“The attention to detail was painstaking, incredibly so,” Passante says, and some of that studio detail is attributable to Ken McKim, a long-time itinerant studio tech in the New York area. Even the lounge’s couch was backdated, its cushions replaced with garish lime-green ones that better reflect the retina-searing Kool Aid colours of the period’s interior décor. Then came the finer details: sand-bottomed ashtrays, clunky rotary-dial telephones, and gold and platinum records, none newer than 1973, on the walls. Only the Neve 8088, which dates to the late ’70s, eluded the time warp, due to its sheer mass. The rear-wall outboard rack was removed - digital readouts would be dead giveaways - and replaced with a cabinet holding turntables. But Vinyl needed more: the computers in the control room were banished and even the studio’s own Studer A800 24-track deck was a bit too recent, so a 3M M79 recorder with more vintage credentials was wheeled in from elsewhere. “When you walk into the studio, already looks like it could be the 1970s, or the ‘80s or ‘90s - the wood gives it a timeless studio look,” says Tino Passante, the studio’s manager.
When Vinyl’s crew showed up for a day of shooting there last year, they came prepared to move the facility even further back in time. Of the two, only Electric Lady, founded in 1970 by Jimi Hendrix, was in business at the time Avatar’s predecessor, Power Station Studios, came along in 1977, but it retains copious amounts of designer Tony Bongiovi’s signature wooden trim that stamps it solidly of the ‘70s. It found it in two iconic recording studios, Avatar and Electric Lady, and while the show tends to overplay some of the madness of the era, it’s the studios that quietly, measurably contribute to the series’ visual and aural authenticity.
#Mercy sound recording studios series
They are also places where you can spend months working on a three-minute single, and that kind of horological elasticity was exactly what the HBO series Vinyl, which started in February and which chronicles a very distinct time and place in the music business (specifically, New York in 1973), was looking for.
#Mercy sound recording studios tv
Recording studios are increasingly finding their way onto our TV and cinema screens.
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