Williamsburg, NY's Headgear Recording has played host to a number of Brooklyn's best and perhaps most innovative bands including the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, CocoRosie, Au Revoir Simone, The National and Dirty on Purpose — as well as out-of-towners like Son Volt and Celebration. Co-owners Alex Lipsen and Scott Norton fill us in on the studio's history and future in their rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.
How did the studio get started?
AL: The studio started because (in typical New York fashion) me and Dan [Long] (our other partner who's in L.A.) were both interning at studios and we had the dream of being the next big band,. We got a rehearsal space and to get good demos we started collecting recording equipment. I was working in a music store in Soho and this guy — a really friendly guy named Reggie Hodges — came in and he was saying how he lived in Williamsburg and how he had a space that needed a sublet that was already built out and would we be interested? We were like, "Fuck yeah." So we went to this place that was right next to this bar called Galapagos on North 6th, and they had a full studio called Bass Mind that they had built up. They had a room that me and Dan subletted. Even though we were working on our own music and getting into a couple of production projects, we saw the need to make some money because we had to pay our rent — so we started taking commercial clients. Then the person who owns Galapagos ended the lease and our landlord — this whole collective called True Mystic Sound System who we were subletting from — they were doing jungle, dub, reggae, all this other stuff — the guy we were subletting with was like, "Hey, do you want to go with me and build a studio in another building? It'll probably take three months." [Scott laughs.]
AL: This was ten years ago so the neighborhood was just starting to fucking pop. It felt like anything was possible still, just really exciting. Then Doug, the guy who sort of commandeered looking for space, found this space in East Williamsburg — just out in the middle of fucking nowhere. We moved in, we did a little bit of construction and then we started smelling some weird smells. We just realized that we were literally adjacent to a barrel cleaning business. It was like clockwork at twelve and seven and we were like, "I don't think this is going to work."
How long were you there for?
AL: We were there like two weeks, but it was an expensive two weeks. Dan and Doug were pretty skeptical about finding another space in this neighborhood. So I was like, "I'm going to find a place in this area." Some-fucking-how I found this building just walking down here with my wife. I call up and it's this Hassidic landlord and I was like, "How much is the space?" and he goes "It's $4,500 for 6,500 square feet," and I think I was hallucinating and I said, "You mean it's $6,500 for 4,500 square feet?" I literally said that because even back then that was such a crazy good deal. And he was like, "No, you fuckface. It's actually $4,500 for 6,500, shut up." I was like, "Okay, we have to do this." So we were only going to do a studio before and now we've found a whole building. So for the next year — which was not three months — we built this whole building out. We built the Headgear space, and we built two spaces up front. We split the entire building into thirds, three spaces of 2,000 square feet and split the first third into two spaces, and the middle third into two spaces. So we subdivided the whole building. My wife and I lived in an apartment in the first third, Doug lived in an apartment in the other third, we had a painter who was here for a number of years and then a kickboxing school, hence the "School of Kickboxing" sign. They were here for a few years and now Stay Gold [Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio's studio] is there. It was a really ambitious project.
SN: I came out a few times and it was always, "Three more weeks and it'll be done."
AL: Scott was kind of parallel with us because he had a studio in New Jersey and he had a kind of similar situation. DS: I met Scott because Scott was the manager of the Magic Shop, which is where I used to intern, and he was my boss — kind of. It was a cool, amazing place. Then he moved on to do his studio in Jersey. So we're having these parallel lives — always keeping in touch. Then we got in here and me and Dan were working and things were going okay and then 9/11 happened. We had just gotten busy and then literally there was like four months without any phone calls. At that point we weren't working with bands on labels. Basically our clientele were 25-year-old designer/Internet programmers who had a lot of money and were playing music and wanting to make their record. That was our fucking bread and butter. It was really the most bizarre thing I've ever witnessed. That's when Dan and I were like, "You know what? I think we should call Scott. I think he should come over here. He doesn't need to be in New Jersey, he needs to come to New York. He can put a studio together."
