So what kind of upgrades are you gonna look into doing at Empty Lane with this fundraiser? JACKSON: The whole studio room is gonna get re-worked. COLIN: We’re moving it. We have a noticeably bigger garage that we are gonna be converting into the control room. We have a whole big pile of rock wall treatment that we drove way too long to get for a deal. And we’re gonna lather it up with that. And put brick on the walls in there….
What’s the purpose of the brick? JACKSON: It works as diffusing but also as like sound absorption. COLIN: It’s a really great material for stopping sound from getting out of a room, versus just putting up sheets of other material.
Is it like the foam that they use that looks like a city inverted on your wall? JACKSON: In a sense, yeah… COLIN: Brick is a subtler way of doing that as well because it is porous and irregular. So it’s a very natural, more subtle version of that type of diffusion if it’s all around. You know, you still might have an occasional area where you do need to break up some sort of weird reflection of frequency and you can hang some more… But I have found that some of my favorite control rooms ever have had brick in them. It’s also pretty affordable considering how much it does, both isolation, structural support, aesthetic and diffusion treatment… JACKSON: Also it solves our one issue with the double-edged sword of Empty Lane, which is we are a studio in a neighborhood. Which is really cool, very comforting, however sound has to shut off at some point. But if we can secure it, then it doesn’t have to shut off ever. COLIN: One of our big goals is to not have curfew… and this is the first step to getting mixing to be more isolated. JACKSON: So we can be 24/7. COLIN: Also, we just got a new piano to put in there that we want to have that sort of always mic’d option there. We also want to put room mics in the control room so that if somebody is shaking a tambourine or doing a scratch vocal and we just want to hit record, we can. One thing about our room right now, our current control room, we were doing some voice over stuff and we noticed that it doesn’t sound that great to record in… so that’s another thing with the new control room. JACKSON: Is it’s gonna sound good. For all those overdubs you just want to do in the moment, at the spark of things, it’s already ready to go and it’s gonna sound good. COLIN: Plus for a lot of percussion overdubs or backing vocals, I’m a big fan of room mics for that sort of thing as opposed to close mic… So that’s one big thing, a new control room that’s going to be properly tuned and dialed. A sub-woofer for that room. We’re gonna be moving from 20 channels of inputs and just a stereo out at the moment to 32 in and 32 out. We’re going to be completely revamping our patch bay. We have a lot of outboard equipment that’s kind of been lying dormant or is on the way. And we have a few more pieces we want to get to kind of round out our collection. Some new compressors. A couple more pre-amps. Getting a lot of 500 series stuff. I’ve recently become a big fan of Warm Audio both for price and I just genuinely have had the chance to try out the real thing against it a lot recently… and they do the job for me. They sound great… We’re also trying to get some new mics, just a handful of ribbons and some other large diaphragm condensor options as well as repairing our floor in the studio kitchen. A couple other repair things, kind of reconstructing the lounge. But predominantly it’s about the control room.
So are you gonna have it set up to where a band can just come in and record something live or a band can come in and make a full album track by track? JACKSON: Absolutely, I would even say it’s set up that way currently. COLIN: Yeah, we actually do a lot of live-tracking already. Sometimes, I’ve ran into two situations where 20 channels wasn’t enough. But most of the time, a lot of the bands who come in are three-pieces or on the bigger side four-pieces. The only bands that I’ve run into that we couldn’t record live here are my bands that are, you know, six, seven people with a million inputs. JACKSON: But now, we will be able to. COLIN: A big thing we also want to do with this space is just have more controls over re-amping, headphone mixes, re-printing stuff that was recorded digitally through rack gear and also just having the option to have more things always on. More things left mic’d up. Because right now we certainly don’t have enough channels to just leave stuff wired. JACKSON: The goal is to make it even more streamlined than it has ever been.
So, it’s gonna be more like that, stuff’s ready to go at any moment… JACKSON: That’s the goal, you can just pick something up and hit record…
Which is hard to find anywhere that I know of in Kitsap. There’s a couple places but it’s still… COLIN: The thing here is, I want the studio to be exactly what I’d want to go to a studio for. That’s been my guiding metric. And there’s a lot of things that are unique about this place that are because of that. Such as: There are so many fucking instruments. We have at least twice as many instruments as most studios do. The downside of that is it does get cluttered. But also I didn’t want it to feel intimidating, at all, so I haven’t really sunk any effort into trying to make it look professional. I want it to look like a house that’s in Bremerton. And I feel like people immediately feel cozy here. The fatigue that comes with recording of being so anxious about breaking something or doing something wrong doesn’t really happen here. And I have a lot of first time recorders or young artists who come in… JACKSON: And they’re not necessarily equipped with the kind of gear that we have here.
And that’s awesome. Having this kind of thing available for anybody’s budget is kind of amazing and that’s what I kind of see and hear that you guys are doing. COLIN: And that’s also why we wanted to do the fundraiser. JACKSON: As opposed to raising prices. COLIN: That’s the way you typically do upgrades at other studios is you just raise the prices. Or you wait a really long time and run the serious realistic risk that whatever traction you have going is gonna go away… JACKSON: And we want it now, so… hahaha!
So for every session and different project do you have different price rates or is it just… COLIN: We have a fairly reasonable standard day rate and standard mixing rate. One thing we do that is very not 2024 at all is: I don’t do mixing fees. I don’t say, your album has this many songs so this is how much it’s gonna cost to mix… JACKSON: A lot of people have different ideas when it comes to mixing so there’s one way to solve it, which is what we did. COLIN: I know some engineers really don’t like to mix with people. I’m the opposite, I really want the client there… I just find that I’m able to give much faster more understandable turnaround times to clients if I’m not gonna charge you a fee for mixing, like some random number based on the number of songs, but if stuff needs to be done for the song/recording/mixing, we book studio time for it. But I also offer discounts for mixing days. JACKSON: And discounts on big sessions, that’s another thing, because we really like working on albums and big projects. COLIN: I really like working on stuff for long periods of time, so once it crosses a certain threshold, I slash it. Because, like, I’m not trying to get rich off this. I’m just trying to pay my bills and make music. // INTERVIEW BY MYKEY HASLIP
CHECK OUT THE EMPTY LANE FUNDRAISER & Artist Showcase featuring 10 bands that have recorded at the studio thus far over two days Nov. 1-2, 6:30 p.m., all ages, $10, each night at the Charleston, Bremerton.
ALSO CHECK OUT THE FULL AUDIO INTERVIEW up now at youtube.com/@kitsapsmokestack.
AND FIND MORE ABOUT EMPTY LANE on the socials @emtpylanestudio or thru email at emptylanestudio@gmail.com
