I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's, I think we should definitely not miss the opportunity to discuss some of the rooms that you've had a hand in, in working on, because there's some pretty tasty ones. Right. I remember when I first heard about you actually was through Heather, Cadbury.

Yeah, that was

great. Yeah.

And so I checked out your website and was immediately impressed by what I learned was Martin Gore's studio. Which is, I was laughing in my own head as you were talking about minimalism at the beginning, because for anyone who hasn't seen, it's, it's almost as if the wallpaper is like modular since.

That was, it's so funny, you know, what you end up, I was a massive Depeche Mode fan growing up. I mean, I just, when Violator came out, I think I had the cassette. That's how far back that was. Yeah. I wore that thing out. I mean, I remember just, and so yeah, that's happened to me quite a bit. You know, Martin's good example, Laurie Anderson, another great example and people that I, you're an example too, you know, people, I find their music first and I love it. And I end up working with them. It's like, it's a dream really. So Martin's room was, interestingly, we did, we did no acoustic treatment in that room.

So we

didn't seem like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

We, you know, for, for studio designers to not to do a project where we have zero acoustics is probably, you know, doesn't really happen, but for

it. We definitely let it to look a lot more like you were talking about before, much more like a very welcoming and good looking room. Yeah. You know, you maintain the house that seems like the house itself had a lot of good, good bones as a

work. Yeah. Yeah. That particular, yeah. So that's an outbuilding on the property. And it's a beautiful room. And the first thing, you know, when I first went there to meet Martin and just see it was a bunch of sit modular synths in road cases stacked on top of each other and just a, you know, almost a disaster. Let's call it. Yeah. Like to kind of make things work. Like Martin had somebody, I think, working with him at the studio who could come in and like, you know, set things up. But yeah, nothing. There was no central kind of like patch bay or routing or anything. And it was just, you know, it was really a mess. Yeah. That's a great way to put it. So I would say 90% of that project was workflow design, you know, like, of course, we designed all the furniture and the all the modular synths ended up in like kind of like a book shelf kind of design, like built in cabinets around the room. Do they have custom power supplies and stuff? Yeah. Custom. Yeah. So we did. Yeah. Technical solutions in that room, you know, we built all the cabinetry, the millwork for we built custom Euro rack enclosures essentially. So we built the side rails and then the extrusion, the aluminum extrusions we ordered from the manufacturer that makes those cognitive size. Like that was a very custom, you know, the kind of infrastructure of all those synths was, you know, because there's nothing, you know, like with your, your rack set up, you know, that looks good. And you can buy cases that are or yeah, exactly.

It's more tiny compared to what we are doing. So this was, I think we at last

count, I think there were 1100 modules. Yeah. So custom power supply, custom power distribution system to all the Euro rack stuff and the five U side of the room, which is a little smaller, but still impressive, all the move and sit calm and all those. We designed a busing system because that wall is whatever 30 feet wide and you know, you don't have 30 foot wide patch cables. So like a 30 foot long patch cable. So we designed a sort of like a busing system so that wherever you are on that synth wall, you just come out of a module, plug into that busing system, then you can pick that signal up way down the line to another module. Yeah. So one of that room was like to my earlier point, if a musician has an idea, you know, when I first met Martin first, went there, he had modules, sound modules and drum machines and just boxes full of these things and boxes full of power supplies. So if you have an idea, oh, I want that module. Where's the power supply? You're digging for that thing for two hours. You know, it's like, how can we solve all of these problems? So yeah, that was a big, big technological hurdle and workflow hurdle. Yeah.

Well, other custom things were there because the tables are great and

they're all the tables. Yeah, all the racks for all the gear, all the, of course, all modular stuff around the room, all of the racks around the room are all custom. There's a workstation that was custom. These are all things we designed and built in Brooklyn and shipped out there. So

but not in the garage.

That was the last project we did in that garage. You seriously, yes, you did. It was me and I had one other guy working with me at the time. I mean, like, if you want to think of like efficiency or value that you get out of a space, I don't think we've even come close to that even now because now our space is huge, you know, and it's like we did a lot out of that little room. That was the last project we did in that room and it was definitely. Wow.

It was tricky for sure. Mine boggling. So you'd like, you'd make pieces, but obviously you'd run out of physical space in the garage and you'd have to like move them up there. Yeah.

