You never know what goes on behind closed doors, a voyeuristic lament especially apt if your block, be it commercial or residential, is home to an entrant in central Arkansas’ surprisingly robust recording-studio market.
Arkansas bands and solo artists face a variety of operational styles — from backyard and back-bedroom to polished-wood, concert-hall stage — in which to pay by the hour to lay down tracks.
In a do-it-yourself age, recording in a converted bedroom of a house is no signal of making do; industry insiders will tell you the hip-hop genre, especially, is suited to converted home studios because the instrumentation is “in the box” — computerrendered, in most cases, as opposed to live in the studio — so rap studio proprietors don’t need a dedicated room for a drum kit, a floor space and overhead advantage over the recording needs of rock bands.
Here, in a representative rather than comprehensive survey, we look at these and other nuances of central Arkansas’ recording-studio landscape, as the state’s roster of record-producers-for-hire meets the changing demands of the recording industry.
Dat Heat Studios, Little Rock At the controls: Producers G-Sizz and Ferocious Hourly rate: $30 with a two-hour minimum Genre: Rap, hip-hop and R&B. As track producers, the duo describe their signature sound as “intense,” says G-Sizz. “Aggression is the main thing.” In the booth: An in-house stable of rap and R&B, including B-Ware, Maria V, X2C and Zebra; the artists of Little Rock’s Conduit Entertainment, including Epiphany and Suga City; and independents like 607 and Rockstar. The beatmakers also donated tracks to Blockade, the teenage rap collective formed by the nonprofit Hip-Hop After School Program.
Success stories: “Caught Up,” Little Rock rapper Xxotic’s collaboration with Pimp C, was recorded at Dat Heat, although the vocals of the legendary UGK member and pioneer of Southern rap in general and the Houston sound in particular (who died last year) were shipped in. Suga City’s Arkansas Bo and Goines are booking studio time in anticipation of their distribution deal with the national indie label Koch Records, a major bump for the South Arkansas duo and their witty, unhurried interplay.
And if machine-like productivity is a kind of success unto itself, the Dat Heat team points to 607, who passes through regularly to maintain his output of a handful of CDs a year. “He recorded his last album in two days,” Ferocious reports. “The joke is if he has a 4-minute, 30-second song, it’ll take him that long to record it.”
Design scheme: The mixing board and insulated sound booth share a burgundy-wall, low-ceiling back bedroom of the 12th-Street-Neighborhood house shared by G-Sizz and B-Ware, his younger brother. The men of Dat Heat completed the remodeling themselves, framing and insulating the wall cordoning the vocal booth and installing the double-pane window with glass they sourced at Home Depot. The only hint neighbors might get that a session is under way indoors could be the presence out front of the flashy SUV driven by Xxotic, which the rapper detailed with an exterior paint job depicting herself with lifelike, fashion-model allure.
Reflections on the changing industry: Dat Heat has a healthy business mixing its artists’ show disks, essentially the backing CDs that hip-hop and R&B performers provide a club’s sound technician to cue up for a live performance. As the studio enters its busy season — owing to two factors: “Tax time,” G-Sizz says, and awards shows; “A lot of artists see these shows and say, ‘I want to be on there next year’” — the team is hewing to its strategy of steering rappers to buy from their catalog of beats, where some beat-crafters offer leasing options wherein an artist can rent a track for around $10 for three months, after which the rights revert to the composer.
“I’m not knocking it, but we try to make everything count,” Ferocious says of the practice. “That’s like borrowing.”
Blue Chair Studio, Austin
At the controls: Darian Stribling, Jordan Trotter
Hourly rate: $45, or a 10-hour day for $375. A five-day block runs $1,500
Genres: Rock, blues, country, bluegrass, gospel
In the booth: The central Arkansas rock bands among whom Blue Chair is cultivating a reputation for authoritative producing are largely made up of college and high school students, making summer the studio’s busiest season. A typical calendar month can float from sessions with pop rockers Grand Serenade, for whom Trotter plays guitar, and the band Latture (Stribling: “David Grey meets U2 meets Queen”) to the Nichols, a Fordyce family — mom, dad, two teenage daughters and a boyfriend on banjo — who book time once each year to record a gospel bluegrass CD.
