SOS Visit the world-famous Capitol Studios in Los Angeles

[Music] the world-famous capital Studios has hosted artists from the Beach Boys to Frank Sinatra to Arcade Fire with studios a B and C mastering rooms production Suites hat even Dolby Atmos Capital Studios is fully equipped and was refurbished in 2012 when Universal Music took over sound on sound visited the iconic Hollywood building to find out more my name is Paulo Salvatore and I'm the vice president of the studios basically managing the studio's booked in the time you know being involved with everything that goes on here I've been here since 1990 I came from another studio Sound City which was really rock and roll so it's nice to come over and hear horns and strings and everything capital was started in the 40s it was Glenn Wallach who had Music City on sunset and vine where people could actually go in and do little recording in there it was a great record store back then and Johnny Mercer who wrote accent the positive and wrote a lot of the hip early hit songs for capital and buddy to silver who was a attorney or accountant whatever but they altar he got together and started the label and then with this success in the 50s of Nat King Cole that's when they decided to buy the property and build the Tower and house the studios on the first floor the success of Nat King Cole's capital recordings led to the nickname the house that NAT built in actual fact it was designed by famed architects Welton Beckett they were able to build the record company and bring over this built recording studios they did have this recording studios which was the old Motown building on Melrose but they needed more room for their artists so they built these studios here in this studio that we're in right now Studio a this rooms really popular for big band horns strings and a composers love it a tends to get used more for you know orchestral stuff we do a lot of big band records here obviously it's the home of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and all those guys so we do tons of big man records it's really fun that's my favorite thing to do is a big band you get the guys out there it's I say it's instant gratification they go out they play it down everybody comes in and listen to to it and then we go great and we move on to the next one it's kind of that quick so so that tradition has been kept alive here you know a lot of that is because of Al Schmidt who has been you know a die-hard here for many many many years so so al and I do a lot of those type of Records here this room you know gets used for good amount of tracking you know it's not unusual for a you know rock type band to be in here but it is more of the orchestral and big bandy type stuff but in here obviously it's a big recording space mostly what we do in here is recording not a lot of mixing so a lot of the stuff we have is very recording centric we have some outboard mic preamps and compressors and stuff you know stuff like the old Fairchild the old pool tech stuff like that that stuff was purchased new from the studios in the 50s and 60s we still have it we still have we have store rooms full of analog gear and all that kind of stuff so very rarely do we get rid of stuff we tend to just if it has to come out of a room it goes into what we call a fuzzy rack which is just a you know and we can bring it in and out so yeah we do use our analog equipment quite a bit especially on the recording side because we are one of the classic studios that you could say like you know it's Austin Abbey Road and United those kind of places we still have all that technology if somebody wants to pull up an old 8-track machine and do something like that we're more than happy to do that we still have it we have rooms full of analog machines and all that stuff but we like to be on the cutting edge of the new stuff too so and I think we're pretty good at blending the two you know for instance we do have all this great analog Garen if if we need it it's right at our fingertips we still carry all the old equipment all the vintage equipment so because Universal and capital have a lot of catalog and that's being used so much so it's good that we can do the transfers on all that stuff and archiving of all that of all those vintage tapes Studio B is another large live area and control room now known as capital rock room a Studio B was also good for bands and you can fit about 25 people in there but later in the 60s it was more like Bob Seger and Steve Miller so it started getting more popular with heart and Bonnie Raitt and you know through the 70s and 80s since I've been there in the 90s we've done everybody a lot of work with John Mayer Bob Dylan did his recent records with Al Schmidt we've had the Goo Goo Dolls just a lot of rock bands in there so it's a good combination between a you know being more strings in Orchestra and B being more rock and roll back in the days of budgets you know Green Day was in there doing American Idiot for months on end John Mayer was in there doing a couple records for the better part of two years so yeah it's if we're doing big rock albums and stuff like that they tend to gravitate towards studio B it's a comfy room it's a little the control rooms a little smaller there's a nice lounge upstairs the room sounds fantastic I mean it's a great string room horn sound fantastic in there it's a really versatile room it's got an Eve 80 68 and there it's actually two eighty sixty eighths put together I've been told that it's actually serial number one eighty 68 either way it was put in there in the 70s there are no plans for that console to come out of there it's a fantastic console one of my favorite ones anywhere in the world likes to do a it's got a complement of analog gear so Studio B hasn't been touched all that much and and there really are no plans to touch it the monitor the mains were changed we put the pmc monitors in we've done some cosmetic stuff in there Studio B pretty much stays Studio B so the live rooms here they're not exactly the way they were like in the 50s and 60s in like 1989-90 which