We had to make them and then dry fit things together to make sure it works and then pretty much crate them up and, you know, put them off to the side, stack them up wherever we could. Wow. At that point, we'd bought some, I'd invested in some better tools and things like that, of course. So, you know, that part of it was a little better. But yeah, that little garage we, we definitely made use of that space for that project. Wow.

That's mind boggling. Yeah. I mean, so when was that

done then? That was in 2016. Wow. It's

that vintage now. Yeah.

Right. That's odd. That's like what,

what, seven years ago already? Yeah. Yeah, that turned out great. Yeah. I think there's a few projects that seem to, you know, get recognition. Like, you know, people are just really curious about or, you know, something interesting in that one. I think those pictures, you know, they made their rounds on all the synth forums and all the Depeche forums and all that stuff. So yeah, I think that project definitely got some attention. Yeah.

And rightfully so. It was definitely like, yeah, a wildly impressive build and the fact that it actually worked. I mean, it almost looks like when you see it, you think that they just not plugged in, you know what I mean? My first thought was like, this stuff obviously doesn't work. It's just like, he's over modular. So he's just like, I'm just going to use his wallpaper. But the fact that it actually works with custom busing on top of that. Did you have to run a lot of the cabling through underneath the floor?

No, that's all actually all the cabling is done. And through, if you look at that studio, you know, like I was saying, they're all, it looks like built in bookshelf. So all the cabling is run through cable pass throughs in the bookshelf. So it's all internal in that bookshelf. Wow.

Yeah, just brilliant. And so, but I mean, and of light, do you, you, I mean, you've kind of alluded to the fact that things aren't the same as they that are used to be. You're not in that garage anymore and you're not in New York anymore, right?

Yeah, so no, we're not. Well, some of us are. So right. Yeah, the now the shop and my office here is in Connecticut. So we're about, we're about 60 miles outside of, you know, Midtown. Takes me about an hour and 20 minutes to drive to Midtown. So yeah, the shop. So we very quickly outgrew New York City because, you know, after the garage shop, then I leased another space that was a big warehouse, but it was like a bunch of different woodworkers and cabinet makers had had different spaces in this building. Oh, yeah. So it's in that for about a year and a half. Yeah, then made the move to Connecticut. So now we have 5,000 square feet of space, brand new CNC, like motorized CNC milling, routing machine and large 10 foot sliding table saws and just, you know, a dream shop. Really like I walk in sometimes. I'm just like, I think about that old garage and,

you know, oh, yeah,

that's like, I'm pretty amazed at where we are now. Basically, the way we're configured as a business is we have, we have the shop here, my office, and then we have a shop crew who are all that work here. And then we have a site crew who, you know, and, you know, they are all based in the city. They all live in the New York city. But, you know, so if the build is in the city, it's kind of home court advantage, but we travel all over to, to do builds right now. We're in the crews down in West Palm Beach. And next year we've got California couple in New York and we just finished a project that we just finished in New York, which was, you know, that kind of project. It's tricky to do remote work, you know, like when we came down to your place, yeah, there's a lot involved, you know, the great, the logistics, the logic, like, it's, it's a, you know, it's a challenge. And of course, it adds to the cost of the building, everything. So yeah, working out those remote gigs can be sometimes a little tricky.

For sure. What's what happened with the Juilliard build?

Yeah, we're done. We're done and out and it's very successful. And we're very, very, very proud of that project. So I mean, yeah, I've got to know about that. So there's another example of like relationships and how, you know, in whatever you do, it's the key. So a friend of mine knew one, a couple of the engineers, I think, that worked at the Juilliard School. The school got a Bloomberg grant to renovate the recording studios because they, the recording studio, they've redone most of the like the concert halls in that in the school, but the recording studio was still original from when the building was built in 1969. And it was, you know, probably amazing in 1969. But for today's standards, it was, yeah, it wasn't great. So there was a pretty extensive proposal project. We got an RFP, I think, maybe October of 2022 and went through the process of submitting a proposal meeting with them. And I think there were four or five other studio designers that were up for the same project. And then it was like late November last year. We found out that we, yeah, they, they picked us. We were stoked. That was like, yeah, we really wanted that project. And it was really, it was challenging from not just an acoustic perspective, but from a construction admin perspective too. So we, of course, so basically two rooms. It's a small, fairly small control room. It's about 11 by 20. With 13 foot high ceiling, the live room is great. It's about 30 by 40 with 26 foot ceiling to the show. Oh, yeah. It's a, it's a big space. Like in New York, you never get to build, you almost never get to build a proper live room. You know, there's

just not, there's not a city in the city.

