8 minute read
Good Vibrations
Good Vibrations
JOEL NANOS ON BUILDING A HOUSE OF SOUNDS WITH ELEMENT RECORDING STUDIOS
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By Nick Spacek
Walking into Element Recording Studios in Strawberry Hill, one would have absolutely no clue that owner/producer/head engineer Joel Nanos has only been in this location for a little over a year. It’s the fourth incarnation for Nanos (if you count starting in his basement years ago), with the two previous archetypes on the West Side. This “final resting place,” as Nanos describes it—barring a winning scratcher which allows him to rebuild on a beach somewhere—feels as though it’s been in place for decades.
What brought Nanos to the area is a tale as old as time: money.
“I did not own the location on the West Side, and rent just kept going up and up and up,” says Nanos as we sit in the room that houses his recording console and an array of gear. “It got to a point where it was two and a half times more than where it started as the neighborhood gentrified.”
Nanos wasn’t charging much more money because the artists he recorded weren’t making much more money. Each year, he ended up earning less.
“I was getting demoted financially, so I started shopping,” says Nanos. “This is one of the last really affordable neighborhoods that are close to the city, which is important to me. I’ve got a lot of friends and artists that live in the neighborhood, and it’s a cool, cool spot.”
During the brief point when COVID made real estate prices dip, Nanos found an affordable place. The second he walked in the door, he could see the future layout and how it would work. He bought it immediately.
“That’s why I say this is the final spot— it checks all the boxes for me,” says Nanos. “It has all the things. All my hopes and dreams are here. I built it completely in my vision.”
Having had years to figure out what he did and didn’t like about other studios he’d worked in, Nanos is now ensconced in a building that is the culmination of decades of work, learning, and practice. It’s a lifelong passion made into physical reality.
“Music is the only kind of passion I ever had, from my earliest memory,” Nanos says. “I always had an audiophile streak in me and a techie streak. I was buying little mixers at Radio Shack when I was 12 and using my dad’s reel-to-reel and my cassette decks and having fun recording with my friends. I was always in charge of the PA—that kind of stuff.”
What really brought it all home for Nanos was an occurrence in his early 20s. When his band at the time band went down to Springfield to record with Lou Whitney, he had a revelation. Just six months prior, Wilco had been in to record, along with innumerable other major label acts over the years—in Springfield, Missouri, of all places.
“I never considered it as a career,” says Nanos. “It seemed like something that happened elsewhere. It was the first time I was like, ‘Here’s a regular guy in the Midwest, recording major label acts and making a living and doing it every day. I would quit this band in a second if I could be him. That seems like the coolest thing.’”
It took something like a decade, but Nanos finally accomplished that goal. He started with the aforementioned basement studio, began recording his band, then friends’ bands, and eventually, “there were strangers in my house,” says the engineer.
“I was like, ‘Oh, these aren’t my friends anymore. I guess I’ll make a run at it.’”
From there, Nanos moved into the West Side location and hit the ground running with his own studio by the time he was in his early 30s. Since then, the engineer has done work with seemingly every local band of note over the years, with an almost inexhaustible cross-section of musical genres. Metal, pop, funk, jazz, so on and so forth—Nanos has done them all. Well, mostly.
“Every genre is on the table, except for maybe like Nashville pop country,” deadpans the engineer. “Which I can’t do because I don’t know when it’s good, ‘cause it never sounds good to me. That’s a disservice to an artist if I can’t recognize it. But all the other genres, I feel like I know when we’re getting it right and when it’s cool.”
As Nanos puts it, his M.O. is “Let’s try and make this cool,” and people come to him for that, leading to the fact that Element Recording Studios has played host to a panoply of sounds produced there. While the Swallowtails were recording their latest album, The World Still Spins, Nanos was also working with a doom metal band at the same time—as well as hip-hop, country, and jazz.
“I did a gamelan orchestra once and a Nigerian pop record once,” Nanos says.
All of that is important to Nanos because otherwise, it would get really boring and stale. He considers himself blessed to get to work on all kinds of music and not find himself in the situation of being pigeonholed.
For all of that passion, however, it’d be nothing without the way in which Nanos has taken all of that knowledge and channeled it into the building. There are 400-pound soundproof doors, and if they weren’t there, the sounds of the neighborhood would bleed through. It’s all knowledge gained from the fact that, yes, this is Nanos’ third studio build for Element, and by this point, he really knew what he was doing, but also from having been in and worked in so many iconic studios over the course of his career, including Fame and Royal, Sound City, and Muscle Shoals.
“The floors are all floating,” says Nanos as he points around the building. “The walls are all double and air-gapped. The ceilings are decoupled. The walls are decoupled. The floors are decoupled from each other, so they don’t vibrate from room to room. Even the closets are decoupled.”
Nanos believes every angle matters. You don’t want any parallel surfaces. As he points out, the ceiling slopes about eight inches from one side of the room to the other side of the room in which we’re sitting, and every wall in the building is on a different angle so that it sounds great, no matter where you are. The sonic balance of Element is crafted to be something unique, right down to the basement, wherein Nanos has built his very own reverb chamber.
At the end of our chat, the owner walks me through every part of Element, from the main studio to the tech shop to Studio B—where we say hello to Chase Horseman as they work on a score for an upcoming film—and on down to the basement and that very reverb chamber. As we stand in it and listen to our voices echo, Nanos explains how it came to be, which turns out to be a summation of his ethos in just one room. Reverb chambers are a pretty rare thing to find outside of L.A. or Nashville, and it’s pretty rare to find them there, too, he says. So just what made him want to build this?
“‘Cause I could,” Nanos says. “Space to do it. And ego. And why not? It’s pretty cheap to do because there’s nothing in here.”
I assume this does some amazing things for vocals and drums, and Nanos confirms that’s the whole point.
“These days, everybody’s using the same plug-in reverbs,” says Nanos. “In the old days, you had three kinds of reverb: you had your spring, you had your plate, and you had your room, and the studio was usually built on top of a chamber that they made first, and that was part of the sound of the studio—that room verb or echo.”
As Nanos puts it, nobody has this plug-in, as it’s his and his alone. If you want it, you have to come here to Element to get it, and it gives the studio something unique in the homogenized music recording world that exists these days. It is literally a physical space that one has to be in to achieve that sound.
Musicians used to get a different sound out in L.A., New York, Detroit, Nashville, or Memphis because those people learned their craft from each other and were isolated in their location.
“Now, everybody reads the same textbook and watches the same videos, buys the same plug-ins, and gets the same interface,” Nanos says. “Music doesn’t have as much character as it once did. I fight against that very much.”
