Small, Powerful, Full-time Facilities

[Slikjmuzik]

I'm trying to find the most powerful, small facilities out there. Looking at facilities that are open constantly for business that are possibly run by just one guy, but do it for a living, kinda like me. By small I mean just a cozy control room and a modest live room. I'd like to look at their website, see how they state their services and possibly dig in to how they go about advertising and manage their time. Definitely those that own and run these facilities have a reputation to be running it full-time, but I'm trying to find out what drives someone to go there in the event someone has never heard of the facility and doesn't know the credits of those who work there. I'm not talking about a place only owned by someone and has engineers coming in to use the facility, literally places run by 1 or 2 individuals that do the engineering and mixing...or am I the only crazy one out there???

I feel like I run a small but powerful facility myself, but looking to get some ideas to take it to the next level from those that have found more success than I have thus far.

Of course, I come to get the feedback of some fellow slutz.

Thanks in advance guys.

[dabigfrog]

frogville records & recording studio is almost 10 yrs old now. We have never advertised. 99% of our business is repeat customers or word of mouth to their musician friends. we are always flying by the seat of our pants booking 2 weeks out, we have a session every day this week and 1/2 of next week is booked and filling up the gaps.

I am the owner, own the land, building and all the gear, Bill Palmer is my main engineer since day 1 and we have another part time engineer / tech guy Jason Reed... 3 man operation.

for 7 years we learned and recorded 77 albums in a 900sf living room, learning how to record and use the gear, what gear wasn't good enough for what we wanted and with the help of GS advice we ended up buying the RIGHT gear piece by piece and learned how to use it well.

we expanded the studio in 2009 mid recession added 2200 sq ft, the crown jewel is our big tracking room, which several engineers and drummers say is the best sounding drum room in the south west... everyone is talking about it around here. we are now a 24 hour facility with residential options.

Now we are trying to get every producer and engineer in the state to come up and experience, be aware of the cool options frogville offers everyone.

we are currently working on a studio only website, as the studio is just a sub menu on the record label website now.

we have had guests recording like John Popper (blues traveller), Taj Mahal, Shannon McNally, Vall Kilmer, Gary Farmer, Brian Hardgroove (public enemy), and a couple of guys from Crazy Horse.... but most of our work is for locals, santa fe, Taos, albuquerque, we have had bands come out from california, LA, Austin and Denver to record at our studio. (And we need more out of town clients all the time)

we too are trying to coax bigger tier artists to our facility, and it is difficult, trying to get these cats as guests to add a part to someone elses thing might be the ticket, they get to experience the studio and staff real time.

we make a living, pay our bills, eat well and every few months we get to purchase a new piece of gear, no one is getting rich, but we are surviving well doing what we love to do.

website in my sig.

[Slikjmuzik]

Absolutely amazing and insightful response. Thank you!! If you don't mind, I'm going to see if there's anything on your site I might be able to incorporate. If you don't mind me asking, is there anything from my site that may look like a deterrent? Most of my business is word of mouth as well, I make great side money and make almost as much as gigging and teaching voice lessons, but I can't live off of it just by itself. Any further insight is always welcome and much appreciated.

[SonicAlchemist]

I went to your site, and here are my unfiltered reactions as a potential client:

1) too much focus on presenting the control room and your mics. I want to see the live room.

2) when i saw pictures (hidden within the site in a gallery) of the live room I was not impressed. The foam treatment on the walls appears weird (the shapes) and arbitrary/obligatory. The room doesn't have a vibe that it sounds good. Obviously your room could be awesome. But it doesn't look like it is a good place to track.

3) there is no mention or focus on the people. I want to know who comes with studio time there and want to feel like they will bring something nice to the table.

So to recap, the two most important things to me are either buried or absent: the tracking room and the personnel.

recommendations:

1. paint the live room a bold color that will match your design scheme and existing treatment. paint will be far cheaper than any piece of gear, and at this point will do far more to drive business, imho.

2. ensure the room sounds great. if you haven't already, dial it in with measurements, etc. . . build some gobos, diffusors as needed, and so on.

3. take pictures of this new space that showcases the tracking room. I want to see tall ceilings, lots of space, good acoustic treatment to keep the room from being too live, but it has to look like it is not too dead, and i want to see there are options for adaptation to the ensemble with gobos, etc.

4. put together a bio for the people who work there showcasing their experience, their strengths.

[Trakworx]

I guess I fit the bill. I'm a sole proprietor - it's just me here. I do everything myself - tracking, mixing, mastering, booking, billing, toilet-cleaning, name it. It's been my full-time gig for 15 years. I'm almost always busy, so I guess that makes my studio powerful... I book between 1 week and 3 months in advance, depending on whatever random natural law determines these things. Most of my business is repeats and referrals, but a little comes from my Gearslutz sig and my yelp.com reviews. My website is 16 years old, and sorely outdated, but the pics and info are current, and it's still doing it's job. Feel free to check it out but of course please don't plagiarize.