is a few years before I started working here Studio a was completely remodeled control room and live room it used to be that the control room was a little booth in the corner and it was one big huge room in again in that 8990 it was torn apart and put in larger controller and put in the two ISO booths and that's also when they made the cut in the wall and opened up the passage between CDA and Studio B the two rooms sit right next to each other so that was something that was not it was not in the original studio designs they were originally they were two separate studios now they are still two separate studios unless we don't want them to be in which case we just slide the wall open it's a really unique situation it makes for a very large recording space we can get about a 60-piece orchestra in here like a lot of times we'll put like big band and rhythm section horns and rhythm section in Studio A and we'll put the strings in Studio B well if if the horns are whipping really loud and we're not getting the presence we need on the strings there's a glass wall that we can close even if the wall is open as you'll see you know in the opening it's not open all the way to the ceiling so room mics can go above the opening and that you know tends to to keep some not necessarily isolation but it gives us a little more control so it is a very unique it's very unique to this studio and I don't think anywhere else in the world can do that and again having that glass door in the middle we can we can open it all the way we can open it half way we can it really gives us so much control we've done sessions where we had like the entire band in studio a and a piano and a vocal in Studio B so we're Studio B just becomes the largest most expensive ISOBUS on the planet at that point but it but it works the isolation between the two rooms is actually pretty good believe it or not the part of the wall that opens is more isolated than the other walls because there's air gaps in it but on a day-to-day basis you don't hear any leave deployment serums at all after 60 years capital has an impressive collection of classic outboard instruments and microphones is the instruments that we have we don't have a ton of instruments here we have most mostly pianos keyboards stuff like that we have two pianos one of them is a Steinway B we call it the Nat King Cole piano it's one of the pianos that was actually at the old original studio and it came over here so it's been here since the 50s it's the Nat King Cole piano it sounds great we have a Yamaha c9 that you know probably as many people have played on we have a Hammond b3 that's been here forever you know we had Billy Preston sign it at one point and and we have an old world at what an old world is certain and old roads and and I mean they've been on countless records we keep them in working order it's it's not a museum as much as sometimes it is a museum but it's a museum that works so yeah we have a lot of these old instruments you know we have a lot of old microphones you know we have the microphone Frank Sinatra saying into I'm sure Frank Sinatra sang into a bunch of our microphones at that time they just grabbed the mic and put it up but we still have that stuff it still works and you know we have old ribbon mics you know we have RCA 44 is that I'm sure we're bought new I remember going through you know sorting through old boxes and storage and stuff in finding sales receipts for you 47s you know there were three hundred and ninety five dollars in 1961 or whenever there was that they bought them and they've been here ever since you know I guarantee you there's microphones that walked into this building in the 60s and have never left so yeah we keep all our old stuff and we use it everyday and you know everybody says I want to see the Frank Sinatra Mike it's like well yeah here's the Frank Sinatra Mike but it's also the Bob Dylan Mike and the Paul McCartney Mike and the Diana Krall Mike and you know insert every sometimes it's the timpani Mike sometimes it's the bass Mike it's you know all the stuff that we have all this great classic equipment it's it gets used every day and it gets used exactly the way it would get use it any other studio you know I mean it's the stuff is sacred to us because it's our tools but we also you know if they want to stick pennies in the piano it's fine to put pennies in the piano just you know don't break it but but let's use it so you know some of our stuff has been beaten up a little bit it's not some of its not cosmetically the nicest stuff in the world but it's really old and it gets used all the time and it works and it sounds good if it doesn't work and it doesn't sound good it's not going to stick around but yeah having those old instruments and and sometimes that's inspiring to the artist too to know that that's the piano that Nat King Cole played or that's the microphone that Frank Sinatra sang into or that's the you know the roads that was on the hit from whatever it was when you know you feel that stuff when you come into a place like this you know even just the pictures in the hallway you know Diana Krall used to say she would come down the hallway and ask for help sometimes the just the place and and the instrument that you're playing can be as much of an inspiration as the song you're singing or where you are so so we use that to our advantage too it's a good thing to have in your back pocket a unique feature designed by Les Paul himself can be found underneath the ground outside capital so underneath our parking lot we have our eight live echo chambers they were designed by Les Paul les told me he designed them himself when I talked to him he said yeah I still have the drawings so there's eight of them down there they're kind of pie shaped the story I heard was that when they originally built the studios in 1956-57 that was the only reverb they had if you wanted reverb you had to have an echo chamber there was no digital reverb anything like that before the plates and all that so so they built four chambers to go with studios and a few years later they