In the third and final part of a 3 part series Anthony Dominello investigates an ambitious project based in Philadelphia - Live/Work Recording, LLC  that plan to adapt and reuse vacant blighted property as modern luxury loft style apartments and production suites for music production, with a large live recording room for both residents and outside clients at its core. As part of the promotion they held a showcase event in the space.

Image courtesy of Divzi Media

Recently there was a showcase featuring the Philadelphia band City Rain who recorded two tracks with session drummer Chuck Sabo (Elton John, Natalie Imbruglia, XTC) playing from his studio in London with engineer Pete Lewis (Formerly of Townhouse Studios) using Source Elements Source Connect software.  Paula Hanson engineered the Philadelphia side with David Nicholas producing from his studio in Australia.

Apart from the musicians in the showcase, many other attendees were there: most of whom were involved in the creative arts in some way or, more often, several ways.  There was a guitarist whose paintings adorned the hall where the band played.  There was a mix engineer who also built custom analogue gear— both 500-series and stand-alone— including a certain blue-striped compressor used for the evening’s sound.

Image courtesy of Divzi Media

Speaking with Chuck in his London studio during the event, he definitely sees advantages to doing business this way.  Now, because of the work he’s done with City Rain, David is going to produce an EP he’s working on with Scottish guitar player John Innes as well as Anna Graceman, a young singer-songwriter from Atlanta in the US.  “So the networking is already happening.  And this is only the very early days.  As the technology matures all the barriers will start to come down.”

Image courtesy of Anthony Dominello

David, for his part, agrees.  Commenting on the showcase he says, “Yeah, well it’s a guy in London playing with a band in Philly.  I’m sitting here listening to it in Sydney, Australia and I can, in theory, once we get the sort of technology worked out a few more I’ll be able to talk to everybody and so effectively produce from a third country, and you know that’s unheard of technology and we want to be at the leading edge of all of this because we’re talking about community.  Networking and community is what really startling  the professionals in this industry.”

So what’s the timeline for construction?  David says, ““So we’ve been through [the design process]  and we basically got to the point where the end of last year we’ve finalized the design.  We’ve worked it out on a whole bunch of different buildings, finalized the economics of it all and we would like to raise the money to get this thing rolling and have it start constructing sometime this year and have it available the middle of next year.”

If you are interested in being part of Live/Work Recording then potential tenants can contact Paula or David.

Anthony Dominello is a composer, songwriter and musician living in the Philadelphia area.  He is perhaps most famous for proposing to his wife on a Pro Tools Expert podcast, making Russ, Mike, Neil, and James honorary groomsmen (honorary chocolate forthcoming).  He and his wife form the musical duo known as Infraction Diary, whose music can be found on Soundcloud.

Mike - Thanks Anthony for reporting on this very interesting project which combines the low overhead home recording option with a larger facility on site as well as bringing together a community of creative people who hopefully will start to collaborate. Is this something that could be rolled out in other places? What do you think?