Across the Board

Friday, Jul 22, 2005

By Lawrence Specker
Entertainment Reporter
Mobile Register

Survey the state of recording studios nationwide and you hear a lot of doom and gloom from an industry hammered by changing times.

But focus in on the recording industry in south Alabama, and you find seemingly boundless enthusiasm.

Somebody's got to be wrong. And you have to suspect that the ones getting it right are the ones talking about how much fun they're having. That would be the local guys.

Consider four small to midsize professional studios in the area: Nomad Productions and Tracks in the Sand in Baldwin County; Dogwood Productions and Jada Entertainment in Mobile.

On the surface, there aren't many similarities. Two are brand-new enterprises, while the other two have been in business for more than 20 years. For some, the dream of scoring a national hit record is balanced by bread-and-butter commercial work; for others, it's all about the music.

The people behind them are an eclectic bunch. Some come from engineering backgrounds, some are musicians themselves, some are more familiar with marketing and sales. Their goals vary, as do their yardsticks for measuring success.

And yet, all see themselves as being in the right business in the right time and the right place.

Forty years ago, the Muscle Shoals area in northwest Alabama became a foundry where countless gold records were minted. If local studio owners' wildest dreams come true, the same thing could happen here.

"We think the Mobile-Baldwin-Pensacola area has as much potential now as Muscle Shoals did 30 years ago," said Lance Moore, one of four childhood friends who own the Tracks in the Sand studio.

The new guys

Moore and his partners, Butch Hedgepath, Eddie Moore and Jeff White, are optimistic new arrivals in a field that has seen its share of turmoil in recent years. So is Tony Cooper, founder of Jada Entertainment in Mobile.

Many big-league studios have fallen on tough times; some have closed. One reason is that the major record labels they serve have been buffeted by file-sharing and a broad sales downturn. The Internet has changed the way music is promoted, disseminated and sold.

Another is that there's been a technological revolution. Thanks to rapidly improving home-computer technology, setting up a studio no longer requires hundreds of thousands of dollars of specialized equipment. With software such as ProTools, it's possible to record a studio-quality album in your bedroom -- though much depends on the user's skill.

In light of these trends, it takes a certain amount of faith to invest in a new bricks-and-mortar establishment. Yet, invest they have.

The Tracks in the Sand quartet, who call themselves Four Old Guys, bought the recording equipment at the heart of a Nashville studio and moved it to a site along Highway 98 near Weeks Bay.

Jada's Cooper, as described in a story in Sunday's Register, has put hundreds of thousands of dollars into an impressively designed facility along Dauphin Street in downtown Mobile.

Tracks in the Sand has a homey feel, with lots of wood in its spacious main room, an arched doorway leading into the control area and a pastoral view out the back windows. Jada, by comparison, is sleek, new and elegantly appointed.

Both studios are the work of people willing to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. But why?

"This is kind of a dream we've had over the years," Hedgepath said. "Our major objective is supporting the local scene."

He and his friends started out as aspiring musicians, playing in bands such as the Myrtle Street Gang when they were in the Fairhope High School class of '75. Lance Moore, now a pastor, once played guitar for Mobile band Gypsy; Eddie Moore, his cousin, played in Gypsy, Slow Moses and other well-regarded local groups.

So far, they say, they're on track. They recently released an album by Vic Saul and Lisa Christian, and they're recording one by The Beat Daddys. The biggest surprise so far, they say, is that while local acts haven't always taken them seriously, they've drawn work from Nashville- and New Orleans-based artists.

Across the Bay, Cooper said he shared the desire to help realize the potential of the "chaotic pool of talent" in the area.

"I had this sort of epiphany," he said. "Maybe the music industry could be a big industry in Alabama." Maybe it could help fuel downtown redevelopment, too.

As for being daunted by the industry's troubles, the two outfits have different approaches. At Tracks in the Sand, it's simply to keep a level head about expectations.

The four partners have day jobs; no one's staking his livelihood on the venture.

"We consider it a success if it pays the bills every month" and stays fun, said Hedgepath. "We feel like there's enough business to pay our overhead. And our overhead is low."

Cooper, meanwhile, has his sights set on the brass ring.

"Our goal is to get one or two famous artists out of this area in the next year or two," he said. "Can we create a buzz? Can we build it and they will come? That's the approach I'm taking."

Jada's studio is merely one component of a growing web of ventures. A publishing company is in the formative stages. And Herd Records, founded by Cooper and Angela Prince, is gearing up to promote the first album by its first artist, Marieo "Multi" Parrish.

Parrish was arguably the most impressive performer at the first "Shooting Star" competition, a 2004 event sponsored in part by Clear Channel, where Prince works, and organized by her. This year, she became the head of the label that signed him.