realized that they needed more so they actually dug up the entire parking lot and added four more identical chambers are not exactly identical but they started out that way so yeah we have eight live echo chambers now they get used every day we fight over them all the time it's to me it's the greatest reverb you'll ever hear it's kind of the sound of those early Capitol Records too if you pull up the old tapes you know every now and then we get to remix an old three track from the 50s or something and and you push it up me house is a really great recording and then you put that chamber on it the whole thing just blossoms and you say oh man that's what that's the sound of that record I get it Capitol Studios has always allowed audio to be routed around the building including to and from the underground reverb chambers [Music] we can tie the two control rooms together we have tie lines either either traditional copper tie lines or fiber tie lines all throughout the building not only just the three Studios down here but to the second floor studios and we can go to the roof if we need to we have a red net system on the roof where we do that kind of stuff so we can tie everything together so we can actually if we have strings in Studio B I can tie into the old 80 68 console use those mic preamps and then bring them over here and we can record them on the Pro Tools rig I can bring them up on the console here or send them straight to the Pro Tools we have red net systems if we want to I can put a Pro Tools rig over there and run it fiber over to here so we keep a lot of our options open that way and because of some of the unique sessions we do stuff like the Academy Awards we have to have that kind of flexibility and we kind of pride ourselves on being able to do that also so in the last nine or ten years we've been doing a lot of red of a shion's here at the studio we were an emi studio for many many many years Universal Music purchased EMI so we had a full regime change at the corporate level on the studio levels not so much but that enabled us to continue some renovations that had already been planned for instance here in Studio A we had been in need of a new console for many many years the old VR that we had it was a trooper it did its time we figured in the 20 years that console was here it probably did more sessions than any other console in the world because we were flipping to three sessions a day we have a fantastic maintenance staff and they kept it running but it was time for it to go so in like Christmas 2011 we took Studio a down for about six or eight weeks and we put in this brand-new 88 R which was custom-built for us it was a it was a brand new one from the factory when we did that we also tore apart the control room and redid some acoustics in here pulled all new cable all that kind of stuff so we figured while we had the room down get all that stuff done so we were down four about it was supposed to be six weeks I think it ended up being eight weeks we had a really big project already booked and we figured we were gonna have a couple weeks to do some test sessions and stuff like that and the install ran long so we didn't have that time so the very first session we did here was a live broadcast with Paul McCartney to the world and it was live like here we go bang everything's on Apple music live to the world with full orchestra and an audience and a video trucks outside and satellite link-ups and the whole nine yard that was literally the absolute first thing we did on this console so a little nerve-wracking I came in the morning there were feet hanging out from underneath the console with guys plugging stuff in and all that kind of stuff but but again we have a great maintenance staff and between our guys and the guys from NIMH everybody pulled it off and it went off without a hitch and it's kind of been that way ever since we're really happy with her with our 88 our belief upgrade wasn't the only big change in studio a the monitor was upgraded to we knew we wanted new speakers the speakers we had again they had they were great for what they were at the time but but we needed to modernize and and we went out kind of as a staff and looked at different options that we had and and we landed on PMC firstly because of the quality of speakers I mean they make great speakers and we were very familiar with them because we've had clients that would bring them in and out so we we knew the speakers and then we met the people at PMC and that was kind of the tipping point for at least for me we realized that they were gonna be helpful and they have been nothing but helpful they have been absolutely the best you know something happens bang they're here they don't they don't call with a fix they show up when we you know when we put the new speakers in and we put new mains soffit mounted mains and a and B and the freestanding speakers in studio C but they had this new speaker coming out and they said oh this might be great we said great so we actually had I think the first pair of each installed and and when we you know we put him in and turn them on and obviously it was like okay these are great but can we tweak them and Maurice was here and he said let's tweak and so because of that customer service I think it's been a really great relationship with them and the speaker sounded great everybody loves them especially for like a lot of the orchestral sessions that we do the film guys really like them because they're familiar to them but they can take the abuse of a rock-and-roll session which is really nice so they've been Damon really great for us both big speakers and little speakers you know we have you know in studio C with the Atmos system when that came around they were right on board with it and and you know Maurice jumped in with both feet and said yeah let's do this and and I think we came up with certainly the best at most room that I've heard there's not a ton of that most rooms around but I think we really hit it out of the park with that around so we've done major scores here we've even done movie scores and with