Later in his career, he would work many sessions at Sunset Sound.Īs an apprentice to some of the best engineers and producers in the business, my husband learned to become a master of sound himself, eventually going on to engineer and produce for artists and bands like Sean Lennon, Kate Nash, Warpaint and Liars. My husband was one of those people in the ’90s - an avid music lover arriving in Hollywood from a small Pennsylvania town and working as a runner at the Record Plant, before moving on to A&M Studios on La Brea (now the Jim Henson Company’s lot).

yearning to work inside the walls where their idols made sacred records, with the hope of one day doing the same. Over the years, legions of highly skilled engineers and producers labored to find just the right mic to capture the unique twang of a guitar, pioneered the use of slapback delay and spent untold hours patiently splicing 2-inch tape to make sure a drumbeat was perfectly timed.Īspiring young music makers flocked to L.A.

These monuments to analog craft were physically accessible touchstones for generations of musical artists: those who wrote and performed the music, those who built the studios to rigorous specifications in order to harness the optimum spaces for sound and those who recorded those sounds. Still, until the past decade or so, Sunset Sound and other local studios remained at the heart of music making. Rapid-pace record industry mergers during that era, as well as the meteoric rise of cheap digital technology, soon eradicated the days when passionate record companies funded years of artist development with only the hope that it might one day pay off (as happened with Prince’s career). The studio now is owned by Camarata’s son, Paul, and boasts more than 300 gold records.Īs with most great empires, the beginning of the end for this towering studio system was its decadence, which ballooned to cartoonish proportions in the ’80s and ’90s with soaring studio-time costs, lavish drug budgets and records like Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” and Michael Jackson’s “Invincible” taking years to complete at exorbitant cost ($30 million, in the latter case). Sunset Sound rose to the top in tandem with bands and artists that recorded there, including Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Janis Joplin, Van Halen and Prince, and later hosted sessions with the likes of Kings of Leon, Paramore, Morrissey and Smashing Pumpkins. The ’60s and ’70s ushered in a golden era of recording in Los Angeles, with dozens of state-of-the-art studios dotting the landscape from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley. 20, 2024 An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Paramore. Sunset Sound is among the last holdouts of a once-thriving music-business ecosystem that is taking its last gasps.ĩ:57 a.m. Making music, once the very definition of artistic collaboration, now more often than not occurs in isolation with a vast library of plug-ins designed to mimic the sounds of various recording studios.

In the case of the music industry, the advent of Pro Tools recording software in the 1990s and the rise of music streaming services in the early aughts - with its cataclysmic loss of income for artists and studios - irrevocably changed the business.įor years cost-effective digital technology has enabled a seismic shift away from the legendary temples of carefully crafted sound that facilitated the creation of some of the greatest records of all time, and into the garages, bedrooms, kitchens and living rooms of indie artists and superstars alike. That threat is existential and highly documented: namely, the digital revolution has done to the analog world of art, media and communication what the industrial revolution did to agrarian and handicraft economies a century before. Especially given that homelessness is not the biggest threat Sunset Sound faces.

Solar sound studio