Studio Profile: Orchard Sound

Orchard Sound is kind of the ultimate garage studio. It should bring comfort to all of you who are scraping by and making do with less than the glitziest, most expensive, most polished and most hip. Aside from the fact the studio really is, uh, a garage, the whole setup is definitely, er, unpretentious. We all get so hung up on having to have really cool gear and really cool acoustics and really cool ambience that it's really startling and refreshing to run across a successful operation that violates the "really cool" code every which way. Makes ya' humble.

Is it really so successful, you ask? How can a 24-track studio that charges less than $50 an hour and is booked maybe six days a month be successful? A studio with ancient analog pieces, marginal acoustics and monitoring, and an acoustic room with about 12 dB isolation from the outside world, on the landing path for a major airport, where the drummer shares space with a ride-on mower, a BMW motorcycle and a Volvo? How can this be?

Personally, I've always kind of enjoyed contrarian alternatives. Back when I hung out with racing car guys, I used to really get a kick out of the home-built race cars that managed to challenge and sometimes even beat the multi-million dollar factory teams with their brute-force resources and emphasis on polish. Similarly, I've always preferred the resynthesis kind of approach to engineering and problem-solving that suggests: "You may just be looking at the problem the wrong way, or else simply looking at the wrong problem."

In the case of Orchard Sound, when I asked Scott Hull, the owner, what his dream was, he said, "I'm doing it!" It's worth thinking about. Read on.

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