So yeah, we, we had a very tight schedule for the build because it basically had to happen over the summer when school was out and there were no students in the building. So we spent about six months on design. We have got all of our design work done. And so we had a lot of work to do on the acoustics, like the acoustics were really bad. And so this was a project where we had, we had our three kind of parameters that we like to include, which is acoustics, aesthetic and workflow. But then the fourth parameter for this project was, as I mentioned, the construction administration because yeah, a project of that scale in New York City. Yeah. So yeah, that, that was, um, let's see, we, we designed it so that we actually just got photos taken of it. I'll share them with you and there they'll be on our website. We're actually redoing our website now. It's done. We just need to go and launch it. But the, the approach to the project was really, you know, we, we wanted to obviously just make as big a splash as we could, you know, it was like, how can we in the time that we have and the budget that we have, how can we move the needle as much as possible? Yeah. And so what we, and this had to be like, there was like asbestos, uh, remediation that had to be done. And there, you know, all the HVAC ductwork was redesigned for high volume, low speed, really quiet. Um, so it was a lot of work and we essentially for the acoustics, we, for the live room, because it's such a big space. We had so little time. So we developed a diffusion. We called it a scatter system. We developed this system that was designed to be made, uh, on our CNC machine. So it's essentially like you throw a sheet of wood on the machine, you hit go and this, you know, the machine can run and just make all these cuts perfectly. So it's kind of like a, you know, the, the live room acoustic treatment was really at the end of the day, became jigsaw puzzle, but more like, uh, yeah, something that just went together fairly easily in the field and was installed fairly easily. It's pretty impressive to look at that space and it's very visually dynamic. It sounds fantastic. The live room is big and, but it sounds the scatter system was designed to, uh, essentially add a lot of density, uh, and randomize the reflections in the space so that you get this really dense, but short. Reverb character with a, with a short decay, but it, you know, the thing about the project that looks the most amazing visually was actually went together. That was like the easiest part of the project. Um, so that was a, it was a win in, in the acoustics and, uh, in the, the, um, the project overall. So we delivered it September 29th. We were done and, um, yeah, we've been, been back just doing a couple of little, you know, punch list things here and there, but yeah, it's done. And, uh, it's great. The control room sounds fantastic. They got a new lava console for the control room. Um, Matt, Marylle, who, you know, from coral sound, he did all the equipment wiring integration and everything.

It's fantastic.

Yeah. And I think the biggest thing, the control room to the live room, there was this tiny little window originally in the corner of the room is made no sense. Really. And the console was in the middle of the room. You had no line of sight to the live room. So we, we hired a structural engineer because it's like double concrete block walls between the room. So hired a structural engineer to, to design a lentil system because I wanted to open up. A huge, I wanted that. Yeah. I could have put a big window there, like, cause the live room looks fantastic. And, and that control room is fairly small, you know, so this is part of the thing about aesthetics and, and feeling comfortable in a space like that small, relatively small control room. Now you have this huge nine foot by six foot window that looks into the live room. It completely changes the feel of that control room. Uh, makes it feel open instead of claustrophobic. And yeah, the acoustic, the scatter system, we actually designed a section of it that slide, this huge section that slides open so you can get to these double doors that go to the freight elevator. You know, there were, there were, of course, some really cool details in that, but, um, yeah, it sounds great. It looks great. The school's stoked. Everybody's happy.

Oh, well, congrats, man. That's, I can't even imagine the sleep. This nice, I went into that.

But, uh, honey loads. Oh, yeah.

Uh, but I mean, what's making me really happy is just like students leaving for summer. And then this sort of coming back and just being like, what?

Yeah,

make over style.

There's this. It's such a cool, like, the end of the day, what I really love about what we do is, you know, there's, of course, a lot of that I love, but it was so cool to be in that. Building, right? And walk around and you just walk down some hall and there'll be some door with a window and it's a practice room and you'll just see some young person in there just hammering away over and over. Like I sat and watched this, this person through the window of the door once and they were just trying the same piano line over and over and over and over and over until they, it was like, yeah, just the. I'd say like the dedication and the passion of the musicians that go through there. Totally. It's just incredible. It was really inspiring. Yeah.