She said Clear Channel is aware of the arrangement, and that it doesn't mean "Shooting Star" is a private talent search staged for Herd's benefit. She and Cooper stressed that Herd intends to focus on a very small number of artists, and currently has just two acts on its roster.

"We're not trying to conquer the world," she said.

Cooper said that Herd's activities are a small part of what goes on at Jada, and that he sees the studio as a physical resource that can help focus local creativity.

"We have a studio, but that's just a draw," Cooper said. "It's not a dating service for musicians, but it's a place where they can come together."

Cooper, whose business background is in real estate, said the turmoil in the music industry only made the field more attractive to him.

"That tells me the market is changing," he said. "The playing field is becoming level. What we have to do is learn what the new rules are."

In a meeting room he keeps a United States map with his battle plan drawn on it. Stage One means pushing artists to prominence in the central Gulf Coast. Stage Two encompasses Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and the Florida panhandle.

It's like an election, Cooper reasoned. Win a big enough chunk of the country, and you win the country.

"It's going to take a lot of work from a lot of people," he said of the campaign to make Multi a nationally known star. "He's going to be successful as long as we don't quit."

The old guard

Dreams will get you started, but it takes more to hang in there for 20 years, as some local studios have done. A big part of what it takes is flexibility, it seems.

"This is a very strange time," said Barry Little, owner of Daphne-based Nomad Productions. "It's vague, what a studio is."

The common image of studios is simple: a singer or a band at work in an equipment-strewn room, with a producer or engineer manipulating the sound at a massive control board in a nearby glassed-in booth.

As it turns out, that's only a part of what studios do these days. For some, it's a small part, as they branch out into other businesses to keep the bills paid.

Nomad got its name because all its equipment originally was based in a van. Little's early specialty was recording live productions on-site: Mobile Symphony Orchestra shows at the Saenger Theatre, for example, or church choirs in their churches.

That's still a big part of what Little does, though for about 10 years he has had a bricks-and-mortar location where he can record bands. On-site work is a niche where he has established his expertise and reliability. Jobs frequently take him as far away as Montgomery.

"I recorded Yo-Yo Ma," he said of the celebrated cellist's appearance earlier this year with the symphony. "Can you believe that?"

He's also developed an affinity for spoken-word recording, founding the Gulf Coast Storytelling nonprofit organization and serving as business manager for Wanda Johnson, a local storyteller. Nomad also designs, develops and runs Web sites for outside clients, a common sideline for music studios.

At Dogwood Studios, a larger operation in Mobile, the theme of diversification is carried to greater lengths.

Audio Director Ray Norman and Audio Engineer Ray Farnell said that at any given time they are working on several music albums, as many as a dozen in a year. But the bulk of their work is commercial, coming in the form of "a lot of things people don't think about."

There are radio commercials and the audio components for TV commercials. There are forensic jobs, cleaning up such things as tapes of phone conversations being used in court cases.

They've found a lucrative niche in "message-on-hold" work, packaging advertising and other content that people get to listen to when they've been put on hold. Another sideline is private archival work -- for example, taking taped "letters home" that someone's father recorded while in Vietnam, cleaning them up, and transferring the contents to CD.

In the bigger picture, Dogwood is a part of The OneGroup, an operation whose branches include video work, photography, marketing and design. Principal owner Tad Denson calls it a "creative production community."

"We made a logical decision not to so get tied into the music racket," said Denson.

"We jumped off really early into jingles," he said, adding that commercials are a great line of work "if you want to get paid well for what you do today."

Not that Denson hasn't had his brushes with fame. Years ago, he was part of a group of songwriters (including Tracks in the Sand's Jeff White) who hired a couple of local singers, one man and one woman, to record the demos they sent to Nashville.

They were excited when parties in Nashville got interested in the demos, particularly the ones recorded by the female vocalist. But as it turned out, they were more interested in the demo singer than in the songs.

Her name was Shelby Lynne. Pretty soon, she was recording a successful duet with George Jones, the start of a Grammy-winning career. Dogwood didn't get to come along for the ride.

That's not necessarily the reason Denson opted not to bet the farm on music, but it does illustrate the kind of risks involved.

"That area of the business isn't what we built for," he said. As a result, he's pleased to say, his operation has been profitable since 1980.

Is it possible that Tracks in the Sand and Jada will have to follow the same path as Dogwood and Nomad, balancing the excitement of the music business with the day-to-day routine of commercial work?

"Historically that's what always happens in Mobile," said Little.

Time will tell. Cooper and the Tracks in the Sand crew both said they're not necessarily opposed.

