They can show you what the red button does: Gordon Davies and Marc Fuller. Photo: Josh Potter

Signal Flow

Recording duo use a bucolic studio for conservatory courses in audio engineering

By Josh Potter

If you didn’t know what you were looking for, it would be easy to mistake the Edie Road recording studio for just another dairy barn out in the woods and fields of Argyle. From the outside, there’s little indication that the modest structure houses anything other than cows and hay, never mind the equipment used to record a Grammy-nominated hip-hop album.

“It’s kind of funny to think that Kanye West was sleeping on the floor on a futon mattress right over there in the corner,” says studio owner and engineer Marc Fuller. “He’s a cool guy and it was a fun session.”

West used the facility to track the 23-piece Harlem Boys Choir, who had a summer residency in Saratoga Springs, for his debut album The College Dropout. The album went triple platinum. To Fuller, though, the story is only one of many dating back to the early ’90s—when he started at the studio, then called Sweetfish, as a high-school intern—through his purchase of the facility, to this year, when he and longtime production collaborator Gordon Davies plan to open a one-of-a-kind conservatory program for aspiring recording engineers.

On a cold afternoon in December, after a massive ice storm had crippled the area and left the studio without power for days, the story Davies and Fuller are most anxious to tell is the one of their most recent session. Davies had brought a band of friends, the Steamers, up to the studio so that he could refamiliarize himself with the recording console in preparation for the conservatory classes. What he got was a lesson of his own. For two days they tried to power the studio on a gas generator, but it wouldn’t give them enough juice to run all the gear.

“We couldn’t run the water pump if we were running the studio,” says Fuller, “so if you had to use the bathroom, we’d have to take a break, turn off the studio and turn the pump on.”

“The National Grid trucks were driving by, working on the power, and we were in here with our candles. But it was a great session,” says Davies.

The anecdote stands as an extreme potentiality for a quality the studio has long prided itself on: the creative ambiance that rural isolation can generate. With a second-floor apartment, built to accommodate sequestered musicians, the studio offers its services to urban artists who may not have the luxury of silence and solitude.

“At a studio in the city, you’re in a room recording and then you take a break, walk out into the street, and your senses are assaulted,” says Davies, who’s spent 20 years as a freelance audio engineer in the New York City area, where he makes his home. “You come up here and it’s very creative. You can be upstairs hanging out half of the day and when creativity strikes you, you can just walk downstairs, plug in and start recording.”

Davies has been bringing projects to the studio since the early ’90s, so when Fuller called him up one day to pitch the idea of the recording conservatory, Davies didn’t hesitate.

“I had always thought about how it would be possible for me to implement my own audio program,” Davies says, “but it always came down to needing a studio.” Now, with the resources in place, Davies has customized a course offering that draws from his experience working at the Omega Recording Studios in Washington, D.C. (a large commercial studio licensed through the University of Maryland), and allows room for instructors to teach from what they know—namely, the many “stories from the trenches” that both engineers eagerly offer up.

With the commercial music industry in free-fall, the timing of such a venture may sound peculiar. Not so, says Davies. When he left Omega, enrollment was up, but few students aspired to the conventional industry course of taking an internship at a commercial studio, climbing the ranks, and eventually going freelance.

Davies explains, “We’re gearing our program toward people who are going to be buying the gear and want to start a home studio, or musicians who want to work at home and have bought the gear but don’t know how to use it.” Just as file sharing and bit torrent has revolutionized the way music is distributed, affordable home recording equipment is busy turning every sap with a laptop into a producer. While many in the industry bemoan this sort of populism, Fuller and Davies are taking it in stride.

“So many people are doing home recordings now,” Fuller says, “but they’re not necessarily getting the best sounds.”

“Just because you’ve bought Pro Tools doesn’t mean you know the right way to use equalization, compression, etc.,” says Davies, referring to the industry-standard digital-recording software. The aim of the course, then, is to use the setting of a professional studio to teach students the foundational principles of audio engineering so that they can then apply this information to their home setup.

The first of the program’s weeklong sessions will cover the hardware that engineers at any level will encounter, including microphones, consoles, signal-processing technology, EQ and compression. The second week is an in-depth Pro Tools tutorial. The third week covers niche skills like jingle recording, commercial production, surround sound, and audio for film and TV production. In the fourth and final week, the group will have a professional band on hand for students to practice recording, overdubs, mixing and mastering. Each Saturday the studio will have an open lab for students to practice their skills.

For now, each day of the program is broken into three four-hour slots to accommodate students who also work day jobs, but Fuller and Davies look forward to a time when they can offer more intensive, specialized classes.

“We just want to get this one up and running first,” says Fuller, “before we put the dorms up.”

Davies echoes this modest goal. In light of the subpar recording quality he’s heard in music lately, he says, “I’m hoping to see if we can bring the bar up a little bit.”

The Edie Road conservatory program begins in March. For more info, call 692-2822, or e-mail info@edieroad.com.