It’s All A Question Of Balancing Your Priorities
Orchard Sound is kind of the ultimate garage studio. It should bring comfort to all of you who are scraping by and making do with less than the glitziest, most expensive, most polished and most hip. Aside from the fact the studio really is, uh, a garage, the whole setup is definitely, er, unpretentious. We all get so hung up on having to have really cool gear and really cool acoustics and really cool ambience that it’s really startling and refreshing to run across a successful operation that violates the “really cool” code every which way. Makes ya’ humble.
Is it really so successful, you ask? How can a 24-track studio that charges less than $50 an hour and is booked maybe six days a month be successful? A studio with ancient analog pieces, marginal acoustics and monitoring, and an acoustic room with about 12 dB isolation from the outside world, on the landing path for a major airport, where the drummer shares space with a ride-on mower, a BMW motorcycle and a Volvo? How can this be?
Personally, I’ve always kind of enjoyed contrarian alternatives. Back when I hung out with racing car guys, I used to really get a kick out of the home-built race cars that managed to challenge and sometimes even beat the multi-million dollar factory teams with their brute-force resources and emphasis on polish. Similarly, I’ve always preferred the resynthesis kind of approach to engineering and problem-solving that suggests: “You may just be looking at the problem the wrong way, or else simply looking at the wrong problem.”
In the case of Orchard Sound, when I asked Scott Hull, the owner, what his dream was, he said, “I’m doing it!” It’s worth thinking about. Read on.
Orchard Sound is in LaGrangeville, NY, which is in the Hudson Valley about 70 miles north of New York City. It occupies the garage and part of the basement of a ranch-type house that is moderately isolated, if on a fairly well-traveled road.
The acoustic room is the garage, and is acoustically untreated. There is a gobo, and that’s about it. Scott has to move his mother’s Volvo out of the garage when he’s tracking! The control room is down a set of stairs in the basement. It has a 7’ ceiling, and is approximately 18’ wide by about 24’ long. The only concession to modernity is a small vocal booth.
The multitrack is an elderly 2” Soundcraft 467 24-track deck that makes quite a racket (it added 10 dB to the noise floor – when I first came in I thought it was a dehumidifier running!). The console is a well-used Harrison 3232, with MegaMix VCA automation available. Monitoring is via Yamaha NS10s with tissue paper taped over the tweeters, and Auratones. The outboard gear is pretty typical, with some older tube stuff and some digital FX. Mixdown is to DAT and cassette. There’s a typical collection of microphones: 1 Neumann U87 and 2 KM 84s, 3 AKG 414’s, Sennheiser 441s and 421s, Shure 57s and 58s, an EV RE20, some Beyers and Crown PZMs.
Acoustic treatment? A sheet of Sonex on a side wall, a couple of traps in the corners. That’s it! Hardly anything at all.
So, it’s all pretty basic. Anybody could set this place up. Scott bolted it together on weekends, with lots of cutting and trying and a general indifference to issues of professional appearance and audio political correctness. There is no flat frequency response, no carefully calculated reverb time, no painstakingly developed control room. It’s plain and simple crude – microphones in one room, equipment in another – so there!
And it works, Glory Be! Scott has all the work he wants, the equipment’s paid for, his clients are happy (more about that later), and he has a lot of fun working! When you get right down to it, there’s not a whole lot more you could ask for
Obviously, there’s got to be more to this. What’s going on here? Now, for the rest of the story . . .
Scott Hull studied audio in the “Tonmeister Studies” Sound Recording Technology program at the State University Of New York at Fredonia. While he was there, he formed a long-term friendship and working relationship with another student in the program named Al Garzone. Before graduating, Scott took an internship under Bob Ludwig at Masterdisk in New York City. He did well enough there that, upon graduation in 1984, he went to work at Masterdisk. He’s been there ever since, first as an editor and now as a mastering engineer (he “inherited” Bob’s room when Bob left to open Gateway Productions in Portland, ME). Scott’s credits include a lot of major releases, including Donald Fegan’s Kamakiriad. It’s fair to say he’s no slouch in the recording business.
Anyway, while working at Masterdisk, Scott began to miss writing music and engineering and producing bands. Living in Hoboken, NJ at the time, he picked up a Tascam 8-track and a little Studiomaster console, and started doing stuff in his apartment. Does this part sound familiar?
About the same time, Al Garzone (from Fredonia) got in touch with Scott to do some mastering for a band Al was producing, found Scott had an 8-track set up in his living room, and suggested that Scott should open a studio that he, Al, would book for his various bands. Scott was also developing a band at the time, so he said sure. Does this, too, sound familiar?
Meanwhile, Scott was feeling a little stretched for time. One aspect of this was that he wasn’t getting enough family time in with his mother, who lived in upstate NY (LaGrangeville, to be exact). His father had passed away while Scott was in college, and Scott felt that he wasn’t giving enough attention to his mother, or helping her with simple things around her house, like mowing the lawn, fixing stuff, etc. Another typical Twenty-Something young-professional sit-com scenario.
So, where you or I would have just felt inadequate and stressed out, and started muttering about how life’s too demanding and blowing stuff off, Scott did some integrating of life elements. With his mother’s enthusiastic blessing, he built a 24-track studio in her house. More specifically, in return for maintenance and just being around the house a lot (how many of you go visit your parents every weekend?), he took over half the basement of her house, set up a control room and started bringing Al’s bands up from the city to record in the garage. Mrs. Hull found the bands to generally be a nice bunch of people, with one exception which did not return – Mrs. Hull wisely retained veto rights on obstreporous clients. When I talked to her she said she enjoys having the people around and isn’t bothered by the noise. Al Garzone is Scott’s primary client, bringing in a succession of alternative bands on the way up (Brenda Kahn, Chicken Scratch, Poopshovel, Agitpop and others). As Scott puts it, “Albert’s work paid the bills, and the engineering kept me happy.”
