Thomas MacMIllan Photo
More and more recording studios may be shutting their doors, but Nick Lloyd is about to open a new one.
Just last week, the news broke that the iconic Abbey Road Studios is up for sale. Even the legendary home of the Beatles can’t compete with the changing dynamics of music creation and consumption, which make it harder and harder for studios to break even.
Meanwhile Lloyd, who runs the Firehouse 12 recording studio on New Haven’s Crown Street, is gearing up to open a second studio. The as-yet-unnamed space is being designed for no-frills, rough-and-ready recording. At the new Firehouse 12 spin-off, bands will be able to record for less money than they would spend at the state-of-the art main studio, which is about four years old.
The main Firehouse 12 recording studio on Crown Street is also a performance space. It’s above a bar of the same name and below the apartment where Lloyd lives with his wife, painter Megan Craig. The main studio will remain on Crown Street. Lloyd plans to add an auxiliary studio right across the train tracks on Union Street.
Right now the new space is a big empty warehouse sandwiched between an electrical contractor and an electrical parts supplier. The City Plan Commission approved the creation of music studio there at its meeting last week, with the condition that Lloyd find a certified sound engineer to sign off on the plans.
Lloyd gave a tour of the space the other day and shared his vision for the new location. He said he expects to spend $300,000 to $400,000 converting the warehouse, a job that will take about six months. The warehouse will house the offices of the Firehouse 12 record label and a painting studio for Craig. She currently has a studio at Erector Square, where she roasts in the summers and freezes in the winters.
The new space will also hold a large music studio, which is yet to be built. It will be very basic, Lloyd said, “a big raw space” for making music in. He anticipates using it as rehearsal space for the several bands that he plays with — like The Wagon Riders and Liquor Cake —and renting it out for other bands to do the same.
It will also be for recording. The goal is to have a place to record music inexpensively, to get “the most bang for the buck,” Lloyd said. The space will have a “rawer feeling… Not as precious as the firehouse feels.”
Firehouse 12 is a multimillion-dollar recording studio, with high-end digital recording equipment as well as increasingly rare analog recording capability.
“It’s an amazing place to work in,” Lloyd said. But it’s not for everyone.
More and more, bands are unwilling to spend thousands of dollars in expensive studio time, when they can get an adequate recording with consumer technology set up in a quiet room in their house, Lloyd said. For instance, Bon Iver’s hit 2008 album was recorded by one guy on a laptop in a Wisconsin cabin.
The recent shift in record creation has coincided with a shift in musical consumption. With the advent of digital music and widespread file sharing, and faced with an increase of DIY recording, the music industry is collapsing and recording studios are folding. These days, “a really nice analog recording studio” like Firehouse 12 is “almost like a dinosaur,” Lloyd said. Firehouse 12 is like studios were in the 1970s, he said.
Firehouse 12 has been able to weather the storm in the music industry partly because it’s supported by multiple revenue streams, Lloyd said. In addition to the recording studio, there’s a bar, a record label, and a performance space.
The new studio will add another component and will allow Lloyd to record bands even if they aren’t ready to spend $85 an hour. It will be a different type of recording session, “more seat of your pants, which I love,” Lloyd said. It will be a return to the way Lloyd started recording.
Lloyd came to New Haven as a Yale undergraduate music student. He continued as a graduate student in music theory. In 2001 he bought the crumbling old Crown fire station from the city; by 2005 he had transformed it into a bar, recording studio, record label headquarters, performance space, and apartment that’s earned national attention.
“I really like New Haven,” he said.
Lloyd said he plans to begin transforming the Union Street warehouse next week.
