New Orleans Recording Studios - the evolution

      The digital revolution has swept the music business. It has changed everything in the ways consumers listen to music, obtain music, and record it. Given that anyone can put songs together on a computer, what is the role of recording studios in this new world? Why do they even still exist and why do engineers still own or work in them? And in New Orleans, how do you maintain a studio after Katrina and the failure of the federal levees? Several engineers and producers in the New Orleans area were interviewed about these issues and how they are dealing with them.

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      Each of the engineers here have different reasons for continuing to be in the studio business. Mark Bingham, proprietor of Piety Street Studios in the Bywater, said simply, This is what we do. I opened this place because I needed a place to work. Chris Finney, engineer at the Music Shed, answer that they started their studio to be an music incubator for the city. We had the concept of being a rehearsal space, recording studio, and place for musicians to have resources to go beyond 'Let's make some music.' Tim Stambaugh, owner and engineer of Word of Mouth Studios, had a similar idea. I saw that the industry was swinging toward musicians producing and owning their own product, he says in the comfortable wood paneling of his main recording room, and not seeking label support. A $100 per hour studio precluded them making a profit for their albums, I wanted to offer them an alternative.
      Even with a purpose in mind, operating a recording studio has always been a dicey business proposition, and in the first years of the new millennium, there are many challenges and way to overcome them. Finney laughs and says, What challenges, besides the fact that everyone thinks music should be free? How do you make money when everyone who is going to be the ultimate consumer thinks there is no value to this? For the Music Shed, they have been moving into movie scoring as well as taking a variety of projects from booking rehearsal rooms and tweaking home recordings while continuing to do standard recording projects. Freelance engineer/hip hop producer Wydell Spotville has become portable. It's a whole new ballgame, he states in the back office of his church in Gerttown, because everything is portable and programs. It's cool to use programs, but you still need to get into a studio with the right mics and preamps. That will bring your stuff to another level. Andrew Goat Gilchrist, owner of House of 1000 Hz in the 9th Ward, thinks that if you're going to run a studio, make it different from what kids can do in their bedrooms. Mark Bingham says, Just do the best possible work you can. Try to find that special scenario where everyone is relaxed, and you can capture the music properly.
      However, that special scenario can also be a challenge to find after Katrina and the failure of the federal levees. Every studio was affected in different ways. Word of Mouth and the Music Shed, being on the West Band and Lower Garden District, respectively, came out relatively unscathed. Bingham says that the roof at Piety Street cost six figures to repair and, he remembers, During the Allen Toussaint/Elvis Costello sessions, we had buckets on the floor to catch leaks. House of 1000 Hz had a little water in the building, but as Gilchrist states, The console sat in that water with deathly humidity and 100 degree temperatures. I probably lost thirty percent of my stuff. Spotville has most of his gear in a building in Lake Forest in New Orleans East. It looked like someone threw a bomb in there, he recalls, and I had some stuff that I put in the church balcony, and the ceiling came down on it. Spotville has obtained new equipment, but his main concern with the aftermath of the storm is that People were scattered. I didn't know if they were home, and they didn't know if I were home. It's been slow, but it is picking up. Tim Stambaugh agrees that people were scattered, and that caused a lot of emotional turmoil. Those situations where people were relocated to other cities and couldn't come back. It played on their emotions. Certain musicians didn't come back and groups broke up.
      Each studio is finding its own way to deal with the changes in the industry brought on both by technology and the flood. Stambaugh smiles when he says, I'm an optimist. I think that musicians complain about the record label situations and not getting any support, but I think they have more power now. They own one hundred percent of their own product and reap one hundred percent of the profits. The computer and the internet offer so many different ways to distribute their product and and have more people worldwide hear it. Both the Music Shed and Piety Street are expanding their parameters. With their proximity to the Convention Center, the Music Shed has wired their showcase rehearsal room for video conferencing so that they can offer that service. Having gotten calls to produce tracks and beats for hip hop and rap musicians, Bingham at Piety Street has upgraded his set up. I'm getting new gear to to do hip hop tracks. They want me to do it so I have to learn new tricks. The demands of the real world come in. Bingham also collaborates with Spotville on certain projects and tracks. On the other side, Gilchrist says, "I'm doing the opposite to keep up. I don't have a platinum suite of plug ins. I don't auto-tune vocals. I replaced my two inch machine and got the emt plate reverb from the Hit Factory in New York. I'm stubbornly old school. You don't have to do some kind of amp modeling and plug ins. I explain to bands that want to record that if you jam a Shure 57 microphone in front of a Marshall 4X12 speaker and put it through an API preamp and print it onto 2 inch tape, that's rock 'n' roll.