Kasey Viso [02:32]: That’s a great question. So when I sat down to think about thesis topics, I really wanted to make sure that if I was going to spend all this time and energy into writing this big piece of research, that it was something that I enjoyed and music has always been something that’s been a part of my life. My father used to play the guitar and sing us to sleep with “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”. I used to be in a band. I sang for a band for a long time. My husband is a songwriter and a producer. So music has always been part of my life and my home and something that I love. Preservation is something that I love to intersect with something that I love personally in my life. So it was the meeting point of a personal and a professional passion.

Kasey Viso [03:33]: There isn’t a person you can’t talk to that doesn’t say music puts them in a certain kind of mood, whether they are trying to pump themselves up or go to sleep or feel good or feel happy. And there is tons and tons of research out there that shows music actually stimulates parts of the brain actually really similar to the way that drugs do. They create adrenaline and they create endorphins that make you happy and they trigger things in the brain that can lower your mood and kind of mellow you out. So there are studies out there that actually link this psychological connection to music and people.

Kasey Viso [04:28]: I don’t think you can have one without the other. I think both are just as important. I think you can’t have an amazing piece of music without an amazing place to record it and an amazing place for recording produces amazing music. So they kind of go in tandem. And I think though my thesis was really focusing on the recording studio itself and why these physical places are important, I didn’t think you could really get into that research and that topic without first having a basic understanding of preserving actual music itself. How are those being saved and are they even being saved? So I don’t think one is more important than the other, but I think one is tangible and one maybe is intangible. And one you realize is a part of the environment, cause it’s a building and one is not. So it’s less noticeable if it’s not there, but when it’s not there, the loss is felt.

Kasey Viso [05:49]: So I think another reason why music is so difficult to preserve is that you have two different kinds of music: you have analog and then you have digital. So when you’re talking about analog, you actually have these canisters of music on magnetic strips and reels that physically need to be housed. So they need to be preserved in a building, in an environment that’s going to make sure they don’t deteriorate. And then you have digital music that is easier to store, but you have technology that changes so quickly, you need to keep up with the changing times and music to be able to play that digital music.

So preserving those sound bits isn’t as easy as just storing on a computer because in five years that computer is going to be obsolete and you may not be able to play that music off it. So you have the physical components to storing music, which becomes difficult. You have the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ component to music that becomes difficult. You also have the funds that need to be given to these places to actually catalog and store and maintain and ensure that things aren’t damaged.

Unfortunately, things have come to light and Universal Music Group, where you have fires, there’s a vault of music that somebody knew they had but most people probably didn’t know was there, and it was just kind of a forgotten about thing. And all these great pieces of music by Muddy Waters and all these great older songwriters were lost. And with technologies these days, could we probably find something online? Maybe a clip of the music somewhere, but the actual physical recording that was done when these songs were written is gone.

Kasey Viso [07:51]: I think preserving music falls in line with the preservation really of anything. I think there is so much music that’s created that people love. But there’s a difference between something somebody loves and something that is significant in a broader cultural sense. I think there is so much that’s created whether it’s a type of music that was created with a technological advance or an interesting way of recording it or at an interesting recording studio, that has impacts on the music industry moving forward. Or just the way it sounds and the technique that was used by the artists and how that ended up coming about.

I think you can correlate music and its significance to its impacts on cultural history and cultural trends, you know, in pop culture, music culture, things like that. So I think understanding how music that comes out has an impact on the people as a whole, that’s the music we want to preserve and that’s just like any other kind of preservation, needs to be documented and researched and understood.

Kasey Viso [09:12]: You know, I think my research at the start really started how anybody’s research does, starts online and books and reference material. But once I got into the actual studios, I really relied heavily on my site visits. So I did site visits to two out of the three studios, really digging into my interviews with the technical engineers of those studios. So Mick Higgins and Lawrence Malchose who were kind enough to walk me around these places.

And then I really focused a lot of what I wrote about and my understanding of the studios on interviews and magazines and old interviews that I could find about people who have worked in these studios and music engineers and musicians and producers who really had a feel for what it felt like to be in these studios and record them. So I did a lot of reading on actual interviews with these people and trying to get a good understanding of why they felt like it was really important. I feel like my thesis topic really kind of worked around the feeling of these studios. It’s a very kind of abstract thing that I’m talking about. So I think making sure I was concise and in representing how all these different people felt about the way the music sounded was important in my research.

