Recording Studio Sweet Spot: Melody Lanes, Williamsburg
WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN: In the early aughts, when Jay Braun and his brother Justin were making a name for themselves with their experimental noise-pop group – The Negatones – bands started coming to their rehearsal studio to record. A guitarist and synth player, Jay had a way with sound and an unconventional production approach that spawned the cut-and-paste collage-pop music of The Negatones, and – subsequently – work with artists like The Fiery Furnaces and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
Melody Lanes Live Room
The band eventually slowed down, but Jay Braun is still going strong as a for-hire producer/engineer and musician/composer – most days out of the Williamsburg studio he owns/runs with Justin and Toshi Yano (Fiery Furnaces, Franz Ferdinand).
Melody Lanes has been assembled in the spirit of Braun’s work and the group’s lifelong gear collection, incorporating favorite analog devices and noisemakers with rock-and-roll-making necessities and the space in which to perform and capture it all.
“The wood rafters and the high ceiling and brick make this a great sounding drum room,” says Braun, who’s worked on music here with Sean Bones, Norah Jones, Cat Power, Shilpa Ray and Tenements, among others. “I play guitar, but I think in drums. It’s priority – getting good drum sounds.
“I’ll do basics to our Studer 16-track 2” machine then dump into Pro Tools. And I print mixes to tape a lot. Since I started doing that, I’ve gotten feedback from mastering engineers that the mixes sound great. I think the tape is maybe the magic element that was missing.”
The clubhouse-style control room has suspended wooden enclosures to the back left and right of the mix position containing a Studer 1/4″ 2 track tape machine, and rack of choice analog gear like the Ursa Major Space Station and Eventide Instant Phaser and Flanger. “We wanted the gear to be really accessible,” Braun notes. “When the equipment was more remote, I ended up reaching for plug-ins more often.”
Melody Lanes Control Room
The splicey, cut-and-paste style evident in Braun’s own music (and mashups) informs his engineering to some degree. “I really like working with found material,” he notes. “Even material that’s a total wreck – like if a band brings me drums they’ve recorded at home, they might sound kind of awful in a traditional sense, but some aspect of the sound is cool, it has character. And I like that process of finding a way to put it all together.”
The “process” is something that comes up again and again with Braun, who’s own creative work as an artist melds the spontaneous with the more studied and technical. So the creative process in the studio is something most certainly nurtured at Melody Lanes.
“Some people come in with their demo that they love and they just want a better-recorded version of that,” Braun shares. “And that’s fine but you’re not really harnessing the process in doing that. I think the more you can let things happen, the more the recording takes on a life of its’ own. And if you can let go of your previous expectations, you usually come up with something that’s far better.
“It’s not fun for the artist if the producer says I have all the answers, and it’s not fun for the producer if the band comes in saying they have all the answers,” Braun continues. “What’s great is if you can all go in together and be like ‘let’s make something that freaks people out and is better than whatever we’d come up with on our own.”
And now, for all the facts and figures on Melody Lanes…
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Facility Name: Melody Lanes
Website: melodylanes.net
Location: Williamsburg, Bedford L
Neighborhood Advantages: Great food and hedged irony delivered right to your door
Established: 1998 in NYC, 2003 in Brooklyn, 2008 current location
Facility Focus: Recording and mixing
Mission Statement: Melody Lanes is an analog/digital studio built around tasty vintage gear, an excellent live room, and a warm, adaptable production environment.
Clients/Credits: Cat Power, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Sean Bones, Dark Was The Night, etc.
System Highlights: Studer A80 16-Track 2”, Pro Tools with Apogee and Lynx conversion, Soundtracs MRX, Trident Fleximix, classic mics, outboard compressors & delays, etc. Moog Minimoog Model D, Little Phatty, and a number of other synthesizers and vintage keyboards
Distinguishing Characteristics: Wood and brick walls, wood rafters, high ceilings, carefully designed dry and ambient tracking rooms, lounge
Secret Weapon / The Building’s On Fire – What Do You Save?: We liked our Soundtracs MRX console so much we went on eBay and bought another for cheap because nobody knows how awesome they are. To illustrate: we had a coveted Neotek Series IIc, a really good console by any standards that we made some great sounding records on, and the MRX made this Neotek sound brittle by comparison. The Soundtracs is very big and open sounding with good stock pres and EQs and its own ‘British’ color, but unfortunately would be too heavy to move in a fire, so we’d probably just grab the Echoplex or an LA4.
What People Seem To Love About Melody Lanes: The flexible/adaptable way we work and the sounds. We want to make the record you want to make and we give a damn.
Most Memorable Session Ever: I get something out of all of them. Working with Jon Spencer is always memorable because he continually throws things at me that seem counterintuitive at first but end up working great in the track. Fearless.
Session You’d Like to Forget: Of the hundreds of sessions we’ve done, only two went bad enough that the plug had to be pulled. Already forgotten.
Dream Session: (if you could host ANY session with any client, living or dead, what would it be?) I’d like to go back in time and intern under Bob Power.
Visit http://www.melodylanes.net for more information and to get in touch.