Success stories: Selling between 2,000 and 3,000 units, Green Willis, a bluegrass-influenced trio made up of three Mountain View teenagers, is the most commercially viable outfit to pass through Blue Chair. The studio also claims a sort of success once removed through their association with recording client Tim Meitzen, a law student from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Meitzen’s mainstream country sound — steel drums and Brad Paisley-style vocals — is fine-tuned in part through Meitzen’s songwriting partnership with fellow Batesville native Brent Baxter, who wrote “Monday Morning Church,” a single from Alan Jackson’s album What I Do.
Design scheme: With pendant lighting, purple walls (with dappled ceiling to match), plush armchairs shaped like cupped palms and a proprietor dressed in the work-from-home, beta-male wardrobe of thick-rimmed glasses and jeans and sneakers, Blue Chair’s floor plans could have been copped from a Nick Hornby novel. Of all the violet: “I wanted it to be an artistic-looking place that wasn’t the same color you’d find in someone’s house,” Stribling says. “I wanted it to look like a studio, instead of a dentist’s office.”
The out-of-the-way location (a couple of miles off Cabot’s main drag) hasn’t proved a hindrance, Stribling adds. “Location doesn’t mean that much. You don’t want to be downtown, because of the noise factor.” Also, constructing a building to spec near a field left the team enough space to dedicate a large recording room for a drum set.
Reflections on the changing industry: While Trotter and Stribling are virtually interchangeable on the sound board, Trotter doubles as a versatile studio musician, while Stribling enjoys a mentoring role to groups that occasionally haven’t simmered long enough to fully blend. The bands Stribling grew up listening to, he says, “would get together, rehearse, then write songs, then maybe do a record. Now the first thing bands do is make a record.”
Poynter’s Palace,
Maumelle At the controls: Barry Poynter Hourly rate: $50, or $500 for a full day Genre: Rock In the booth: Soul Embraced, Runaway Planet, Damn Bullets Success stories: Aside from the band The Juliana Theory — whose CD Emotion Is Dead was recorded in a backyard garage studio Poynter once operated on Valmar Street in Little Rock’s Stifft Station neighborhood and sold 200,000 copies — Poynter’s most persuasive success story is his own.
A veteran of Little Rock band production, Poynter became a favored producer of Seattle’s Tooth and Nail Records (label home to The Juliana Theory) and other metal outfits that sent him bands from around the country. (Though now installed in a spacious house on the slope of Maumelle’s Panther Mountain, in his Stifft Station era, Poynter would send heavy metal rockers to lodge at the nearby La Quinta Inn between sessions.)
He was twice nominated in the Hard Rock Producer of the Year category in the Dove Awards, which he describes as the Christian Grammys. And he and composing partner Jimmy Powell are on retainer with HBO to create interstitial music that has been used during montages promoting series such as The Sopranos and Sex and the City. He recently completed an urgentsounding track that will begin airing underneath a trailer for the HBO movie Recount, starring Kevin Spacey and following the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, premiering May 30.
Design scheme: A bi-level outbuilding behind Poynter’s home, with separate recording rooms for instruments and vocals. Velvety loveseats are propped on blocks because, as Poynter says, otherwise people reclining in them would miss the high end of sound that would literally be over their heads.
Reflections on the changing industry: In his arrangement with HBO, Poynter is adjusting to the shifting world of industry placements, recordingbiz jargon for bands licensing songs for commercial use. Once, after the band Coldplay rejected HBO’s offer to license a song for use in a promotion for Six Feet Under, the network commission Poynter and Powell for a compatible track. Although the duo’s quick turnaround netted them a raise from HBO — and the 1:45 play time promised higher royalty payments than accompanied by the usual :30, :15 or even five-second musical flourishes the network commissions — Coldplay ultimately caved and allowed their song to be used after all.
Lucky Dog Audio,
Little Rock
At the controls: Jason Weinheimer
Rate: Project-by-project basis, but an estimated $500 per day
Signature sound: Looselimbed and lived-in, courtesy the vintage instruments and equipment Weinheimer likes to source as hallowed receptacles of old-school cred. (Last week he drove through a snowstorm to pick up a circa-1960s console custom-built by Atlantic Records for the albums Tom Dowd recorded in Memphis with the likes of Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin.)
