Joe Reineke and Karyn Gold-Reineke: In the Temple

How did we both end up studio owners and producers?

JR: I came from an artist's place. I fell into this. I certainly didn't have a plan. Who has a plan? [laughing] You go through your life and collect bits of information. Sometimes I collect information that isn't correct [laughter] and store it as fact.

I remember getting The Mice record from you, Say No to Cheese, that Jim DeVito produced.

KGR: Joe still talks to him every week. He's like family.

JR: He did the first couple of The Meices records, and one that Kurt Bloch [Tape Op #52] produced. And, full circle, I recorded the Fastbacks' recent record [For WHAT Reason!] here. We took care of Kurt!

Jim DeVito's recordings for you sounded so good.

JR: I learned a lot from him. I still bounce ideas off him. He gave me some great advice. When I was living in Florida, I had a chance to move to California. I called him and said, “I have a chance to move to California. What should do”? He said to me, “Well, have you ever been anywhere?" I said, “No,” and he said, “Well, go somewhere.” [laughing] It was the absolute best advice.

The Meices were signed to a major label.

JR: We were on London Records.

Who produced and recorded those?

JR: The first one for London [Tastes Like Chicken] Kurt Bloch did with Jim DeVito at his place in Florida. We went back there from San Francisco and camped out for a month or so. The second record [Dirty Bird] we did with Gil Norton, and I ended up doing two more with him [From the Word Go, Ten Songs in the Key of Betrayal] after that when I was in Alien Crime Syndicate. That's who I felt I really started to learn how to make records from, by watching him.

What was the production difference?

JR: Kurt was a little bit more of a documentarian and a good cheerleader. With Gil, we wanted to dig into our songs and make them better. We did a lot of pre-production, working out parts, and making it all fit together. All the pieces have to somehow move with each other. Gil's great at engineering as well, but I think of him as the first "producer" that I worked with.

He stripped your songs down and rebuilt them with you?

JR: Yeah. Really talking about the songs. I picked up a lot of information from doing records with him. He would hear a groove in places that we couldn't, and he wanted to sort it out. He worked a lot with the bass and drums and got those to really lock in. On that session, Ben Hillier [Tape Op #112] was the engineer.

That's crazy! Ben went on to do a lot, and Gil had produced The Pixies and Echo & the Bunnymen.

JR: When we did the first Alien Crime Syndicate album with Gil [Dust to Dirt], he'd just done the second Foo Fighters record, The Colour and the Shape. We used Grandmaster Recorders in Los Angeles. Wade Goeke [Tape Op #46] was our tape op on that session!

From Chandler Limited?

JR: Yeah. That was the last session that he did as a tape op before he started his company, making the initial Neve-based gear. We became friends then – he was so cool to be around. He was changing tapes and all that. He'd say, "I've got all these Neves." I'd reply, "I don't care about any of that. I just want to make music."

Yeah! [laughter]

JR: I should have paid more attention to him. But that was his actual last time working in the studio.

How did you end up in Seattle?

JR: The Meices broke up, Alien Crime Syndicate got signed, and I moved to Los Angeles. When ACS recorded our second album [From the Word Go] with Gil Norton, on the last day of mixing the label president came in and said she got fired. [laughing] The record was shelved. I was playing with [bassist] Jeff Rouse. He'd lived in Seattle and always had friends up here. By that time, I was full on into recording. I had a little Allen & Heath board and reel-to-reel tape machines. Before then, when I lived in San Francisco, my whole bedroom was a studio. I slept in the closet, on a folded up mattress. [laughter]

KGR: True dedication!

JR: Cords and gear everywhere. When we moved to Seattle, I was living in the basement of a house. There was a living room, where I slept. The studio gear was in the bigger bedroom. I made demos and worked on songs in there. Then this really interesting thing happened. The guys I was playing with in Alien Crime Syndicate started to play with Duff McKagan [of Guns N' Roses]. One night, we were at dinner and Duff turned to me and said, “You're into recording, right? I have a board and a tape machine in L.A. that you can use.” A day later I was driving the van all the way to Los Angeles to throw the gear in it. All of a sudden, I had a Trident Series 80B console and a Studer A800 tape deck. Then, in 2002, a space opened up downtown, I grabbed it and started Orbit Audio. I was thinking, "I'll be here six months, do our record and some friend’s bands, and see what happens." It's still here 22 years later.

What sort of space is Orbit Audio in?

JR: It's downtown, in the basement of a commercial building; 1st and Main in Seattle. They'd built it for a post-production studio. We have two rooms down there.

How do you have Orbit, a place that's staying busy, and then decide to build another studio behind your home?

JR: Well, when COVID happened, we – like everybody – weren't sure what was going to happen with the world. It was Karyn's idea to build this place.

KGR: Everything was right, for some reason. We were drinking coffee in the morning and chit-chatting when the idea just popped in. I heard a voice say to me, "You need to build this." It wasn't, "That'd be cool." It was, "You need to do this!"

Really?

KGR: Then I was thinking, "Why do we need to do this?" As we've come along, that part of it's being revealed. This project, and this space, has its own energy and consciousness. We've been trying to figure out, "Why do you want to be here? What do you need? What do you want?"

JR: "What do you want us to do with this?"

It’s in a thicket of trees behind your home.

JR: We could barely walk back here. Blackberries and all kinds of crazy plants.

You cut some of the trees down and milled them on site?

KGR: A hippie guy came over from Vashon Island with a portable mill. He milled all these planks. They were giant. We took them, one by one, and stacked them up in our garage. We put these little half-inch spacers so that we got airflow, and we slow dried it. It took three to four months before the water fully came out.

