History

We now have our piano!! It's a mint 1984 YAMAHA C5 Conservatory Grand 6 ft 6 inches. Powerful and expressive.

After 15 years at our 21st studio we relocated in September 2005 to 40 West 27th Street, 7th Floor

Same great equipment, a larger tracking room, and a great control room.

In October 1988 the studio opened on Shelter Island, two hours east of NYC. Producer/ engineer Steve Addabbo purchased all of the equipment from a well respected east side studio that was closing and set up the studio in the basement of his home. The timing was perfect, Steve had just had a huge success with Suzanne Vega's "Solitude Standing" album and Shawn Colvin had just been signed to Columbia records. Steve and the studio began working on Colvin's debut album, "Steady On"(a Grammy Winner), Eric Andersen's classic, "Ghosts Upon the Road" and other major label and indy projects.

In October 1990, the studio was moved to 30 West 21st Street in New York City.

Now in its fifteenth year of operation, the studio continues to be a vital part of the New York recording and mixing scene.


An Interesting Footnote:

Suzanne Vega: "The Mother of the MP3"?

Suzanne has been referred to as the "Mother of the MP3" as it was her voice that was used as the model for Karlheinz Brandenburg's compression algorithm.

From Business 2.0 Magazine: "To create MP3, Brandenburg had to appreciate how the human ear perceives sound. A key assist in this effort came from folk singer Suzanne Vega. "I was ready to fine-tune my compression algorithm", Brandenburg recalls. "Somewhere down the corridor a radio was playing [Vega s song] Tom s Diner. I was electrified. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a capella voice. Because the song depends on very subtle nuances of Vega s inflection, the algorithm would have to be very, very good to select the most important parts of the sound file and discard the rest." So Brandenburg tested each refinement of his system with Tom s Diner. He wound up listening to the song thousands of times, and the result was a code that was heard around the world. When an MP3 player compresses music by anyone from Courtney Love to Kenny G, it is replicating the way that Brandenburg heard Suzanne Vega.

Note from Steve Addabbo:

I recorded the acapella version of Tom's Diner up at Bearsville Studios, January 1987. It was in the huge room, we had to gobo her off so I didn't get too much of the big room sound. Since this was acapella, I recorded directly to my digital Nakamichi DMP 100 (basically a SONY F-1 in black) onto a Betamax tape. Just a mono recording. This was the master. I recall she did about 7 takes and we picked either the second or third. We mixed it with Shelly Yakus out at A&M studios in LA. It took about 4 hours to mix it since we were mixing to half inch non-dolby analog tape(Studer 807), we had to be careful of tape hiss and print through.