourage you to imagine a doctor’s office that would fit in the basement of the mother’s house in Psycho. The pictures should speak for themselves.

Most of the building needs to be gutted to the bone, but since I would be doing that anyway in order to properly soundproof the studio this was almost an advantage — my hand is forced into doing it right the first time. In addition to dirt and grime, the previous owners left a Plinth and a fully functioning 1950’s GE X-ray machine! I’m still toying with the idea of gutting it and using it as a really creepy mic closet.

Check back next time for details on how I selected my team of studio designer, architect, and structural engineer. Feel free to email if you have any specific questions, or comment below, and I’ll try to cover those as well.

Marc Alan Goodman
strangeweathersound at gmail dot com
http://strangeweatherbrooklyn.com

Marc Alan Goodman is a producer/engineer who’s worked with artists such as Jolie Holland, Marc Ribot Shudder to Think, Dub Trio, Normal Love, Alfonso Velez, Angel Deradoorian and Pink Skull.

Strange Weather Building New Recording Studio In Williamsburg

Strange Weather owner/engineer Marc Alan Goodman is building a new recording studio on Graham Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The new studio will be designed by Wes Lachot Design (Saddle Creek Records’ ARC Studios, Mitch Easter’s Fidelitorium, Electric Lady Studios’ B and C acoustics) in cooperation with Hannah Purdy of NYC architecture firm, Walsh Purdy.

The plan includes a 400 sq. ft. “reflection free” control room featuring all of Strange Weather’s existing gear, including the 40-channel API 1608 console, Pro Tools HD3, Studer 820 ½” and A820 24-track machines, and vintage outboard gear galore, as well as a 750 sq. ft. live room and two large iso booths.

Plans are in the works and construction should start mid-summer! Strange Weather is currently located next to The Bunker Studios on Broadway in Williamsburg and will be making its migration over the next few months.

Stay tuned for updates!

« Previous Page