Renewal and Reordering: Manhattan Sound Recording
MIDTOWN, MANHATTAN: The winds of change keep on blowing through the New York City recording scene. For close observers, the evolutionary cycles can’t help but fascinate, as people change philosophies and places change hands.
Matt Carter in Manhattan Sound Recording, Studio A.
A perfect example is the emergence of one of NYC’s newest tracking/mixing rooms, Manhattan Sound Recording. Founded by a longtime leader of the New York recording sector, Dave Amlen (Sound on Sound, Legacy Recording Studios), MSR marks a rebirth of his career and the space itself, a sun-splashed annex that had previously been home to the Manhattan Producer’s Alliance.
One of Amlen’s first moves after securing the real estate from ManHatPro (which is now based out of Dubway) was to hire his studio manager, Matt Carter. A Berklee grad who cut his teeth with positions at Sound on Sound and Legacy, Carter brings the perfect blend of youthful panache and real-world experience to the formidable task of launching an NYC audio facility in 2009.
“Managing a studio, there’s a lot of thinking on your feet,” Carter notes. “A lot of different things come up, especially at night. You learn to deal with a broad variety of stressful interpersonal and technical situations, and trying to keep people happy. I don’t think the learning process ever really ends, because no situation ever repeats itself exactly.”
After Carter had been at Legacy for four years, Amlen approached him with a rare opportunity: help him to open up a new world-class audio facility in a town where far more studio doors seem to be slamming shut than flying open. Carter was no contractor, but that didn’t stop him from rolling his sleeves up and helping to rock the renovation of the inviting space, at 36th Street just off 5th Avenue.
The result is the MSR facility that opened in June, with two up-to-the-minute rooms designed to agilely address the needs of producers, mixers and artists of multiple stripes. Studio A’s expansive slanted glass window blesses it with one of the best ambiences to be found anywhere in Manhattan, while Studio B is connected to a larger live room capable of recording small bands and ensembles.
Both spaces are centered around Digidesign C24 control surfaces, running off of Pro Tools HD and Mac Pro 8 cores. Monitoring is via Dynaudio, Genelec, B&W, Tannoy and/or Yamaha NS10s. A tight but tasteful complement of outboard gear is on hand, from the likes of API, Universal Audio, and Avalon, plus the additional welcome touch of in-demand hardware synths – all the better to actually make music with. Avid Mojo’s make MSR ready and willing to accommodate the video world’s audio post needs, while a service-oriented staff and approachable rates round out the appeal.
“We redesigned the place, renovated it, did everything there was to do in a very quick timeframe,” says Carter. “It was all a learning process for me, but the beauty of it was there was a lot of infrastructure already in place here.
“Choosing equipment was probably the first thing I did. You have to figure out how to pack as much stuff into a room as possible, and make it useful. The philosophy was to have as many high quality plug-ins as possible in the best Pro Tools rigs you can get, because in a small studio that’s the heart of your workflow. Our draw is not an SSL, but people will complain if you can’t load up Autotune 20 times, so for hardware we were less about effects and more about compressors, EQs, and mic pres. The C24, you can do most of your mix with the screen turned off, which is really nice – you can assign your plug-ins, assign your send, automate everything. It’s a nice compact footprint, but pretty flexible.”
The MSR concept appears to be fitting in with Manhattan recording denizens. Since opening in June, projects there have included Bad Boy Entertainment/Cassie, MTV Network Promos mixed by Pat Viala, producer George Petit for Bill Block, Jazz singer Monique DeBose, R&B/Gospel Singer Raphael Smith, and Anne Hathaway for Shakespeare In The Park.
The hip on-site synth collection, which includes a Dave Smith Prophet 8, Moog Voyager Little Phatty, Akai MPC 2000XL and EMU SP1200 (“a dinosaur”), make a subtle but important statement about how MSR intends to take the NYC studio experience to another level.
“It’s not just about having the synths, it’s the way we set them up in the rooms,” Matt Carter says. “One of the most annoying things I’ve seen at a studio is trying to set up a keyboard for ten minutes before you get a sound out of it. But our keyboards are right in the patch bay, so you can get up and running. The idea is to have these on hand so you can do what this place is suited for, which is to create.” – David Weiss
Visit Manhattan Sound Recording:
http://www.manhattansoundrecording.com
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@Msrstudios