Meanwhile, Scott is slowly moving into more of a producing role with many of the bands, and he and Al are beginning to increasingly function as a production team for bands on the rise.
A key element in making this all work, of course, is Scott’s day job. Scott is a mastering engineer with an extremely well-developed room and monitoring system, and he spends all day listening to other people’s work, both as it comes in the door and after it has hit MTV and the charts. He’s a human Spectrum Analyzer with extraordinarily well-developed ears (yes, he went through the Golden Ears audio ear-training in college and swears by it), and he does critical listening for a living all day every day. So, he’s got these great ears and a day-time monitoring system to die for, plus an ultra-hip client list. But he finds it a little too removed from the raw creative fun of recording and production (the grass is always greener, isn’t it?).
Anyway, where the rest of us have to worry about “how good does this sound?,” Scott knows. When I measured his control room, I found a terrible mid-frequency slap out around 40 milliseconds and so I got on his case a little. “C’mon, Scott,” I said, “this slap pretty much screws up everything. You must have an awful time hearing stuff,” to which Scott sort of guiltily replied, “Well, see, if I’ve got a question about anything, I just take it into Masterdisk on Monday morning and check it out on the Duntechs. But mostly I already know how it’s going to sound before I play it back there.” An extremely useful perspective to have.
So what’s wrong with Orchard, from Scott’s standpoint? Number one on his list is lack of adequate air-handling, particularly in respect to the Harrison console, which runs extremely hot and is experiencing on-going capacitor failure. It also makes the control room quite uncomfortable to work in during the summer months. Number two on his list is inadequate bathroom facilities to accommodate a whole band plus friends for a couple of days at a time. The third thing he mentioned was lack of working surfaces on which to put stuff and crude rack designs that make it unreasonably hard to get at the back of things.
Meanwhile, on the plus side, he really likes the garage acoustics, particularly for drum sounds. Because of the unfinished outer walls (a single layer of wood on studs), low frequencies simply dissipate as in a free field, while there is a nice fat bright mid and high frequency ambience. Scott feels it’s a place where he can get wonderful drum sounds and full-bore live Rock’n’Roll rhythm section grooves a la Muscle Shoals. Guitar leads are a cinch, as is other amplified stuff. He also finds he can vary the sonic character a lot, with comparatively simple materials. The outside noise leakage is only a minor annoyance for most of the stuff he’s recording, and the occasional busted take doesn’t seem to upset anybody unduly, thanks to the really relaxed atmosphere.
Scott notes, however, that “bands seem a little dubious when they first get here, and often can’t believe that anything good is going to happen. That usually changes as soon as they hear the first drum sounds.” He also allows as how he’d have a little trouble doing a really pristine 20-bit unplugged true-stereo acoustic guitar/vocal album. Too many cars ‘n planes. One side benefit: load-in’s a cinch! Where else can you back the band van into the drum booth?
In general, the alternative bands Scott and Al work with seem to really enjoy the ambience and pace. The running clock and the mounting expense are comparatively minor issues when recording at Orchard. As bands Scott works with are in the early stages of their professional careers, they still have more time than money, so the leisurely pace and low-key facilities are more a comfort than a burden.
There is no commercial front end to the operation, either. Scott does not advertise, doesn’t compete with the local studios in the area, doesn’t have a sign, nothing. Zoning is not an issue, irate neighbors don’t exist, security isn’t a problem. In short, Scott has neatly bypassed all of the usual commercial headaches that beset most of us in business for ourselves. Total cost, over the years? Scott figures he’s spent about $40,000 on everything, starting in 1986 (or $5,000 a year, on average). He hangs onto stuff, doesn’t try to update or run in the technology race. He generally pays cash, or puts stuff on short-term plastic. His monthly expenses are the cost of utilities, insurance and a telephone! Does this begin to sound cool, or what?
And whatever its shortcomings, from Scott’s standpoint it sure beats the alternative route to his artistic goals. “This was the only way I could get direct engineering and producing experience without spending extended time as a gopher or second engineer in a regular commercial studio, which would have meant I couldn’t work at Masterdisk.
“There was, however, a point in my work at Masterdisk,” Scott goes on, “when I began to feel I’d put my career ladder up against the wrong building. I began to get more caught up in going home to work in the studio than in my work at Masterdisk. Naturally, this caused some frustrations and tensions, particularly with Bob Ludwig. But it was really important for me to make music, and I think Bob understood that.”
So now, interestingly, Scott feels the most serious challenge to be faced is to maintain the balance he’s achieved among the various elements in his life, particularly with his recent marriage and thoughts of having a family (yet another familiar life situation). “I need to stay semi-pro,” he says. “I keep being tempted to improve the facility, increase bookings, do all the usual business development things, but then the studio would take too much time and resource, and I’d have to make it earn too much money just in order to pay for itself.”
So, instead, Scott is focusing more on artist development, working with beginning bands until they reach the point where they need full-time production services. He’s happy to let them go at that point, knowing full well that if and when they fly into stardom, they’ll be back to see him, at Masterdisk! Clever, eh?
Meanwhile, running up to LaGrangeville to cut the grass and put up storm windows, etc. at Mom’s house, is no big burden, actually no burden at all. Because time and money pressures are relieved and he’s having fun recording bands while visiting Mom, the quality of such life activities is greatly enhanced for Scott. Most of us have dreams. Scott’s doing his!
For more information, contact Scott Hull at www.Masterdisk.com
Dave Moulton is having fun interviewing guys like Scott. Beats working!
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