GUILFORD — The architects of a new recording studio hidden in the woods of Guilford have recently been honored with a prestigious state award for its “green” design.
Guilford Sound received a 2013 Award of Merit from the Vermont chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
This one-studio, energy-efficient recording facility located on more than 300 acres of private woodlands in Guilford has been designed by the New York City–based firm of Ryall Porter Sheridan Architects as a haven for those looking to get away from it all and focus on creating music.
The sound studio was chosen in part because of its relationship to the landscape and to other buildings on the site, which include a renovated farmhouse from the 1800s and a compact, contemporary heating plant housing a wood-fired boiler for the building.
“There is a lot more work here than initially meets the eye,” said the AIAVT jury. “These two buildings walk the line of being simple but beautifully done.”
Guilford Sound is owned and operated by Dave Snyder, who moved to Vermont to pursue his dream of building a studio from the ground up.
Dave and his wife, Sara Coffey, first met in Vermont when they were students at Marlboro College. They had long dreamed of leaving New York City and returning to live near the school to raise their growing family.
In 2004, they decided to look for a property in Vermont where Snyder could build a studio and Coffey could continue her focus on helping modern performing artists create new works. She is the founder and director of Vermont Performance Lab, a incubator fostering experimental approaches to research and performance.
“Finding the right spot turned out to be more difficult than we at first thought,” says Coffey. “That is at least until we discovered for sale this beautiful farmhouse attached to a large parcel of land at the end of an idyllic sugar maple-lined road. It became our future home as well as the site for Dave's new studio.”
Snyder started his musical career in 1994 as a drummer but soon acquired a taste for production. After a number of years recording with different bands and exposure to some of New York City's greatest recording studios, he decided to make a go of it himself.
The first incarnation of his studio was a 100-square-foot room attached to a rehearsal space in the basement of a tenement building on Rivington Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
“It quickly became apparent that the control room space was too small and the 'live room,' with its seven-foot ceilings and piles of other bands' stuff everywhere, left something to be desired in the quest for great sound,” he said.
So Snyder moved his operation into a project studio on East 4th Street above Tower Records and renamed it Jarvis Studios.
“Though Jarvis Studios made some amazing records,” says Snyder, “time and more discerning ears made it sorely apparent how lackluster the control room sounded. The room had some problems in the low end that could not be addressed without completely rebuilding the space.”
After moving to Vermont, Snyder put his search for the perfect studio on the back burner and spent several years working on other projects before returning to his dream of building a state-of-the-recording studio.
After a lot of planning and hard work, his recording studio is now up and running.
As he writes on the studio's website, “Guilford Sound sports a spacious control room, a large live room with a “live/dead” side approach, four isolation booths featuring spring floated concrete slabs for optimal isolation between rooms, a 64-input API Legacy console with Flying Faders and a 12 channel Neve Melbourne sidecar, and a long list of equipment, including drawers full of vintage microphones.”
Clients can stay on-site in “a recently restored three-season historic 1790s farmhouse that comfortably sleeps six.”
In addition, a “modern, five-bedroom, passive solar housing facility is currently under construction and will be ready for occupancy in 2014.”
Snyder teamed up with Ryall Porter Sheridan Architects and Francis Manzella Design Ltd., which did the acoustical design to create a world-class recording and sound engineering facility that would also be an example of environmentally sensitive, sustainable design.
“The plans were realized by local contractor David Ross Builders and his dedicated crew,” says Snyder. “Heating is provided primarily by a high-efficiency wood-gasification boiler linked to a repurposed 1,500 gallon milk tank for thermal storage. Cooling is supplied by a closed-loop ground-source heat pump system that takes advantage of the year-round ground temperature of 53 degrees. Electrical usage is offset by a large photovoltaic panel array on the main south-facing roof pitched to optimize solar gain.”
Snyder is proud that the materials for the building were sourced locally whenever possible and, in the case of the interior black-cherry detailing and exterior black locust decking, within a few thousand feet of the site.
“Our facility now hosts a wide range of musicians and performers who have lauded the technical sophistication of the studios and the unique peaceful and creative environment that it offers,” he says.
Snyder is confident that his studio would be ideal for big names like U2 or David Bowie to record their albums. He says that the beauty of the Vermont landscape and the on-site housing should be very appealing as a recording haven.
“Those top artists would bring in their own producers, using our equipment,” he says. “They would help pay the way for what I really want to do.”
Snyder says his real mission is to foster talent of indie bands whose musicians might not have as easy access to the best studios in the world, and to produce for them world-class recordings of their music in a state-of-the art studio.
Snyder also has reached out to the area's musicians to record in his studio, often by giving away studio time at local fundraisers.
Prominent local musicians such as Brattleboro Concert Choir Director Susan Dedell and Vermont Jazz Center's Eugene Uman have recorded at Guilford Studios and were impressed with the results.
“Our dreams have finally been realized,” says Snyder.