Kasey Viso [10:44]: I don’t know the exact number. I do know that whether it was a state of the art studio or whether it was a studio that was repurposed from an older building, they were a dime a dozen and you could probably stand on any street corner in Los Angeles and throw a rock and hit a recording studio. I don’t know the exact number and I don’t know if anybody probably will ever know the exact number. So the studios that I profiled were Sunset Sound, I went to EastWest Studios, and then I profiled Capitol Records. I wasn’t able to site visit Capitol Records, it’s a little bit of a fortress there to get into, but I was able to do enough research to profile it in the thesis.

Kasey Viso [11:43]: So the first studio I talk about is Sunset Sound. It was constructed originally as an auto repair shop and then between 1958 and 1977 it was adapted into recording studios. The first two, Studio One and Studio Two were the earliest. And then in 1977 Studio Three came online. Sunset Sound is known for having a really honest sound. So the rooms aren’t really tinkered with. Studio One, Studio Two are just really kind of natural sounding rooms. They have vinyl tiles and acoustic ceilings. They have concrete walls, they have padding that you can put over them. They just have a very natural easygoing sound. Sunset Sound is also really known for its echo chamber. So an echo chamber is a concrete or plaster room that was used to create reverb on a sound. Reverb is kind of that echo-y sound you hear on a track. Before digital reverb these rooms are how you created that sound.

Sunset Sound has one of the oldest and still functioning echo chambers in Los Angeles that is still used today. Some of the first bands really to record at Sunset Sound, so The Doors recorded their self-titled debut album there in 1966. Joni Mitchell recorded her debut album there as well as Song to a Seagull in 1968. And then Janice Joplin used the echo chambers at Sunset Sound. The echo chamber to record her album Pearl, which you know, that really singular vocal that we hear in Janis Joplin’s voice through a lot of her records, that had a huge part to play in it.

[Janis Joplin music]

Kasey Viso [14:08]: I went to EastWest Studios, which was originally constructed in the 1930s as actually a grocery store. And then in the 1940s and 50s, it turned into a radio recording studio and station. So it had a huge soundstage and EastWest Studios actually has the largest live room in Studio One in Los Angeles. It was originally the soundstage for the radio recording, so they would have fans in there and huge acts so it needed to be big. So EastWest Studio, especially Studio One which is probably what it’s most known for, has this huge, vibrant, really lively sounding room. Just really beautiful.

When I was there, Lawrence Malchose, who is their chief technical engineer, was walking me around, this live room ceilings are 20 feet tall. They’re aligned with triangular acoustic tiles, which protrude into the room with pegboard, wood pegboard in between them. And he was telling me that when the pegboard has to be replaced, they don’t manufacture the same pegboard anymore, so a blank piece is purchased and they actually drill holes into the pegboard to mimic the original pegboard to make sure that the sound doesn’t change the room. Which is kind of an amazing thing that the people who work in these studios and are part of these studios, buy into the sound so much that they are willing to sit and drill holes into pegboard to ensure that sound doesn’t change.

[Beach Boys music]

Kasey Viso [15:44]: The Beach Boys recorded a bunch of their albums there. So those doubled echoes that you hear at the beginning of ‘Surfing USA’ were the product of the echo chambers that were used at EastWest.

[Beach Boys music]

Kasey Viso [16:12]: Studio Three, which is the smallest of the studios at EastWest Studios. So because it’s so small, it creates this really kind of rich and warm sound. And what happened is the Beach Boys recorded their album Pet Sounds there and because of how small the room was and how warm the tones were, you get a lot of leakage from all the different instruments playing together into each other’s mikes and creates this really interesting sound on the album.

[Beach Boys music]

Kasey Viso [17:00]: A lot of writers have written about this album and stated that recorded anywhere else, you would not have gotten the same sound quality, as you would have gotten, as recorded in a room of this size with this material, the way it was recorded. And then Capitol Records was probably the most well-known name in the music industry and one of the most iconic buildings in the Los Angeles skyline. It was the first, one of the first, purposeful built recording studios in Los Angeles. And they really took a lot of time, which I found really interesting because they took a lot of time and really playing with the acoustics and they brought in a lot of engineers and they really wanted to make sure that they got it right.

