In town, on track: Boom in local studios offering Chattanooga musicians a cheaper recording alternative to bigger cities

In a day and age when more and more aspects of life are rooted in digital soil, Marty Bohannon is hoping to lay the foundations of his musical legacy in analog bedrock.

The lead singer of local rock band The Bohannons, Marty and his brother and bandmate, Matt, teamed up earlier this year with seasoned sound engineers Mike Pack and Alex Norfleet to found Tiny Buzz, a recording studio on M.L. King Boulevard whose focus is on capturing music on magnetic tape instead of a computer file.

At many studios, analog sound lost ground long ago to the speed and convenience of digital processing. But Bohannon says part of the beauty of sticking to the older approach is that its inherent limitations force artists to play without the safety net of a hard drive that can store a seemingly endless parade of retakes.

"[The studio] is not exclusively analog, but our preference is to be analog to capture the performance," the 40-year-old explains while sitting in the control room of the studio, which occupies the second floor of a building next to the music venue JJ's Bohemia. Catty corner to his leather chair is a Tascam 85-16B, a hulking gray multitrack analog recorder that he says has been the studio's beating heart since it opened in March.

"What I like about rolling tape is that you have a beginning and an end, and you're trying to be as efficient and careful with that space as possible," Bohannon adds. "You already have the canvas, and it's not going to grow any bigger, so it's what you do with it that makes it feel right."

In its first four months, Tiny Buzz has produced about 30 projects for local and regional artists. It joins a growing network of smaller, independent studios that has sprung up in recent years in the area thanks to the lower cost of recording equipment and software. These facilities offer Chattanooga musicians the opportunity to lay down tracks without having to pay the higher rates of studios in Nashville or Atlanta.

"With the advent of affordable, 'pro-sumer' equipment nowadays, anyone with a space and a decent collection of mikes and gear to record a band can open up and function as a studio, whether it's in a commercial space or in a bedroom of their house," says Brett Nolan, 35, the owner of Nolan Media Group, a Chattanooga-based audio production company. "Those factors have contributed greatly to smaller facilities being launched in and around town."

Five years ago, Nolan was tapped by Eric Parker, a local musician and sound equipment designer, to help him turn a building he owned in Soddy-Daisy into a commercial recording studio. At the time, Nolan was working at another local studio that was on the verge of folding and, as a keyboardist with Chattanooga-based bands such as The Communicators and The Iscariots, he leaped at the chance to design a space where the artist's comfort was first and foremost.

"To me, atmosphere is equally important as the gear that's in a space," he says. "When I was asked where the investment should be allocated, my personal opinion was that we should create a creative space where people could feel comfortable and lose themselves in; shut out the world but still provide a quality recording. There are so many studios in town, and I knew that we had to create an experience versus just providing a utility."

The interior of his studio, named The Soundry, speaks to his philosophy. The entry lounge features a kitchenette, a chic black leather couch and walls decked in a mosaic of dark slate and stone tiles. Off a narrow hall, a pair of soundproof recording booths offer performance space that is intimate and closed off, oases of silence. In an adjoining control room dotted with couches and chairs for band members to retreat to when not in session, a massive mixing board on a raised platform serves as the studio's production nexus.

The goal, Nolan says, is to make artists in The Soundry forget that they're at the foot of Walden's Ridge and a few dozen feet of asphalt away from a wrecker service. A musician recording there, he says, should feel every bit as important as if he or she were clocking hours at a studio in a bigger city with a major label picking up the tab.

"Offering budget-minded alternatives to having to go to Nashville or Atlanta to record is always going to help local artists, especially when they have a 9-to-5 and a family," Nolan says. "I think any time you can give people the quality that they could get in a major market at a Chattanooga market price is going to be a benefit to any local artist."

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In town, on trackBoom in local studios offering Chattanooga musicians a cheaper recording alternative to bigger cities

Insider's perspective

Playing music is a kind of gateway drug to sound engineering. Most local recording studios are run by current or former musicians, and bands say having someone in the control booth with experience on both sides of the mike can drastically improve the experience.

In 2012, Chattanooga-based blues musician Lon Eldridge recorded his second full-length album, "Play Dat Thang!," with Nolan, a choice he says was largely based on Nolan's convenient location to his home at the time and the ease of working with a fellow performer. When the time came for a follow-up, he turned to another local studio, Spanner Sound in East Ridge, to lay down tracks for "Long Gone," which he released on June 25.

