April 30, 2003

• O_Snips asked me about my experiences working at a recording studio. I’m too lazy to search and what I’ve ‘blogged about it before, so forgive any overlap:
  
  I worked at a place called Sugar Hill Sound in Houston, TX. It’s a beautiful place inside, with lots of black formica and gray carpet. Studio B, the big room, has iso booths that look like the patio at a Mexican restaurant.
  
  Outside, it’s a dive. It’s a big corrugated building in a not-so-nice part of town with gunshots ringing in the distance.
  
  The place was getting back on its feet when I started interning there. The owners had bought it from the legendary Huey Meaux, who maintained an office there even though the place was being managed by somewhere else. Soon after I left, Meaux would go on to be taken in for drug possession and child pornography, and would skip bail leading to a couple-month’s-worth of manhunt, until he finally turned himself in.
  
  But I’m getting ahead of myself.
  
  Meaux’ office was part of a really huge studio that had been partitioned off into smaller rooms, for storage and office space and so forth. The big studio was the first place the Houston Symphony ever recorded, back in the 50s. It’s a huge soundproof room.
  
  I mentioned Studio B. It was built for Freddy Fender in the ’70s. Meaux got rich off Freddy, and needed the technology to keep the hits coming. It was a really amusing place to work, because it had (and probably still has) this lovely, brand-new Otari 24-track deck, a really nice console, and… two Scully 2-tracks. The Scullys were great, but they were ancient technology, from the 50s. Big glowing VU meters and if you pressed stop at the wrong time you’d stretch and break the tape.
  
  Also hooked up to Studio B were some of my favorite things about the place: Actual, honest-to-goodness echo chambers. Two of them! Echo chambers are just little cement rooms with a speaker and some microphones in them. No one ever used them, since we had plenty of digital effects, but they were all set up and functional.
  
  The other cool retro thing was the plate reverbs. Two of those, as well. They were about the size of the wall of a bedroom. The legend was that they were hoisted into the upstairs while it was being built, because they were so massive.
  
  A plate reverb is like an echo chamber, only two-dimensional. It’s a plate of glass with a speaker-like device on one end, and pickups on the other. The sound reverberates through the glass just like it would a room. The plates got used more than the chambers, but the thrill of antiquity wears off quickly when you’re trying to record a jingle or hip-hop.
  
  Studio A was about half the size of B. It had an ancient, ancient ANCIENT 16-channel mixer, and a 16-track tape deck. It was mainly used for purely utilitarian needs, such as shooting sound effects into a radio spot or something. All of it is completely obsolete now, thanks to ProTools and the like. Still kind of cool, however.
  
  But. And this is a big deal. In Studio A, there’s a sweet spot for recording vocals. A very sweet spot. A very, very sweet spot, so sweet that it’s marked with a big formica star on the floor. Because right there, on that star, is where the Big Bopper sang into a microphone on numerous occasions. That’s what made Sugar Hill cool.
  
  It’s is quite the unique place in Houston, because it’s actually historic. Most places in Houston get paved over, so there’s no real chance for history to take on any relevance. It’s cut down before that can happen.
  
  And, again, you look at that star on the floor, and you look at Freddy Fender’s gold records on the walls, and you go through the big room where the symphony recorded, and you get to Huey Meaux’ office where there was porn and drugs. And you leave the building and dodge bullets and drive through poverty to the freeway that whisks you off to the suburbs.
  
  Looking at the web site, I see that chief engineer Andy Bradley is working on a written and recorded history of the place. I hope that works out.

  • 11:04 am
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