Ray the movie ray with Jamie Foxx we filmed it in here and recorded that song Georgia but we do a lot of TV's TV TV projects are like quick four to six hour sessions we work with with all of them Warner Brothers Universal and we wear now since we can do five point one seven point one nine point one and at most in Studio C we're doing more fill mixes we just did first Mia with Justin Hurwitz and we he went to Golden Globes so we're really proud of that Studio C traditionally Capitol studios mix room is now there Dolby Atmos suite the drive for our at most room was not based on film mixing even though that's what the system was designed for that that's why they built it it works great for that and we do do film mixing in that room that was not the impetus we had to do it we built it too specifically to mix music music only content there is a deal with Universal and Dolby to provide content so it was first of all let's see if we can do it let's see if it works we built the room we learned how to use it we started mixing it was really incredible the results we were getting everybody loved it and it would then we were off to the races and I mean I think we've done a few hundred titles now in atmos of different stuff some some has been released some hasn't been released yet we use it for demonstration purposes and and all kinds of different things and we have all kinds of different genres we have classical music and hip-hop music and rock and pop and movie score and all kind of jazz and big band and and from me as a mixer it's been really fun it's cycle holding palette for me so there there are people working on stuff that is specifically for the atmos format but most of what we've been doing is stereo records stuff that was intended for stereo that we're now making Atmos we haven't been really big on going back to the old records you know going back to stuff that was done on 8-track it's eight tracks and I have 20 speakers and sometimes it's sometimes you can pull it out and it works and but it's much more fun doing some of the more modern records that have you know big orchestras on them and and and I have multiple mics or I have you know full drum kit that I can spread around the room or so I've been having more fun working on more modern type records the main difference is is the speakers on the walls and in the back and over the top in a film context you you have a screen and you have a story and you don't want anything to get in the way of the story and and and that's the way it should be when we don't have a screen attached to it it's all bets are off so if I want to put the drums in the back up with the drums in the back if I want to stick a guitar over there I'll stick a guitar over there if the voices are going to come out from above the voices are going to come out from above I I have this whole 360 degrees space to deal with now I have full range speakers everywhere so I can put anything I want wherever I want it's not that the mix is up here and it kind of bleeds into the surrounds a little bit and maybe something tinkly happens in the back I mean we're really and on some mixes this very program dependent how we do it but I mean there's some mixes where there's flying it it's it's great it's really fun to do you know we have stuff spinning around and flying over the top and or it's very orchestral sometimes and we say okay I want to give the listener the experience of you're sitting right in front of the conductor and if you're sitting in front of the conductor in an orchestra you know there's musicians here and there's me citizens over there and you're hearing stuff come off the back wall and there's people back there so we can take that experience and and give the listener that experience this is what it sounds like in the conductor I did one record where I actually knew I was gonna do an at most mix before I recorded the album and I was recording a big band record here and so I hung extra microphones and I was gonna I was I had the mix kind of planned out before I recorded it it was really fun and and when I got to mixing it I just took all the kind of ambient mics that I had plugged in and and I pushed them all up and I spread him around the room where I wanted and I brought my friend who's a big band arranger who has an office here and I brought him down I sat him down I said just listen to this is the mix isn't done but just listen and I hit play he said Wow he said that's exactly what it sounds like when I'm standing on the podium it was really fun when they first set the room up a friend of mine was one of the tech guys who said there he's also a mixer and he would come in and check you know every day or two and he'd pop it in the morning so like is everything working and his art I said yeah I say you know I'm run into this thing and you know how do you deal with it when you have this and that and you look at me and go you're the first one that's ever done it man just I I don't I don't have an answer for you you're the first one that's ever mixed music this way so go for it even though this is a new format and even though it's really fun and people want to hear stuff whiz by their head and all that I'm still mixing music and I always keep it in my head that someday somebody's gonna sit in their living room with a glass of wine and put on a record and want to just listen to music so so I always have to have the music in mind I'm trying not to be gimmicky with something that doesn't need to be gimmicky so I always have that in the back of my mind is I'm still mixing music and I still have to have the artist come in and sit down and hear their record come back at them and and not just tingly stuff flying over their head so again it's very program dependent if it calls for that then stuff will fly around the room if it doesn't call for that then it's not gonna fly around the room so we're allowed to have way more dynamic range and it can be way bigger in the bottom end and so because we have this this huge space to work in we we use it always keeping in mind that that original mix is there and that's what the