And now, you know, the recordings and all of the, I mean, you know, it's like that thing where people are like, you can learn to play on a really shitty instrument. But in a way, if you do have access to a certain kind of quality. Relatively early on, you can like kind of expand so much more because you kind of like learn the nuances. All of a sudden, you're not just trying to make a sound. You're looking for nuance tone, you know, and you can only really do that if the instrument allows it. Same for recording, you know, there's a certain wall you hit, you know, with some limitations of like, you know,

yep. 100% and yeah, the instrument, you know, the room is also an instrument or it. Yeah, not an instrument, but it does. An instrument will sound better in a, you know, it can sound better in the right space. So yeah, I learned. Yeah, your point is spot on because I, you know, when I was coming up, making records and, you know, working in my. Bedroom at first and then, you know, a little project studios and then I, you know, I was like, what this, you know, doesn't sound in whatever it's weird and everything. You know, and then I started, got the position at Avatar Studios in New York and. Yeah, I was like, all of a sudden, my recordings were sounding just, you know, like 10 times better than they did the day before. Yeah. And it's, you know, those rooms and the gear, it's all that stuff that just takes you

to that next level. It is. I mean, you know, you can't, especially the room. I mean, especially the, I mean, I always think that now the only thing I really will pay for to sort of get out of the home studios. Obviously the home studios have become so powerful. The tools we have to see if in a computer, a wild, just like unthinkable, you know, even from a few years back. But you can't, you know, you can't get a drum sound. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you can use samples, sure, but you can't, if you really want to like play it and get that sound, you have to pay to get the room. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's wonderful when you do. I mean, you kind of like it is a lot of money, usually, but it's money well spent, I think, just to even, I think anyone who can think about maybe putting the money into trying to like experiment with that or, you know, it's, it's really worth it, isn't it? Because you just sort

of think, oh, man, like, I mean, it can be, it can kind of like shattering in a way because you're like, oh, if only I had that. Yeah. Yeah. It's cruel in a way. It's just slippery slope because you got to leave at the end of the day, to this great room. And yeah, I mean, so, yeah, from my days of making records, that was one thing we'd always go even when I had my own studios, you know, you book a, you book your drum dates at a big studio because it's just the value. Yeah.

You could do a whole record in that. Yeah.

You, you, you know, it's those good, those rooms that are really good, like Avatar had two rooms that were phenomenal. A and C, just amazing live rooms. You stick a mic anywhere. It sounds good, you know, without a lot of work, you can get a great recording. Yeah. Good room tone. And yeah, that, that, that,

that goes a long way. I mean, I was, oh, my, that happened to me recently because I went to RCIA here in town. I don't know if you've been in there. No, I haven't. Oh, man, it's just, you just know, right? When you walk in, we've worked in a few rooms. You just, just in one, a few seconds, you can just know. I mean, that room is one of those where it's just like, oh, man.

Yeah, that's special. This room is crazy. Yeah.

It's, yeah, you know, right away. I've, the way that I've, because of what I've been doing and my ear hearing rooms, you know, that, that's what we do. And yeah, you know, you know, right away, when you walk into a room, how it's, how you have a good sense of how it's going to sound to a microphone, you know, because that microphones differently than our ears, of course. So, yeah,

you can, you can tell right away when you're in a nice space. You know, one of the things that's so good. And it seems like you got that, the Juilliard. The RCA has wildly high ceilings and it has actually this system of like kind of curved, big, kind of curved sections, almost like tube traps, I suppose, but just along the entire length of the wall. You know, so that the wall is not flat. This is if the entire wall is concave in some way, a convex concave.

So concave probably convex concave is tricky and acoustics. You see this in rooms a lot. You'll see like a concave shape or a inverted pyramid shape or something, which is actually not, it's concave is the worst because it tends to not tends to what it does is it focuses kind of like a satellite, you know, how satellite.

Like a parabolic mirror.

Yeah, it focuses all that information to that little piece sticking back at it. So a concave shape. If you have a sound that hits it directly, it'll kind of focus and go back to the same point. Like if your source is at that same point, you could probably get something kind of cool sounding if you were going for effect, but it could have some artifact that's, that's, you know, not desired as well.