Falling Wall Studio
By Matthew Toledo - 11/24/2001
Athens has plenty of resources available for use by the motivated musician. Web sites, support networks, and the availability to record inexpensive high quality demo tapes and CD's. Ryan Weitzel is a recording student at Ohio University who desires to provide exactly that: inexpensive recordings that you could be proud to play.
Falling Wall studio is the brainchild of local student and musician Ryan Weitzel. The studio is named after the slanted wall in his basement where the studio is located. His primary goals are to gain experience with recording and to help local musicians like himself.
As a member of the "loud" rock band, Meta, Ryan has learned what it is like to be on both ends of the recording session. As a musician, Ryan realized that it is important to be relaxed while recording tracks. That is why Ryan is more than willing to move his equipment to a band's practice room, or where ever they will feel most at ease.
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Falling Wall studio is a modest recording outfit with modest equipment aimed at recording quality demos for up and coming musicians. Ryan has done professional quality work for a recent Film featuring the music of ran. frontman, Justin Zimmerman. However most of his recordings are high quality demo work for bands like Anne The Drosendoff, local singer-songwriters, and his band, Meta.
Most of the various microphones and other sound equipment at Falling Wall has been gathered through trade and bargaining. The price of his collection is an excellent "Studio Project" brand condenser mic that looks like a circa 60's Star Trek phaser. It was made in China and sounds just as good as models costing thousands more. Chinese condenser mics are the current rage in amongst recording professionals as evidenced by a wealth of articles on the subject in recording magazines.
Other equipment at the studio includes an Ampeg VT-40 tube bass amp, Shure SM-57 drum mics, guitars, basses and amps for both. There is also a drum set available for use upon request. All of this is recorded on a MD-A Yamaha minidisk 8 track recorder. Ryan can premix drums through another mixing board into 2 tracks on the Yamaha leaving 6 tracks for the vocals and rest of the band.
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Every recording engineer has a philosophy about what sounds good. Ryan's philosophy is centered around realism and simplicity. "There is no compression" states Ryan, "I like laying basic tracks live to capture the essence of the performance. I hate bands that use too much multi-tracking. Bands that can't perform it live won't sound good regardless."
Recording at Falling Wall studio costs a very reasonable $8 an hour. Tracks are mixed down to a two channel master on a PC using Cool Edit Pro for the same rate. Expect the studio to be around for another 2 years, after that Ryan expects to graduate from Ohio University and move the studio to a larger city.
