Tour of Shock City Studios

May 20, 2009 News
Written by: John

Our Great Studio Hunt began on May 19th with a visit to Shock City Studios. We met with Chris and Doug, who are IMHO two of the nicest guys in the business, and they quickly started to show us around.

Before I begin I would like to state that I am NOT an Audio Engineer guy, and wont even pretend to know what I’m talking about when it comes to gear. If you want to know more about what they offer or the toys they own, contact them on their website. But I will tell you about my experience in their studio, and will try to describe, to the best of my ability, what I saw and what I understand. With that said…

We started in Studio A, the big room with the mixing board, can be seen on their website. They showed us all the bells and whistles, but also showed why it was built that way. They talked about everything from how the walls were built and why they were put together that way to each piece of equipment on the racks. We listened to a track they were currently working on, and to say the least, it sounded great. It may not have been my style of music, but the quality was there. They have 3 sets of speakers behind the board to listen from, but the kicker for me was they were able to play it through a normal ‘boom box’. In my experience with studios, the music always sounds good on the big speakers, but we like to burn a copy and listen to it in the car (that’s where most people listen anyway).

Next, we moved to Studio B, where we heard and saw another track they recorded, and the video they produced. Again it sounded great, not that they would show us crap, but the video also looked very nice. Polished. And perfect for the style of music.

We moved on to the recording room, the large room where the bands play their music. By far, to me being a musician, I thought this was the coolest room. Let me start by saying, the studio is located on Gravois downtown, not an area known for being a quiet country road, but at no time could I hear ANYTHING from the outside world. Back to the room, they showed how they can take pieces of the wall off to block off sound in specific areas. But by far the coolest feature was the windows. This two-story room had windows running up the side of one of the walls, with a mechanical screen over it (mechanical making it go up and down). But they pointed something out that I personally would never have noticed; all of the windows were angled in a different direction. They said there were two layers of window, the first layer (pointing all over the place) was to block sound and help make the room perfect. The second, the actual window, was built to be perfect for audio. And like I said before, I really have no idea what I’m talking about, I can only tell you what I absorbed, but if your interested in recording then go take a tour and hear about it from someone that has a clue.

At this time we took a smoke break, no smoking inside so we stepped out and continued talking with Chris about what we wanted to do as a band, who are influences were and so on. He really took the time to try and get to know the band and the music. He also wanted to hear some of our music, to get a better idea of what we wanted to do. So we went back to Studio A and listened to some older studio tracks of us, not very good stuff (why we are looking for a new studio).

They gave us their opinion of what they thought of our style, who they heard (our influences) and suggestions on how they think we could make things a little better, or at least some things to try. Very informative.

From there we realized that we had spent over two hours talking music and recording, and generally having a good time, and it was time to wrap things up. We started talking money. Shock City Studios currently does not have prices on their website, so I’m not going to tell you the quote they gave us. But I will tell you they gave us 3 quotes, a 1 song, 3 song and 6 song. Walking in the door we only intended to do 1 song, but after talking with Shock City, we are leaning more towards the 3 songs.

All in all it was a great experience, and if they win the Great Studio Hunt I would have no problem working with them in the future.

We are currently trying to set up an appointment for next Tuesday to visit another studio, we’ll keep you posted.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tags: recording, Shock City Studio, studio