One of the world’s most distinguished studio designers opens up about his life and career. Unscripted. Unframed. Unfiltered.

An outtake from Filter magazine #3.

Following his design of the famous Electric Lady Studios in New York in the late sixties, John Storyk has become one of the music industry’s most famous and celebrated studio designers. However, becoming an acoustician and studio designer wasn’t on Storyk’s radar when he was a young man. In 1968, he had just completed his architectural studies at Princeton and Columbia Universities, and started work at an architecture office in New York.

“It was a relatively typical architectural job,” recalls Storyk, “for a wonderful firm, though not terribly interesting. But I was getting paid and it was what seemed to be the start of a design career! When I graduated from college as an architecture student, I actually thought I was going to be a musician. I grew up playing piano, clarinet, and sax, and by 1968 I was in a 12-piece blues band, and we were pretty good. We were performing three times a week, and I was having the time of my life. It was the late sixties in New York City, and you can connect the dots: it was very exciting!”

“Then my life suddenly changed, in a very short amount of time. It really was a fluke set of events that led to a small commission designing an experimental night club in lower Manhattan. The club, Cerebrum, became quite well-known very quickly. It made the cover of Life magazine within a few months; and was visited by almost everyone in the art scene at that time in New York.”

“Once Jimi Hendrix visited! He loved the design and wanted to know who was responsible. The next thing I know, he asked me to design a club for him. But Eddie Kramer, his engineer and producer, convinced Jimi to scrap the club and build a studio instead. I wanted to strangle Eddie, as I watched this amazing project disappear as fast as it had arrived.”

“Eddie had talked Jimi into building a recording studio, reminding him and his manager that his recording bills for the year were over $300.000, which was a lot of money in 1968. So Eddie suggested that instead of designing a club, I could ‘stay on and do the studio.’ I commented, ‘Guys, I’ve never even been in a studio!’ But they replied, ‘You’ll figure it out. Maybe you can learn.’ So I quit my job, became an intern for an acoustician who was designing radio stations, and tried to learn from him.”

“Electric Lady was built with just six hand-drawn pencil drawings! I’m not sure you can build a kitchen with just six drawings today. I borrowed the isolation details from my internship mentor. He was particularly good, and he knew a lot about masonry and sand-filled walls. So we decided we were going to build masonry sand-filled walls, which gave tremendous isolation. We needed that between the two studios.”

“It took one and a half years to build, and before it was finished, I was already asked to build four other studios. Then I went back to school for a year. I don’t think I was doing any kind of serious acoustic calculations until maybe studio number 10 or studio number 12 that I built.”

Electric Lady became an extremely successful studio, and more than fifty years later it continues to be among the most iconic studios in the world. Storyk went on to enjoy a stellar career as a studio designer, and in 1987, he founded the Walters-Storyk Design Group with his wife Beth Walters, an interiors and textile designer. They had met a few years earlier, and quickly became partners in life and in business.

WSDG has supplied architectural and/or acoustic designs and consulting for close to 4000 projects all over the world, ranging from audio and video studios to theatres, educational facilities, railway stations, airports, football stadiums, and more. Storyk and WSDG have designed countless private studios — for legends like Bob Marley, Bruce Springsteen, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, and many more — and many commercial studios, including new facilities for Spotify, Sony and RCA, plus iconic places like the Swiss Parliament, Maracana Stadium in Brazil and the Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.

Today, at the age of 76, Storyk is the world’s eminence grise of acoustic design, and he shares his knowledge in various educational centres around the US, for example as an adjunct professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He also has lectured on this subject at numerous schools in the USA and abroad.

During the more than six decades that Storyk has been active, he has been instrumental in extending the scientific knowledge base that is the foundation of studio design today. His admission that he had little technical acoustic knowledge when he built Electric Lady therefore is a little surprising. With hindsight, what did he get right 53 years ago?

TECHNICAL DRAWINGS BY HAND

“The iconic Studio A live room is basically still the same room, apart from that they’ve painted it a little bit and so on. Why is that room still working after 53 years? Some people say it’s the river that runs under the studio, or Jimi’s vibes in the wall, or the subway 300 meters away, which they say can occasionally be heard on records. Although all of these ideas may be true, I am not sure about the science associated with them. In fact, one of the reasons why the room works is because the reverb time goes down at low frequencies rather than up. That’s the primary acoustic signature in that room.”

“Why did that happen? It was a little bit of luck. The ceiling has a spiral shape that I had fallen in love with in architecture school, and we made it with very thin plaster. We used commercial eggbeaters to make it very, very thin, and then we troweled that onto this shape. I knew very little about membranes but inadvertently we had made a giant low-frequency membrane absorber in the ceiling, which squashes the low frequencies. It took another 25 years before I even had the knowledge and tools to measure this.”

“This story illustrates why one of my favorite words in life is still serendipity. It is a privilege to continue to be able to visit Electric Lady Studios, which remains successful due to its amazing leadership, particularly its manager for many years, Lee Foster. Studios serve musicians and nobody understands that better than Lee. A fluke moment in life leads to a club design leads to meeting Eddie Kramer, leads to Jimi and morphs into a lifetime’s work… seriously?”

Storyk explains that the industry only started to develop reliable technology that could predict acoustic behavior in a particular space by the late 20th century, and even that was only for the frequencies above the Schroeder frequency, and not for low end. So how has studio design and acoustic science developed over the years?