"If you try to communicate with someone who isn't a musician - who's just punching the buttons and rolling the tape - at some level, there is going to be a disconnect," Eldridge says. "With 'Long Gone,' I was able to throw out all these abstract terms and my vision for how I wanted it to sound, and [Spanner Sound owner] Charles [Allison] picked right up on that."

Despite touring internationally and being well-respected in the regional blues community, Eldridge says he prefers to record locally, both to save money and because of the inherent interconnection between local studios and the Chattanooga music community.

"I wanted to keep it local because that money stays here, so I'm supporting my friends and local studio engineers and helping to bolster the Chattanooga musical culture and economy," he says. "I've always grown up with the sense that where you come from is important to who you are, and I've always lived around the Chattanooga area. I want people to know that and to see that and experience that. It's a big part of who I am as a musician and a person."

Although he began recording his own music on a borrowed four-track recorder as a teenager, Allison, 41, incorporated Spanner Sound in 2009 when he received about $6,000 through a MakeWork arts grant. He used the money to build a website and to offset the purchase of a treasure trove of recording equipment from a former commercial studio at a fraction of its worth, which he estimates would have been more than $100,000 when it was new.

"It was basically everything, minus a building," he says, laughing. "That was the pivotal moment where it was like, 'I'm legit.' I felt like that put me in a different league, and that was when I made the decision to go pro."

Even with his equipment windfall, however, Spanner Sound has long been the quintessential basement operation. After briefly moving to a commercial facility, Allison is once more recording artists in his home, where he has employed his skills as a professional carpenter to turn his living room into a recording space. He cut a window into the wall of an adjoining bedroom, which he has converted into a control booth and, when not being used for its intended purpose, his dining room offers supplemental live recording space.

"My house has always been the hub for everything I do," Allison says.

For the last five years, Allison has been the primary studio used by Strung Like a Horse, a raucous local punk/bluegrass band whose profile has grown tremendously in the last year thanks to appearances at festivals around the country and a string of dates opening for Grammy Award-winning country artist Travis Tritt.

The band has recorded all of its albums at Spanner Sound largely because the band feels comfortable performing there, which lead singer Clay Maselle says is critical to capturing a record-worthy take.

"If you've got any kind of weird nerves or you're not comfortable, then you can hear it in the performance," he says. "That's why people jump from studio to studio so much - they're looking for that place where they feel totally comfortable and can perform.

"I feel extremely comfortable working with Charles It's not a crazy-fancy room, but he has a lot of equipment, and he knows how to use it. You don't have to go into a studio that charges you $1,000 a day anymore to get a high-quality sound."

Not just for bands

Like most recording studios, however, Spanner Sound isn't able to subsist off music contracts alone. When he's not recording bands or mastering albums, Allison takes on a variety of audio contracts, from converting and archiving 78 rpm vinyl records to cleaning up damaged audio recordings for court cases. Bands, he says, are more fun to work with, but they don't typically pay well enough to keep the electricity turned on.

"It's almost like the things I want to do and the things that pay well are in an inverse ratio. The better something pays, the more likely it's something I don't want to work on," he says. "The more creative, exciting things tend to have the smaller budgets.

"That's the part that sucks about doing it, trying to find that balance of making enough money to survive while working on things that I'm crazy about it."

Most local engineers face the same conundrum.

Nolan's workload is about 60 percent music projects, which he often does at a reduced rate for Chattanooga-area bands. To offset the discounts and unbilled time he frequently offers to local artists, he tackles a range of multimedia projects, from posting sound for short films to producing audiobook narration.

Looking ahead to Tiny Buzz's future, Bohannon remains optimistic that he and his co-op partners can leverage their connections on the touring circuit to attract enough bands to pay the bills without needing to diversify. So far, they've managed to do so, producing projects by local bands such as Future Virgins, Swoon, Tab Spencer, as well as regional acts like Nashville's Hans Condor. Currently, the studio is mid-production on The Bohannons' next album, "Luminary Angels," which is expected to be released in late October.

And in the process, if the studio's work can help establish Chattanooga as a recording haven for musicians, in-town and farther afield, so much the better, he says.

"I'm another guy from Chattanooga who wants to see Chattanooga create its own vibe. I feel like we're well on our way to having it," Bohannon says. "Having local studios just goes hand in hand with that.

"I feel like you can make an industry-ready record in Chattanooga for any style of music because of this studio and a few others. [Local studios] need each other, in a way. We scratch each other's backs. They're colleagues; they're contemporaries. It's music; it's important to all of us. We're beholden to it."

Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.