And when they had the first people come in to record, which was Frank Sinatra, they hated it, hated the sound of it. They thought it was just too dry, that it didn’t make any sense and they did not want to record there. So I thought it was this really interesting balance of these places that were really repurposed, that had interesting materials and maybe weren’t meant to be recording studios. And if you talk to a sound engineer or an acoustic engineer today, they’d be like, ‘you can’t put that stuff on walls to record, that’s terrible,’ were the places that actually sounded the best. And this meticulously curated place that costs a lot of money and took a lot of time to create, people didn’t like at first they were like, ‘this is too sterile’. They just, it wasn’t where they wanted to be.

Kasey Viso [18:37]: Yeah, so they came in and they brought people back and they played with the acoustics. And we were able to get the sound of Capitol Records that we know today. But I think it was just this interesting little tidbit that came across, that when so much thought was put into the process of creating the perfect acoustics, the perfect acoustics were lost. And I think that plays in to that feeling of music is the most important part. Once the acoustics were figured out, you have a very dry sound that’s recorded up top, and then everything is pumped down into the echo chambers underground to give it this really rich reverb and echo. And this helped, you know, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. That crooner sound that we have come to know from these people, the way those sounds were recorded at Capitol Records really plays into that.

[Nat King Cole music]

Kasey Viso [20:01]: Yeah, totally. So this is an interesting point you brought up. And I think something that I talked about with the engineers when I was visiting these studios is, there is another component when you’re recording. Microphones have to pick up what is actually being recorded and whether the microphone is far away or it’s close up, it’s going to change, it’s going to add another layer of what that music sounds like. And a lot of these studios have in-house engineers who know exactly where to place the microphone for a drum and where to place the microphone for a guitar and how tall the stand should be and how short it should be to make sure that sound can be repeated over and over.

But unfortunately, a lot of these engineers are reaching the ends of their careers and people aren’t going into studios and recording that often anymore. It is not a cheap thing to pay, to go into a music recording studio, when you can, most people are just recording in their bedrooms or their homes or their living rooms. Technology has taken over so much of the music industry and changed the way we do things. There’s things called plugins or built-ins that are pretty easy to obtain online through licensing, through purchasing, that actually mimic the sounds of these studios. So you can buy a Sunset Sound plugin. Capitol Records for the longest time did not sample their echo chambers. Last year was the first time that they actually sampled them. So you can now buy a plugin that will mimic the sound of Capitol Records’ echo chambers. So I could record a vocal or an instrument here in my home studio, and I could put it into my computer and I could lay on a sample track that’ll make it sound like I recorded there.

Some people will argue that it’s still just a little different and not quite the same. But to the average listener, the layman who’s listening to it on the radio or on Spotify or whatever music platform they’re using, it doesn’t sound different. The way we consume music so quickly now and the way people put out music so quickly now, having to get into a recording studio and get all the people there and set it up and record takes so long when you can just put it all into a computer, play all the instruments yourself, and then just put it out on the internet.

Kasey Viso [23:57]: Totally. I think there is this sense of performance that happens when you are recording music in front of, you know, even just your band mates and an engineer and a producer. There’s a sense of the people that have come before you in these studios, especially when we’re talking about such prominent studios. There’s just the sense of a collective whole who are creating a piece of music and your energy, the energy of the all is getting in there. As opposed to a singular person who is sitting in a home studio in front of a computer and recording all their instruments themselves.

You don’t even have to be a musician to be able to play an instrument anymore. There’s digital drums, there’s digital guitars, there’s digital piano. And it literally is just dragging the notes around on the computer until you hit the right note. People in the music industry will tell you it’s a different feeling and you get a different product when you record in an actual recording studio, physically with other people, as opposed to recording direct into a computer.

Kasey Viso [25:25]: They had so many stories. I was probably at each studio for six to eight hours. Just kind of walking around with these gentlemen who have been doing this for so long. And Mick Higgins at Sunset Sound has been doing this for decades. Lawrence Malchose has also been doing this for a long time. But I think I’ll start with EastWest and Lawrence. When I was there, they were actually replacing a door on the backside of the studio that was original to the studio. It was just an old wooden door with metal hinges that was falling to pieces and has been there for 60ish years and just needed to go. Security-wise, it wasn’t working. But he felt so passionately about this door because so many people have come in and out of that studio, so many famous artists, and so many people have contributed so much to the music industry and have touched that door, that he actually was keeping the door. He was putting it in his truck and taking it home, which I thought was amazing because if he wasn’t gonna take it, I was gonna ask if I could. Because the acts of, you know, Elvis Presley has touched that door and people from The Who and The Beach Boys, everybody has, you know, held the handle of that door and opened it. And I thought that was just really funny.

