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!

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