Why Sound City's Ugly Room Made Better Records

Oct 3

6 min read

sound city studios recording room with musicians with instruments, guitars, bas, drums, keyboard

Sound City was a converted Vox amplifier factory in Van Nuys, in a part of the San Fernando Valley Neil Young described as a place you drove through to get somewhere else. The building was ugly. The neighborhood was nothing. The carpet and the linoleum reportedly never got changed, because nobody wanted to touch whatever was making the room sound the way it did.

What Sound City actually was

Sound City opened in 1969. Joe Gottfried and Tom Skeeter took over the old Vox factory at 15452 Cabrito Road and turned it into a recording studio. On paper the layout was wrong. In practice the main room turned out to be one of the great live-tracking spaces ever, especially for drums.

The thing that made it was the console. Business was bad until they spent about 75,000 dollars on a custom Neve 8028, one of only four in the world, with 28 inputs and no automation. Read that last part again. No automation. You could not recall a mix. You could not save your moves and come back tomorrow. You could not fix it later. If you wanted the record to sound like something, a band had to play it well, in that room, through that desk, and someone had to catch it.

Out of that room came Nevermind, the self-titled Fleetwood Mac record, Tom Petty's Damn the Torpedoes, and about a hundred other gold and platinum albums. Below is the list of who recorded there. Then the argument, because the argument is the reason this place matters to anyone still making records, and it's the reason we're building a live room of our own at Friland right now.

The artists who recorded at Sound City

Grouped by era, because the roster tells a story about the same room doing the same thing across four decades. For the longer list, see 50 of the biggest artists to record at Sound City.

The 1970s: the room gets discovered

Neil Young (After the Gold Rush, parts, 1970, one of the first recognizable clients)
Buckingham Nicks (1973, the unknown duo whose Sound City record led Mick Fleetwood to the room)
Fleetwood Mac (Fleetwood Mac, 1975, the breakthrough that made the new Buckingham and Nicks lineup)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (Damn the Torpedoes, Hard Promises)
Foreigner (Double Vision)
Cheap Trick (Heaven Tonight)
REO Speedwagon
Grateful Dead (Terrapin Station)
Dr. John (Gumbo)
Nils Lofgren

The Buckingham Nicks story is the one to hold onto. Two unknowns made a record in that room. Mick Fleetwood came in scouting a studio, heard the sound, and ended up hiring the people who made it. A working room, doing honest work, changed the course of one of the biggest bands in history. That doesn't happen in a plugin.

The 1980s: hits through the same desk

Rick Springfield ("Jessie's Girl," from Working Class Dog)
Carlos Santana (a track each on Havana Moon and Blues for Salvador)
Dio (Holy Diver, 1983)
Tears for Fears (the drums for Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, 2004)

The 1990s: the live room defines a new generation

Nirvana (Nevermind, 1991, Butch Vig producing)
Rage Against the Machine (self-titled debut, 1992)
Red Hot Chili Peppers (One Hot Minute)
The Black Crowes
Slayer, and Johnny Cash (both through Rick Rubin's sessions there)
System of a Down (self-titled debut, 1998, with Rick Rubin)

Nevermind is the one everyone knows, and for the right reason. The drum sound that helped reset rock in 1991 was a band playing live in that specific room, through that specific Neve, with Butch Vig catching it. The explosiveness is the room. You can buy the same plugins Vig's engineers had access to. You cannot buy the room, the take, or the fact that it had to be right on the day.

After 2011

The studio closed in 2011. Dave Grohl, who tracked Nevermind there as Nirvana's drummer, bought the Neve 8028, moved it to his own studio, and made the Sound City documentary in 2013. The film is a straight argument: something real was lost when the live rooms closed and everyone moved to screens. The story ended better than the film did: in 2017 Sandy Skeeter, daughter of co-founder Tom Skeeter, reopened Sound City with Olivier Chastan, and it is a working studio again.

Why the ugly room made better records

This is the part worth your time as someone who actually makes music, not just reads about it.

No undo forces honesty. A console with no automation means no safety net. You can't comp the life out of a take across forty tries because the clock and the room won't let you. So the musicians had to be good, and they had to commit. First takes and early takes carry something later takes lose: the nervous energy of people who haven't gotten comfortable yet. Modern recording removed the constraint and quietly removed the honesty with it. Infinite takes and infinite fixes sound like freedom. Mostly they're a way to avoid deciding.

The room is an instrument, not a container. The Sound City drum sound wasn't added later. It was the sound of drums in that room, captured. The space did half the work before anyone touched a fader. Most people building a record today treat the room as a neutral box and try to manufacture the space afterward with reverb and samples. It never quite lands, because you're faking the thing Sound City got for free by having a good room and putting real people in it playing at once.

Nobody engineered the humanity out, because they couldn't. The tempo drifts, the fills rush, the vocal cracks in the right place. On a Sound City record those aren't flaws that survived. They're the emotional information. That's the whole point. A drum machine on a grid and a tuned, gridded vocal are technically more correct and emotionally deader. Meters and grids describe the signal. They say nothing about whether it moves anyone.

Here's why this matters more now than it did in 1991. AI can already generate clean, competent, on-grid, perfectly-tuned productions for free. That entire aesthetic, the polished and correct one, is becoming worthless because it's becoming infinite. What stays scarce is a real band playing a real thing in a real room, with all the specific human character that implies. Sound City has been making that argument since 1969. The market is finally catching up to it.

Read more about Sound City Studio in 'About a Studio: Sound City'

Why we're building a 100m2 live room at Friland

We didn't take the Sound City lesson as history. We took it as a plan.

We're building The Reserve, a studio and living space at Tapetown Friland on Djursland, around a real live room. The bet is exactly the one Sound City proves: as polish gets free, the room and the live performance become the thing people can't get anywhere else. You can find more about the journey on our Instagram

It's the same reason we record bands live in the studio rather than assembling songs one sterile layer at a time, and the same reason our approach to mixing starts by protecting what the performance already has instead of polishing it into everyone else's record.

FAQ

Which artists recorded at Sound City Studios? Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Neil Young, Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rick Springfield, and many more, across roughly four decades. Over a hundred gold and platinum albums came through its Neve console.

What made Sound City's sound so distinctive? The live room and the console. The main room was an unusually good space for tracking a band at once, especially drums, and the custom Neve 8028 had no automation, so records had to be performed well rather than fixed later. The character is a real room plus a committed performance, not post-production.

Come make a record that couldn't have been made in a laptop

If the Sound City idea lands with you, a band in a room, playing it for real, caught honestly, that's what we do at Tapetown, and it's what The Reserve is being built around. Send us the songs and tell us what they're supposed to feel like. We'll tell you what it takes to catch it.