He was so passionate, every time we would walk past that way of the door, he’d be like, ‘okay, just let me know when it’s off and I’ll tell you which truck is mine so you can load it.’ Because he was so sad to see it go. I think at Sunset, Mick Higgins was very conscious of what stories he told me and what stories he did not. He was like, ‘you know, I have some stories that I can tell you that probably are inappropriate to tell you. So I won’t.’ But I think something that stuck out to me with Mick was how passionate he was about what he did as well.

Sunset Sound has one of the highest inventories of actual working analog gear in the music industry. And Mick actually takes care of all of this gear. And something he spoke about was, we were standing in his repair shop of, you know, once he stops doing this and he’s nearing retirement, there isn’t anybody taking over his spot. There isn’t anybody who knows how to fix these pieces of gear anymore. There isn’t anybody who wants to learn how to fix these pieces of gear anymore. It’s almost like a lost art. So it was interesting to hear of, you know, we want to preserve these places, but there’s so many factors that go into a studio actually being able to be viable.

Kasey Viso [28:32]: Yeah. So if they’re not moving ahead with the times, it becomes very expensive to track down parts to fix these things. It becomes very time consuming to fix these things. The knowledge has to be passed down.

Kasey Viso [29:05]: I think that is such a complex question and a question for probably five more thesis students to write because there’s so many facets to it. I think we need to understand how do we actually preserve these physical buildings themselves. So these buildings aren’t architecturally significant. You walk down the street and they’re just discreet, concrete boxes, usually with no windows, that nobody would know was there, unless you actually knew it was there.

With so much redevelopment happening and housing crisis, is it worth keeping this building? You then have this idea of, financially people aren’t going into studios. You know, in the heyday of music a band was signed to a record label and that record label paid a studio so that band could go in and record. And the band recorded an album in six months and the album was put out for sale. People aren’t signed to record labels anymore. People create their own music at home and put it out on the internet for free. And then you have this idea of analog gear and this engineer knowledge that is so valuable and has helped create and shape a lot of the music that we know. But is just kind of like a lost trait, like anything in the past, anything that we have seen come and go. So I think there are things we can do. I think more visibility as to where they are and who they are and what they do. I think a better understanding of how impactful they are on cultural trends and pop music and pop trends.

Kasey Viso [31:11]: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting way to preserve a studio. I think what Sun Studio has done is really created a tourist attraction and a nostalgic approach to recording. So when you record at this studio, you don’t go to record at this studio because it’s top of the line, state-of-the-art recording studio. You go there to record the way that Elvis Presley recorded, like ‘it’s cool and it’s hip and look what I did,’ and it’s a story to tell. But I think that does accomplish the task of preserving this bygone era of recording music. So you have a museum which explains to people why this was important, how it impacted the industry and what it did, and then you are able to record people in that sense.

I think it works for them and it works to be able to preserve it, but I’m not sure you can take all of these recording studios who want to continue to draw in new clients and new clientele and continue to be state-of-the-art and tell them that they have to freeze in time and be a museum now. Museumaphying things as we are learning in the preservation fields is really not the way to go, to make sure that it is viable. So I think it could work, but I’m not sure it is the only option.

Kasey Viso [32:46]: I think two things stood out to me. I think the first thing stood out in my research was how multifaceted preserving music is. So you’re preserving physical spaces, you’re preserving materials, you’re preserving the actual music itself. You’re preserving gear, you’re preserving knowledge of how to run these places and run the gear. So I think when I started my research and started down this thesis topic, it was okay, here’s the studio and that’s what we’re preserving, but then there’s all these other things that you have to preserve as well and understand.And then I think the other thing that really stood out to me was not so much in my research, but the reaction I would get to what I was doing my thesis on. So when I would explain my thesis to people in the preservation field, or even people not in the preservation field and just the average person, it would always come back with questions of, well, why is that important? Why would you preserve that? Where is the significance? And you know, how would you even do that?

But having come from the music world and having a lot of friends still in the music world, when I would explain my thesis to them, they were right on board like, ‘yep, we get it, we understand it, we totally believe in that, the space creates a different energy and element which shapes the music.’ And there were no questions about it. So I think it was really interesting explaining what I was doing to people who were living in it, got it. And people who weren’t living in it really needed help along to understand why it was important.

Kasey Viso [34:30]: Thank you for having me. Buy music! Don’t stream it for free!