SN: I had been in that building out there almost five years and it was 38 rehearsal spaces in this giant factory warehouse. I took over three rooms. Dream Theater had been in there, then one guy from the Misfits started building the place out and didn't really finish it and I ended up finishing it. I knew I was going to have to move. They were getting ready to sell the whole building and turn it into a parking lot. So we started talking. I had bought the gear. I had built the console and the tape machine and had a bunch of outboard and stuff, but I had kind of outgrown the space. They had built an incredible studio, but probably didn't have the gear that was appropriate and I had the gear but didn't have the room for the gear. It was a perfect marriage. AL: And Dan was like, "He'll never do it." Not that Dan was skeptical that it wouldn't work — he was just "Ah, he doesn't want the headache."
SN: Alex is right. [laughs] We started talking in November of 2001 and February 15th we did our first gig, and by that summer we met Dave [Sitek]. I gave Dave the studio tour. We did some ads, some guerilla marketing with the shit you put up on the street. He had actually ripped off one of our things and came in here and by that August, I think, we were doing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs record [Fever to Tell] and then it was off to the races. 'Cause with this neighborhood you can't spit without hitting a kid with a guitar.
AL: So after that record it's been nonstop for five years. SN: We've been very fortunate.
So what other studios were here at that time?
SN: Coyote, the Mission [Sound], Excello. AL: There are a lot of great studios in Williamsburg and there are a million studios in New York. It's really overwhelming at first, but the more you get into it and the more experience that you have doing it you just realize there's not competition in the normal sense — 'cause there are so many studios doing so many niches, you just have to find your niche. And that's what we were always able to kind of figure out. There are a million studios that might have better gear or this or that, but we were able to find our niche and that ultimately is the relationships you build. So it's like gear, gear, gear, gear, gear — but in the end it's the people. There are a lot of great studios in the neighborhood and they've just built their own niches by their relationships.
It's a pretty impressive list of bands that have recorded here. So is it still just word of mouth?
AL: Yeah. We've all been around good studios and worked in really professional environments. We had good gear, we had built a good place and it was just a matter of time. We'd been doing good work, but eventually you just need a break. And the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, that was just a tremendous break. I think we felt confident in our ability to provide a great sounding studio, but we just hadn't had that break, and that was the first one.
SN: You realize that maybe not the biggest, but almost the biggest part of a studio is the personality of the studio, which obviously comes from the owners and what you actually fill the studio with — not technically just gear-wise, but the actual feel of the place.
AL: And we were always behind the ball in terms of money. SN: We were just like, "We need to provide an awesome product at a very reasonable rate." I've always been big into not jumping into the gear chase. If you have quality gear you can probably get great sounds with it and not sink yourself. The bottom line is so many studios, and studios I had worked at, were constantly trying to get the latest greatest thing. AL: We realized fast that we weren't going to be the Magic Shop, 'cause we worked there and we knew even from the beginning that we weren't going to be getting a Neve, as great as a Neve console is. The climate of the industry was, and it is now, all those big studios closed down — not the Magic Shop though. The only studios that are able to exist on that huge level in New York are basically extensions of corporations. And even those falter. We were I think unbelievably frugal.
A huge part of it is luck and timing.
SN: I remember Dave specifically telling me that he had gone and looked at a bunch of studios and I was the only person who didn't ask him who the client was. I could have given a shit to be honest with you. I was giving him a studio tour just 'cause he was a producer and he could do anything he wanted here. But there was certainly that vibe, 'cause he told them who it was when they asked him, and because there was so much hype around the band all of a sudden the rate went up. I didn't even think to ask. That is pretty indicative of what our scene is like. For every record we've done that people have heard of, there are ten records that nobody's heard of, but the people got treated exactly the same.
I was going to ask you about Dave who's done a lot of stuff here. Does he tend to do more experimenting in the studio or does he come in knowing exactly what he needs to do?
SN: It's a little of both. In general a lot of it's pretty experimental, but it depends on the project. He's definitely done gigs here where they've done a lot of pre-production and they know exactly what they need to get done when they come in here.
AL: There was experimentation with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but I also think they knew exactly what they wanted and Dave just helped them facilitate executing it. Obviously with TV on the Radio I think there's a lot more experimentation going on. He just did a remix — obviously a remix is going to open itself to a lot of experimentation.
But I guess he can do that. I didn't realize his studio's right next door.
AL: He kept bothering me about, "When am I going to move in?"