"We're open to that," said Lance Moore. "We're more into music, but we'll do anything that comes along."

Gearheads

"You can go in there," said Norman, gesturing at the isolation booth where vocals are recorded, "and listen to the way it sounds. Then you can come out here, and listen to the way it sounds. There's a difference. What's the difference? The electronics are the difference."

Part of the studio challenge is making that difference work for you, rather than against you. The skills and talents required to do so are arguably traditional studios' hole card in an era of rapid technological change.

"It's an expertise thing," said Little. "It's not a gear thing anymore. Everybody has the same gear at home."

"The theme is that there's more done at home," he said. "But I get a lot of those projects."

Artists who invest enough time in learning the ropes can produce impressive albums on their own, the engineers agreed. But they said they see many cases where people record their basic tracks at home, then turn to the experts for the more complicated steps of mixing and mastering, which blend the separate tracks into a cohesive final product.

"It's like when I was into photography," said Norman. "'How come my stuff never looks as good as what's in the magazines?'"

"When people explain what they want, you have to interpret that into the equipment, the electronics," said Little. "I'm part of the equipment."

The equipment itself has changed, of course. All the studios use ProTools, which has become the industry standard recording software. All-digital setups, in which music is recorded on hard drives, are the norm -- but analog equipment hasn't entirely given up the ghost.

Tracks in the Sand uses a late '70s or early '80s-vintage Triton mixing console. The studio has a digital storage array, but also proudly boasts a 2-inch analog tape machine.

It's a storied but uncertain medium. In recent years the very supply of blank tape has been in doubt. A reel that might hold 15 or 30 minutes of music, depending on tape speed, can set you back $100 to $200.

Curiously, the biggest champion of analog recording is the youngest person in the room, 19-year-old engineer Hunter Baldwin.

"Analog sounds a whole lot better than digital," he said. "We have a lot of people inquire" about using the machine.

Over at Dogwood, a 1-inch tape machine sits in a corner. Denson calls it "a $25,000 coffee table." The studio gets more use out of its quarter-inch tape unit, but mainly to transfer old tape recordings to more durable CDs.

Aside from the gear inside, there are the buildings themselves. And they reflect optimism across the board.

Nomad is the smallest operation of the four, but Little is in the process of expanding his facility, located in a strip of offices and shops. Tracks in the Sand occupies about 3,200 square feet of freshly remodeled space.

Jada and Dogwood are easily twice that size, if you include an undeveloped industrial garage-type space at each. Both envision using that space for halls and stages big enough to record high-school bands or large choruses.

In short, all are building for good things to come.

Getting together

"This is not a recording Mecca," said Little. "People don't come to Mobile or Daphne to record."

Little let the reality check hang in the air for a moment, then added: "I think that is changing."

"Our area is different from the industry," he said.

"I think we're on a big boom here," he said. "I think we're primed for an area-wide recording association."

Already, a certain amount of cooperation and consultation goes on. Nomad and Tracks in the Sand have discussed sharing equipment and facilities. Cooper and Denson describe themselves as good friends.

To some extent, all seem to agree that having a variety of studios in the area, each with its own special areas of expertise, helps bolster the area's overall reputation as a good place to record. Ambition, at least so far, doesn't seem to have translated into cutthroat competition.

"Together you're stronger than by yourself," said Cooper.

"There's no sense beating somebody up for 100 percent of the business," said Denson. "It isn't going to happen."

Whether or not the boom comes, all seem to agree, you can measure your success by how enjoyable the work is.

"I'm in this business for fun and profit. Not necessarily in that order, but they've both got to be there," said Little. "I'm making a living, not a killing."

Most people can't make a living at recording, he said, and have to augment it with a day job. He's thrilled to be in it full-time.

Norman, too, said he's pleased to have people ask him what he does when he's not in the studio. "I go, 'This is my day job!'," he said.

For new and old studios alike, a big part of the game is keeping up with new opportunities and deciding which they want to chase.

"I thought real estate was complicated," said Cooper, of the rapidly expanding sphere of activities around Jada.

"I just thought I would start out with this little studio and just work with people," he said. "Once you get started, you find all these opportunities."

It's a long stretch to go from Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung to the local record industry. But an aphorism attributed to Mao easily could be their unofficial motto: "There is great disorder under heaven. The situation is excellent."

There's no guarantee the area's potential will ever give birth to the kind of recording boom that drew a steady stream of superstars to Muscle Shoals in the '60s and '70s. But, if entrepreneurs like Cooper and Hedgepath are to be believed, changing times have brought the gold close to the surface.

"Mobile is a great place to do this," said Cooper.

"Why not here?" said Hedgepath.

©2005 The Mobile Register