The Studio

The studio is situated on 16+ acres of beautiful pastoral land that is half forest and half meadow, with ponds, nature trails, and a variety of gardens throughout. Designed by Wes Lachot, the buildings exemplify Frank Lloyd Wright's most ambitious goal: Organic Architecture. In this design, which you will see and feel from the moment you enter the environment, form and function are not only one, but were conceived and grew as one, naturally, to full maturity.

Using Nature as our basis for design, a building or design must grow, as Nature grows, from the inside out. Most architects design their buildings as a shell and force their way inside. Nature grows from the idea of a seed and reaches out to its surroundings. A building thus, is akin to an organism and mirrors the beauty and complexity of Nature.

— Eric Corey Freed, What Is Organic Architecture?

The Rooms

At the center of the studio is the Music Room, an architectural tour de force and an acoustic masterpiece. Designed for performance and built as one would craft a fine instrument, the Music Room seems to anticipate and the respond to the sounds played within it. The 1380 sq ft area is large enough to comfortably seat 35 musicians, yet compact enough to reinforce, rather than overwhelm, a solo voice. The 24 foot ceiling is properly scaled for developing the full harmonic range of any musical instrument or ensemble, especially the studio's own Yamaha CF-9 concert grand piano. 23 adjustable acoustic panels can tune the room's RT60 (reverb decay time) from half a second to one full second of harmonically optimized reverberation. Additional gobos can be rolled in to cut reverb time even further without losing the acoustic benefits of its 32,000 cu ft volume. For those who want the sound of a real room, this is a real room!

Equally impressive is the Control Room, designed to be as accurate as the Music Room is fantastic. The Control Room is optimized for stereo mixing and surround formats including 2.1, 5.1, and 7.1. The RFZ (reflection free zone) design is enhanced by a dual symmetric QRD (quadratic residue diffusor) on the rear wall, extending the useful diffusion range (and thus acoustic accuracy) by an additional octave compared with conventional planar designs. The 22.6' room depth and 15' peak ceiling height ensure accurate frequency and impulse response for all supported mixing formats, again across the entire musical spectrum. Translation: accurate monitors will be accurate, without fighting room modes or artifacts. As of April 2008, we plan to track and mix with a 48-channel Solid State Logic Duality console. Multiple digital environments can be integrated in their native format and workstation environment using the amazing 1536x1536 Harrison X-router, with its industry-standard MADI I/O interfaces.

Extending from the North side of the Music Room are three multi-function booths: A, B, and C. Booths A and B have outstanding visual connection to the Music Room, the Control Room, and to each other. In fact, architecturally the two booths are built as if they are two halves of a larger (490 sq ft) LEDE (live-end/dead-end) room, with Booth A being the live end and Booth B being the dead end. A 7' sliding glass door provides variable isolation from none at all (open) to an STC of 51 (when closed). Booth C is primarily a media creation and edit suite for video and graphics. The room is visually treated (85% grey colored walls and desks, special lighting) for color-critical video work. It is also acoustically treated so it can be used as an isolation booth for recording instrument amplifiers that are not compatible with uses of other rooms during the session.

Protecting each side of the Control Room are Sound Locks 1 and 2, both of which have excellent visual connectivity with the Music Room and especially the Control Room. A sizable 135 sq ft each, they are large enough for recording vocals, overdubs, and even re-amping applications. Their 7' ceiling height and highly absorbent acoustic characteristics also makes them good for broadcast or voiceover work that benefits from a more intimate environment.

Because the facility is designed as a single studio environment (albeit a highly flexible environment suitable for handling highly complex projects), all studio rooms have a common audio and video signal interfaces and interface panels providing:

  • 4-16 XLR analog audio inputs
  • 4 XLR analog audio outputs
  • 8 analog audio tie lines
  • 8 AES/EBU inputs and outputs
  • MADI I/O (32 channels each direction at 96kHz, except in Music Room)
  • 8 Analog Video Tie lines
  • 1-3 SMPTE 311M Video Fiber connections
  • Work clock (configurable as audio, video ref, or house black)
  • 1-4 Aviom personal mixing ports
  • 4 CAT6 (1 Gb) Ethernet (CAT5 compatible)
  • 4 Fiber 10GigE Ethernet
  • Dual-link DVI Video I/O

This makes it easy to capture, route, and monitor the full range of audio and video formats regardless of what room is in use for what purpose in the context of the project. With three such panels in the music room, there are plenty of connections, plenty convenient to any playing position.

The Green Room and Beyond

When you are ready for a break, you can head West to a large glass Loggia that transitions to the 1400 sq ft outdoor Patio, beyond which the meadow, forests, and ponds await. Or, exit via Sound Lock 2 and walk across the 1000 sq ft paved walkway/patio to enjoy the comfortable lounge/green room (with private bathroom). Either way you go, you will appreciate the organic harmony of the studio and its surroundings.

Up the hill lies the Windsong Bed, Breakfast, and Retreat Center. Windsong features a beautiful Meadow Room (34'x36' floating plywood floor, 1,224 sq ft, 50 people max capacity), a rustic Sun Room with an adjoining and equally large and rustic sun deck (16'x48' total, ~700 sq ft usable), a kitchen, three additional "living rooms", and three upstairs bedrooms, the largest of which is configured to sleep 6 in bunk beds (or 8 in a pinch). Windsong can be booked through the studio to provide additional facilities for workshops, catering, client accomodations, or it can provide additional services and amenities to further enhance the studio experience: Yoga classes, meditation rooms, holistic health therapy, etc.