Looking at your site - constructive criticism - I find the text hard to read under "General Information" - it's dim and cramped in that window - I think it would get read by more people if it were more pleasant to view. I like the gear pics (what is that bus comp?). Navigating the site is slightly tedious - I don't immediately see reasons why I should go there, I have to search for it. Needs a hook on the very first page that pops up. Needs a list of credits.

Anyway, my business model has always been to give clients more value for their $ than my competition. Happy customers are the best possible advertising in this business. Make sure they are very satisfied and don't nickle and dime them on stuff like CDRs or whatever.

Cheers,

J~

[dabigfrog]

Originally Posted by Slikjmuzik

Absolutely amazing and insightful response. Thank you!! If you don't mind, I'm going to see if there's anything on your site I might be able to incorporate. If you don't mind me asking, is there anything from my site that may look like a deterrent? Most of my business is word of mouth as well, I make great side money and make almost as much as gigging and teaching voice lessons, but I can't live off of it just by itself. Any further insight is always welcome and much appreciated.

1) work on your live room - make it look more inviting, paint, lighting, more pro looking acoustical treatment (can be diy - its all cosmetics on final look)

2) add bio's of staff w/ pics and credits, specialties, fortes

3) add vocal lessons / info as part of the site + any other specialty services.

4) get a Neumann into your mic locker, people like neumanns.

5) many studios don't list price on the web, you can cater the price to the job on a job by job basis.... we are 100/hr but we have been giving the local discount of 75/hour...but you have to call to find that out.

6) add some samples of audio of work you have done

most people don't care about gear - they care about people, the people they are going to TRUST with their art, to help them make the right decisions during the process. we don't have a console, we have a control 24, we can do 16 hi end channels at a time (soon to be expanded to 24-32) everything ends up on the 'puter and mixed ITB after we have colored the signals proper on the analog front end)

it's tough, in the last 20 years a thousand new studios opened up, not everyone knows what they are doing, giving disappointed musicians the idea that they can just buy gear and do better thus making a 1000 more new studios flooding an ever shrinking client base.

people come to us because we know what we are doing and deliver the goods at a decent rate, we have a track record in our region that ppl respect.

last year our town's million dollar studio went under, now we have the biggest tracking room in town!

** we do our best to get the very BEST and most TALENTED musicians into our studio so that the best stuff in our region IS coming out of our studio...many times (3-5) we have done this at a loss (engineer paid but studio took it on the chin in order to work with that artist) whatever we lost in those 2 or 3 situations we gained 10 fold in new customers who heard that record and want their stuff to sound that good and come to us to do that.

YMMV and no one can tell you how to run your business, you just have to keep the artist paramount. What would the artist like, need, feel to be productive ... and cater to that.

[Cb Media]

Great thread!!! I will be keeping an eye on this and referring back to it many times I'm sure. Thanks to the original poster and all who have commented.

[RCM - Ronan]

I travel around the world a bunch for my work, but in LA I have what is basically a one man operation (with some help in the office), and I am thankfully booked year 'round.

The important thing to keep in mind about trying to make a studio successful in this day and age, is to remember that clients are looking for a place that feels good, and FAR more importantly, they are looking for a person they trust to take good care of them and their music. Great people make successful studios. A studio run by a guy/gal with a great reputation can charge twice the money with 1/10 of the gear when compared to a studio run by some one without a reputation.

Not to be too discouraging if you do not already have a good rep, because you have to go out and make that reputation. Get to know local musicians, church group, ad agencies. What ever kind of clients you are hoping to work with, find a way to let those people know about you as a person, because as much as we obsess about mic pres on Gearslutz, very few pres are going to seal the deal with a client.

[Trakworx]

+1!

[DannyMac]

Just a note the the OP.
Under gereral info on the website there is a sentence
" The control room at ECS offers an acoustically neutral control room that yealds"

( in a friendly non-confrontatioal manner) Please for the sake of your business, my sanity and the English language change this to

"ECS offers an accousticly neutral control room that yealds"

[Trakworx]

Originally Posted by DannyMac

Just a note the the OP.
Under gereral info on the website there is a sentence
" The control room at ECS offers an acoustically neutral control room that yealds"

( in a friendly non-confrontatioal manner) Please for the sake of your business, my sanity and the English language change this to

"ECS offers an accousticly neutral control room that yealds"

Sentence structure yes, but spelling;

"acoustically" is correct, not "accousticly".

"yealds" should be "yields"

[DannyMac]

Waabo... Correct my friend
Late night typing on a phone by a dyslexic too lazy to use spell check will "yeild" these problems

[thronechild]

To slikjmusic,

Interesting thread, was gonna check it out but your site doesnt load on my iPad, if it's flash based it won't load on apple phones or iPads which may knock out some prospective clients who can't see your site, lots of mobile only web surfers and musicians on iPhones. Adobe is dropping flash support for mobile devices so you definitely want to go to straight HTML or html5.

Unless its a problem with my iPad...