“Well, of course we kept getting smarter every year,” says Storyk, “and the knowledge has increased. There has always been architecture, acoustics and audio, and there’s also the art of building a studio. In all this, there’s a fundamental agreement that rooms basically need to be acoustically neutral. So over the years there’s been a process of intuition, guessing, measurements, using your ears, and then you improve with the next studio you build, to achieve this aim.”

“You have to remember that all the great cathedrals we know today are the ones that did not fall down. Half of the cathedrals that were built collapsed. People learned from their mistakes, and got better. In our case, some studios we made did not work, so we made them better next time. One general mistake in studio design is making control rooms too dead, possibly making them non-musical. And for years, people, myself included, were designing what became known as compression ceilings.”

“You put the speakers up high, encapsulate everything in wood and hard baffling, and then you have the ceiling come down, also in wood. The result was that you got 3 to 6dB more gain in the room. It was a very clever way of getting extra low frequencies, which was good news. The bad news was that you got horrible comb filter reflections from the horns in the listening position. For years people did this, even while knowing it wasn’t sounding good. This was in the late seventies and early eighties.”

COMPRESSION CEILINGS

“Then, all of a sudden, half a dozen people realized that the compression ceiling design concept was wrong. What should really happen is an expansion ceiling, and it should be baffled and soft in the front, and probably be diffusive in the back. From that idea somebody one day came up with the live end, dead end concept, and gave it an acronym, LEDE.”

“When LEDE came along in the early eighties, it became popular because it was an easy acronym to grasp. It was the same with the importance of reverb time. Other concepts emerged as well, like the reflection-free zone, initial time delay gap [ITDG], and more. Nobody ever said small, critical listening rooms were easy to design!”

“Although everybody jumped onto the LEDE concept in the eighties, I always thought that it should be called FDLEDE, which means Frequency Dependent Live End Dead End. LEDE is only for certain frequencies. People say things like, ‘the reverb time of my room is 0.3s.’ However, that means nothing. You have to know for what frequency it is 0.3s. You need to know the reverb time over the entire frequency range.”

“Moreover, the reflection-free zone idea states that in the listening position there’s no energy arriving in the first 15ms that’s within 10dB of the direct sound. That’s an aim that’s not so easy to achieve, and led to new developments in acoustic design.”

“More recently, two important trends have impacted studio design. One is that people have become more and more interested in low-frequency content. It’s to do with hip-hop and urban music. Our musical interest in low end in 2022 is not the same as it was in 1950. Just listen to a Buddy Holly record!”

“The other is that studios are getting smaller. Real estate is expensive, and most people are mixing on smaller consoles, or not on a console at all. More and more studios are private, because the great era of commercial studios has stopped growing. Chris Stone, who founded The Record Plant, predicted over 20 years ago that there would be motherships and satellite studios. He said that there would always be a handful of large iconic studios, and thousands and thousands of smaller studios, privately owned and producer-oriented. It’s exactly what has happened.”

“For the studio design community it means that we are busier than ever before, but it also poses challenges. These smaller studios, now paying more and more attention to low-frequency information and accuracy, are harder to design. As counter-intuitive as this might seem, the science bears this out.”

“The Schroeder frequency gets higher as rooms become smaller, so there’s a larger low frequency range that’s problematic to predict. The combination of stronger interest in low end, and rooms getting smaller, has created a perfect storm for us. It was another reason why we developed the NIRO software, to try to predict how the low end behaves.”

Returning to the topic of the predictive tools that have emerged over the last 25 years, they include the ODEON Room Acoustics program, and the CATT Acoustic [Computer Aided Theater Technique] program for frequencies above the Schroeder frequency, and very recently WSDG’s NIRO program. Overall, it means that today there’s not only a multi-disciplinary approach, but also a multi-concept approach to studio design.

“We have half a dozen industry standards and design parameters now,” elaborates Storyk, “like reflection-free zone, reverb time across the frequency spectrum, frequency response, which needs to be as flat as possible, ITDG, and so on. And we have improved predictive software to help us deliver rooms that are as acoustically neutral as possible. However, there’s no such thing as a completely flat room, nor should there be.”

“For starters, our clients do the final tuning to their own preferences. Every room will have an acoustic signature – it is the nature of music and it is the nature of design. Engineers in broadcast studios often like to have their rooms a little bit dead, particularly at the high end, so that content that leaves their studio is a little bit on the hot side. We had one well-known artist who doesn’t hear the same in both ears, and asked to have one side of the room tuned differently to the other. The client obviously has the final word on how we tune their studio, and this is a subjective judgement.”

“Good engineers put something up, and when they say, ‘Yeah, it’s translating,’ it’s a nice moment for us. That’s as good as we need to get. Some engineers think our rooms are a little bit on the bright side. I guess that’s a little bit of a signature of ours. Generally speaking, most people appreciate that. The rest is vibe, aesthetics, making sure that everything works, and that the place is comfortable. We should never forget that studios are work places. They are like workshops – they are supposed to be a bit messy and ready for change at all times.”

“There will always be moments when intuition trumps science in the design process. We’re always going to have people disagree with our software: ‘I don’t care what it says, this is where the door has to be.’ You’re dealing with building codes, construction realities, and the fact that studios are also living spaces. If you ask me, ‘what interests you now at age 76?,’ it’s to improve the predictive side of acoustic design. At the same time, I don’t want to ever lose sight of the intuitive, artistic part of studio design.”

This article, written and edited by me, is an exclusive outtake from Mix With The Masters’ Filter magazine.