On April 4, Dan Dietrich lined his new 9,000-square-foot recording studio, Wall to Wall Recording, with kegs of beer and opened its doors to music fans for a party featuring three bands–local acts the Redwalls, Clyde Federal, and the New Constitution. It was pretty much what you’d expect from a studio opening. But guests wandering around the plushly carpeted hallways, some getting momentarily lost as they moved from one professionally appointed recording room to another, couldn’t be blamed for wondering what, exactly, Dietrich could have been thinking opening this place–especially now.
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But Dietrich says Wall to Wall’s combination of first-rate equipment and moderate rates fills a significant niche in Chicago. “We can’t compete with some guy in his basement with a Digi 001 that charges $10 an hour,” he says. “We also don’t compete with [Chicago Recording Company] or somebody who charges two grand a day.” There are other studios in town whose rates compete with Dietrich’s–like Semaphore and Engine–but none of them has Wall to Wall’s newly rebuilt Neve recording console (a pricey British-designed board) or its $100,000 worth of high-end German and British microphones. Dietrich says bands making digital recordings in their practice spaces are often less than satisfied. “They say, ‘Wait a second, it doesn’t sound the same’–the same as the records they grew up with.” Those records, he notes, were typically recorded on “two-inch tape, analog console, and nice mikes.” By switching between his three recording rooms (dubbed the Big Room, the Gold Room, and the Little Room) and an unnamed preproduction and rehearsal room for live tracking, overdubbing, and mixing as necessary, a group can make a complete record at Wall to Wall for about $3,000, he says. “We’re trying to keep it affordable because around here that’s what we have to do.”
Ironically, the shakiness of the market in many ways makes opening a studio easier–and therefore more tempting–than ever. The big studios are “all going broke and their equipment is becoming available at fire-sale prices,” says Albini. Sought-after gear like the precise German-made Studer tape recorders that once would have run a new studio more than 50 grand are now going as cheap as a few thousand dollars on eBay. Outfitting a studio with an arsenal of high-end recording equipment that would have cost a cool million not too long ago costs about $50,000 today. As a result, says Albini, “There’s a shit million studios opening up.”
Lishon died in 1978 and Wurman sold the studio to Dick Girvin, who ran the audio and video postproduction house Zenith; he in turn sold it to one of his film mixers, Rick Coken, in 1982. His company, Coken & Coken, worked on projects such as Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and a slew of B movies in the space until Columbia College took it over in 1992 for use by its Audio Arts and Acoustics Department. (Coincidentally, department chair Doug Jones started his career soldering for Lishon’s fledgling studio in the fall of ’72.)
Dietrich has preserved many of the space’s expensive structural appurtenances, such as a glass-walled control room that overlooks the main live recording room and some of the Studio 54-era decor: blue and red shag carpeting and a hall-of-mirrors entryway. The studio’s original rooms have dimensions and structural extras (like the layers of wood that isolate the smaller control room) that are, by design, acoustically favorable.
Dietrich now charges a base price of $75 an hour (though discounts for multiday projects are available, as at most studios) and says he needs to be booked a minimum of ten days a month to make it work. “We’ve been busy 18 days [a month] since November and that’s average,” he says. “In December, it was 20-some days.”
