Sweetwater Studios has attracted Anthrax, Robben Ford, Eric Johnson, and Jordan Rudess – just in the last year. Can you talk about the big picture in Fort Wayne and what is driving this?
I think Sweetwater, as well as Chuck and Lisa Surack personally, are the driving force behind all of it. I came to Sweetwater as a visitor in 1998 while I was living in Nashville at the time, and honestly there wasn't a lot going on in Fort Wayne. When I visited, I was driving around wondering, "What do people do here?" Of course that has all changed now.
What was the main industry back then?
It was kind of a fall-out industry town, so you had all these old abandoned factories. Downtown, there's a 300-acre GE plant that has been abandoned for years. Manufacturing was a huge thing here up until the '80s, and eventually they closed it all down. So much of the area became depressed through the '80s and the early '90s, and then it started to come back. Now the GE campus is being repurposed into living, retail, and green community park space. There is also a river walk being constructed downtown where the rivers come together. Sweetwater has been a major engine for job growth and culture here. The company has grown roughly 20 percent each year since the mid 2000's. That's a pretty impressive growth rate; and just last year we hired about 700 people across all the various Sweetwater companies. Now Sweetwater is the largest privately-owned company in Northeast Indiana – and about 80 percent of the people working here are musicians. This is having a real impact on the arts. This has definitely bled into the community at large.
What was the main fuel for the business when Chuck started it?
Well, it started as a recording studio. He never thought about retail in the beginning at all – he was just trying to make some extra money while playing in various bands around the region. His start in retail was when he bought a Kurzweil K250 and he wanted to make his own samples for it. Ray Kurzweil told him that he couldn't do that, at that point. So, Chuck reverse-engineered it and started recording his own samples and used them in the recording studio. After all that, Chuck became a Kurzweil dealer. But he was just making samples and having fun while selling some keyboards. When the online thing came to be, Chuck got the Sweetwater Sound domain and he was on top of it.
How have the studios evolved there since they began?
Today's studios opened in 2008 and were designed by Russ Berger. Back when we opened, we were mainly doing corporate work for regional clients. What we now offer now is a very boutique and high-end service for recording clients around the world, all the while offering opportunities for our customers to become better engineers and musicians. Our studios are now very balanced, in both of those camps.
Fort Wayne seems vastly more open and approachable than other traditional music cities.
That's true. Other music cities still have labels, and there are all the politics. For example, if you are working on a pop country record in Nashville, there are still people who say, "If you are doing a pop country record, it has to be done this way," according to whatever imaginary formula that happens to be popular last week. Up here in Fort Wayne, that doesn't exist. We are isolated from the labels and everything else, and just really focused on the artists. We figure out what the goal of the project is, what the resources are, and work backwards from there. The main question is how can we reach that goal as efficiently as possible for our clients? The real opportunity is how we can engage people, find out what they are doing, and how we can help them.
Was moving to Fort Wayne a risk for you? That's a big change, coming from Nashville.
I was already gainfully employed, globetrotting, and working in many different genres of music. I spent my 10,000 hours staying diverse. My uncle [Ronnie Brookshire], who is also a producer and engineer, who still lives in Nashville, told me early on that if you want to stay busy, and have longevity, you've got to diversify. You can't go to work for one producer, one label, or one genre and expect that the work is just going to keep coming. Every gig comes to an end, and everything ebbs and flows. One thing goes out of style just as something else comes into style. My uncle was really a great influence on me in saying, "The more diversified you are, the better." If you can go from jazz, to blues, to hard rock, then that makes you pretty unique – most people in this business don't do that. I happen to have a wide variety of musical tastes since I was a kid, and it's served me well.
What was the first thing you did after coming on board at Sweetwater?
I realized we were flying in musicians on a regular basis to help out on our recording sessions. When you start to do the math on that – adding up hotels and airfare – you figure out, "Well, we'd save money if we just hired people." But we needed diverse people because we have so many different types of projects. So, I called up some people I had been working with for decades: Phil Naish, Nick D'Virgilio, Don Carr, Dave Martin. They've all made their mark in different genres of music, which makes them an interesting rhythm section. But behind the scenes, I've worked across many different genres of music with this group of guys.
So, getting in some musicians to support your sessions on a regular basis was important?