Though pop, rock, jazz and blues prevail, Weinheimer records the occasional rapper, either for CD tracks — as in the case of a forthcoming project from Epiphany and his band One Night Stand — or as when the artists wear the hats of commercial jingle-writers and spokesmen. Weinheimer collaborator 607 has performed voice work for Lucky Dog commercial clients the Arkansas State Police and the Memphis Grizzlies.
In the booth: The Good Fear recently recorded a few songs for a forthcoming record, as did The Moving Front, for their April release. The Greg Spradlin Outfit and Jim Mize have also logged time in Lucky Dog’s Center Street space in an otherwise law-firm- and parking-garage-clogged stretch of downtown.
Success stories: Weinheimer tends to be proudest of the records of his own band, Little Rock’s beloved Boondogs. But since Age Old Hunger, the rollicking, bluesy CD he produced for the retrovoiced troubadour Chris Denny, has made it to the player of legendary producer and kingmaker Rick Rubin, now installed at Columbia Records, Weinheimer places him in the win column, too.
Design scheme: Ikea sleek, with blond wood and found art. Recording sessions gravitate toward nights and weekends, when more musicians are free, leaving afternoons for lingering chili-dog lunches.
Pet projects: Weinheimer and company have a fanciful art series: namely, a photography project wherein staff members, wives, children and friends have modeled by arranging their posture to perfectly flesh out an artist’s close-up on a vintage album cover. Weinheimer has positioned his children behind the faces of Mahalia Jackson and Liberace (the results are browsable at
www.flickr.com/ photos/luckydogaudio), while other entries imagine what the camera left out on covers featuring the likes of Johnny Cash, Peter Gabriel, Joni Mitchell and Isaac Hayes.
Infrared Studio
Productions,
North Little Rock
At the controls: Sound engineer Jay Jones and record producer Eric Chesher. The studio is owned by Dr. Rex Bell, a Little Rock pathologist and concert pianist who initially devised the studio as a space in which to record the quarter-million-dollar Fazioli pianos sold in a showroom adjoining Infrared.
Hourly rate: $75, with discounts for “buying in bulk.” Jones offers the rule of thumb that one finished minute of music on an album should correlate to one hour of studio time, meaning a 60-minute CD will reflect 60 hours of studio work.
Genre: With connections that lead most directly to Nashville, the duo say they feel comfortable working in any style except hip-hop.
In the booth: The men are still working off multi-year artist-development deals awarded to finalists in the Little Rock Star vocal talent search sponsored by the studio’s incubator, the Windsong Performing Arts Center. The Ted Ludwig Trio, a favorite of Little Rock jazz fans, recently recorded their CD Common Grounds there. Through late spring and summer, the men will expand their contest to the Great Arkansas Talent Search, panning further for singer-songwriter gold they can interest in artist development and recording deals, with the finals scheduled for September.
Success stories: Demos for two singer-songwriters discovered in the Little Rock Star process are making waves in Nashville: Heather Bennett of Malvern scored a publishing deal with Curb Records, and Bonnie Raitt and Carrie Underwood each have a song of hers on hold for album consideration. And Cara Martin, a 14-year-old Pottsville native with a Miley-Cyrus-with-amean-streak voice, is being considered by Universal and Capitol Records, the men say. Jonathan White, a Little Rock saxophone virtuoso with play on national jazz radio and a forthcoming gig at the Kentucky Derby, switched his allegiance to Infrared from the Memphis studio where he commuted to record his debut, Melodies From the Heart, after performing a show in the studio’s attached, 314-seat concert hall, which doubles as a recording booth for groups that prefer to record in their live-show configuration, sans headphones.
Design scheme: West Little Rock swank. In keeping with the Italian-villa splendor of the performing arts center and reception hall, the studio features a decidedly un-rock-n ’n’ roll mien, with buttery walls, leather couches the color of espresso and a window offering a view of a duck pond and waving pines.
Reflections on the changing industry: Working with fledgling singer-songwriters, Chesher labors to produce a calling card as lushly arranged, textured and radioor MySpace-ready as possible. “Fifteen years ago if you were shopping around a song, they didn’t want anything produced,” he says. “They’d be insulted, like, ‘Who are you to actually produce a song?’ But the coin has flipped. Today if your production isn’t perfect, they won’t listen.”
BY KYLE BRAZZEL ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