SN: It was just a way to get him off our back actually. [laughs] There was a time two years ago where he booked every other month, full months at a pop, and he still needed more space and more time, so he put that studio next door. This last TV on the Radio record was both rooms going nonstop.
Is most of the work you get bands recording an album straight through, or is it people doing bits and pieces — maybe even to augment home recordings?
SN: In the beginning it was definitely more start and finish the project, but in the last two years or so we've started doing more projects where people come in maybe do basic tracking here, get as much down as they can on what their limited budget can afford and then go home. It's just varying degrees of percentages. We're still doing whole projects from beginning to end, but little by little it's starting to be basic tracking and people will take the files home. They'll take it home and a lot of times come back and mix here.
AL: I think that we all kind of foresaw (especially with people going to digital exclusively) as much as we like tape, that people with the flexibility were going to be working in a lot of different areas. Basically 90% of the gigs have become either just mixing or just tracking — like the Animal Collective record where they did all the tracking in Tucson, Arizona [at WaveLab], then they came here and mixed the record. That's the way it is.
SN: We've started a B room for that specific reason — for people to be able to do that stuff at home and afford a fairly cheap large diaphragm condenser, maybe a decent preamp, the Digi002s and the Mboxes — it doesn't necessarily make you an engineer and you're not necessarily able to get good sounds. So we're hoping the B room is a way to maybe get some of those gigs back where we can provide the kind of quality that we're accustomed to, and offer that service to a client where it's reasonable to them on a small budget, where you can be in the Headgear room and not paying for the entire studio. We're able to offer a service which is cheaper, but with much better quality than most people have at home.
AL: I built a room up there in the space that I used to live in with a smaller recording rig to write in. Even though I built it for me, all of a sudden every friend of mine wanted to record there. In like the last two years there's this huge market for stuff that's half the budget of the recording studio. I did a lot of records where I tracked all the basics here and then I did all of the overdubs up there and then came back and mixed here. This kind of market evolved that is always going to be there and I think that's kind of affirmed this B room notion.
SN: But there's a huge variable in quality. Some people that have come in here and done basics and gone elsewhere have had great results and then some people have not. You start to recognize that there is a need for it.
I just wanted to finish by asking you about the neighborhood and how the gentrification has affected you.
SN: We just took a huge hit. AL: We're in a transition phase. Our landlord at first wanted to destroy the building and build a condo and I persuaded him not to not do it — but he hadn't taken all of the steps to actually pull the trigger. So our lease ran up in April and we got an extension, but he tripled our rent. Our whole infrastructure has changed and we're in this transitionary period, and one of the changes is that the B room is evolving. One of the tenants in the building left so we had to compensate and make up for it by either renting the space that he left or by coming up with new business propositions.
SN: Early on we kind of messed around with the day rate and tried to figure out what would be best. We knew we wanted to try to come in underneath the other studios and really offer a great service. We decided to pull the Saturn car deal and say, "This is what the rate is. We know it's a good rate. We don't really want to haggle with you. This is just what the rate will be." We're trying to reorganize and restructure stuff so that we can still offer that kind of thing, but it's been a bit of a nightmare.
AL: It's a very delicate balance because we want to provide a great environment for creativity and the art of making music, but we have to make a living and the balance of it all. It's hard.
So you plan to stay here?
AL: We've agreed for it to stay here for a while so it's still going to be here for a few more years definitely. But there's always a breaking point.
SN: With all the stress that's going on there's a very real possibility that an upside could emerge which is that we have a B room that could offer the services like we talked about as well as a space where the bands can actually stay, which we've never had before and we've certainly been asked about that.
AL: We have our history here, so the longer we can stay here the better. I would just love to own a building. Because when you do this much work and this much juggling and this much crazy shit and when you don't own the building it gets really fucking hard. It's got to make sense financially on some level. You don't get into a studio for a logical reason — you do it because you love it and that's fine. That's the only thing that we would be interested in pursuing. Scott and I have been really busy with all of the projects that we're working on. We just decided that right now that we don't have the energy to do that.
The people who make a neighborhood what it is eventually can't afford to live there.
AL: But forget the studio business — Manhattan is almost an international island. It's almost untouchable. I love New York, but it's a hard place to grow something. It wasn't when we moved down here, but now there'd be no way we could move to this neighborhood.