artist intended and so we try to keep faithful to the intent of the original mix but yeah I got a sub before all the sudden so let's put some bottom and in the second floor of Capitol tower houses several mastering suites some of which have been refurbished very recently the mastering suites we have here you know mastering is a little different because there's usually a person that goes with that room they all have their own monitoring systems some of them have been upgraded some of them have not depends on usually how long the guys been here so they're the modifications that happen in in the upgrades that happen in the mastering rooms are more a personal thing with the mastering engineer we do have two lathes that run basically six days a week we cut a lot of vinyl here they are both the original lathes that were here from the 50s their Neumann lathes and at one point in the late 90s we we were down to one we put one in storage because it was in the way we weren't cutting that much vinyl a few years ago the demand for vinyl kicked up and we had to get the other lathe back out of storage and one of our maintenance guys he was charged with rebuilding it and he rebuilt it and put it back together and in the process of doing that he obviously learned how it worked and he is now one of our cutting engineers so he moved from maintenance into mastering it was something he wanted to do anyways and and now he's one of the cutting engineers and he's great it's obviously not the only mastering we do here all those guy even the guys that are the cutting engineers they do traditional digital mastering also that's another spot where it's really a hybrid of the two a lot of them they all have analog consoles and analog gear but it's up to the engineer whether they use analog or did they both use a little bit much like abbey road capital still run a full maintenance department in-house we have probably the best maintenance staff around we've got these guys can fix anything and they're really smart and they're really good and they're and we've always had that it's it's not just the guys that are here now but in the 25 years almost that I've been here we've always had a great maintenance staff and we have combination of old guys who know how to fix old stuff and new guys in behind and the old guys teach the new guys and the young guys teach the old guys and it's it's really kind of fun up there but but when something breaks it gets fixed and it gets fixed immediately and you know we have a lot of old gear and and it breaks down and luckily we have a lot of it so if that 1176 doesn't work you just patch into the one below it and keep going you know if a channel on the desk goes out yeah we can come down and out with a module in with a new module but then that other module gets fixed so we always have spares in it and if if if something catastrophic if the speaker blows out or whatever it is by the next day it's fixed so if it mic goes down they'll fix the mic I mean obviously they can't fix everything but if they don't they know somebody who does and we can send it out so really to keep a facility like this up and running our maintenance staff is is just the best and and none of us could do what we do without those guys and finally we asked Poehler and Steve for their favorite memory associated with this iconic studio Paula recalled a session from early 1991 in February we did unforgettable with Al Schmitt David Foster and Natalie Cole doing the duet with her dad and I remember walking around with a three-track of unforgettable and transferring it on 48 digital to wasn't Pro Tools at the time but transferring down digital so they can fly in the vocals together but that was a phenomenal session and that was just beautiful this is a really unique place there's one small hallway here and three rooms are very close together and it's very rare for the doors to be closed I don't know why it is because I work at other studios too and you go into the room and everybody closes the door and you never see anybody in here doors are opening people walking in and out and and you know you'll you'll be on a session and you'll say where where did the drummer go where does it you know and you'll walk over and he's playing tambourine on the record next door or something like that you know Al and I used to joke that we got you know a bunch of our most of our gigs came from just being around you know we'd be mixing in Studio C and somebody from Studio eight come on go hey what are you guys doing next week I'm like nothing why you want to mix this record like yeah sure and you know it becomes very social which is really fun it's a really unique place you know we say we have the greatest Hall in the music business you never know who you're gonna run into you know I walked into the bathroom one day and there's Mick Jagger washing his hands and hey how you doing great and you know awful okay I guess Mick Jagger's in the building today so usually you kind of get an idea when people are here but not always I've been I've been surprised in the hallway a few times we did a couple records with Paul McCartney here and and he would kind of get bored and wander off sometimes and you know like all right we're ready to go where's Paul and I find him in studio C talking to those guys or he'd wander in the studio being hey what are you guys doing in here and you know everybody gets a kick when I kind stuff if you enjoyed this video be sure to like and share it and subscribe to the sound on sound YouTube channel thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Sound On Sound magazine

Views: 215,604

Keywords: Capitol Studios, Capitol Records Tower, Capitol Studios Tour, Dolby Atmos, Mastering Rooms, Production Suits, Universal Music, Studio Tour, Recording Studio, Sound On Sound, Music Recording, Music interface, Mixing desk, SOS, Recording Techniques, recording equipment, recording studio equipment, music recording software, How to record music, microphone techniques

Id: Ex85UBvDrgQ

Length: 30min 53sec (1853 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019