JR: I had a couple dehumidifiers and fans.

KGR: Joe brought this cute little old school CD boombox out there, and we put on chanting music. It was infusing the wood with these ancient mantras. Then we had these big, funky slabs. We got the tools to square the sides more, because we hand cut them all. Then we had to plane them multiple times, stain them, and clear coat them. It was a long process.

That wood is what we see visible in the interior?

KGR: Yeah.

The walls aren’t built out of the trees?

JR: Oh, hell no! We bought lumber and had someone to help to make the actual building.

KGR: The structural part is standard. It was a labor of love, but it felt special to use that wood, honor the trees that were here, and do something artistic with them.

JR: In a way, they're living on in the place they grew up. This was Karyn's idea. Larry, always listen to your wife. [laughter]

I know that! How do you balance this with having another commercial studio in the same market?

JR: Orbit Audio does a lot of rap sessions and all kinds of other work there. There are other people that do sessions there. I don't do all of them! Actually, since the new studio opened, I’ve hardly done anything at Orbit.

It sounds like there are plenty of other engineers and there's plenty of work.

JR: Right. There are A and B Rooms there, and the B Room does vocal sessions, some VO [voiceover], and that kind of work. All the bigger projects and longer sessions I do here. Ones that people want to lock out.

KGR: We built this with artists in mind. We really made it for us; first and foremost. What would we like? What would we be inspiring and what would feel good, knowing that other artists would resonate with it.

JR: It took a number of years to put this together, and we didn't even really have the budget to build this place when we started. But somehow all these things started to show up. We needed the HVAC system…

KGR: …and then the right session would come to Orbit. A couple of major label projects would come in.

JR: Little by little.

KGR: We did a lot of the work ourselves. We did all the electrical. We had an electrician friend who would come and advise. He did some of the work that was just above and beyond our abilities. We had another friend who's a general contractor. He'd come and say, "You guys could do this. I'll show you how." We acted as the general contractor; we were opposed to hiring someone. We found people who could do the labor, and we would buy all the materials.

JR: We had a guy named Harper Hug help us do some design for this and help us get the permits through.

KGR: He got all our plans together for us and helped craft all the ideas into something tangible.

JR: He's buddies with Eric Valentine [Tape Op #45, #133] and from the Bay Area.

Yeah, Eric's originally from there.

JR: The Meices did an EP [Uncool] with Eric when he was in the Bay Area, and we stayed friends. But this guy, Harper Hug, helped us here. I bought our Genelec monitors in ‘94 from Harper when he lived in San Francisco, and we still have them. Still working.

How many years was buildout before the first sessions?

JR: About two and a half years. A year of planning and then a year and a half of building, doing all the interior, and then getting the console [SSL 4056 G/G+ Series] and tape deck [Studer A 800] in from Orbit. We have a Trident TSM at Orbit now. I brought some good gear out here. 

It makes a good delineation. If you want to work fully analog, come out here.

JR: Right.

Karyn, is your business still going?

KGR: Yeah. I have a perfume business that’s still going. I'm also currently training in qigong. It's a movement and energy practice. I'm becoming an instructor and I'm going to host classes in the live room here, with sound elements. I realized, "Oh, I could teach out here." I'm thinking to myself lately, "Why am I adding one more thing?" [laughter] But it's meaningful to me.

When you make a studio that looks this nice, you can use it for other purposes. It's almost like a church.

JR: We did that intentionally. The front door is an old 18th century English cathedral door. I've been sober a long time now, but I bought it one drunken evening on eBay. [laughter]

KGR: It seemed like a great idea at the time!

JR: It used to live down at Orbit, leaning up against the live room. When we decided to build this place, I said to Karyn, "Well, we already have the front door.” That was the inspiration to make it a little bit more gothic and have this darker feel. Most people, when they build studios, they worry about putting the door on last!

KGR: Yeah. Everything had to go with the door. People come in here, and they comment on that. It feels inspirational. We want people to come in and feel that they can just be an artist. Be inspired, work on their craft, and feel supported by the environment here.

You've got a giant SSL G-Series console here, but the outboard gear is not a ridiculously out of hand amount.

JR: Yeah. A lot of it is what I’ve collected over the years. I got all that record by record, and swapping gear out here and there.

Oh, I know! There's no producer's desk in your control room.

JR: Harper mentioned that if we mounted the outboard gear in the wall, we wouldn't have the sort of caste system in the control room. It could be open for the artist and the recordist.

It's not, "I’m the producer/engineer. You're on the other side."

JR: Exactly. We have to be in the same space together, as one team.

What's Seattle Recording Arts? How does it fit in with the studios?

JR: Well, we also own a school for audio engineering, Seattle Recording Arts. It's been running for a decade now. We have a couple of different courses. We also have an online one that we do with software training; Pro Tools and all that. Then the in-person happens downtown at Orbit Audio.

KGR: With full band sessions.

JR: They'll have experience, making records.

It's amazing to me when someone talks about this career and asks, "How do I get into it?" I think, "Well, you've got to be doing it."

KGR: One foot steps in front of the other. Connecting with people is big. You've got to get out there in the world.

JR: It's the music business, but it's more of the relationship business. We have these relationships with people that happen to play music, and we continue these.

What prompted this school?

JR: I'd been teaching for a while, through this company that I don't want to mention. It didn’t feel right. All these people kept coming to the studio saying, "I want to learn."

KGR: “Can you show me?”

JR: Then, for one reason or another, they'd fall off or they were just not a good fit. I thought that we could do this better than what was out there.

KGR: And we heard a lot about what was out there. People would come and say, "I just got a four-year degree, spent $100,000, but I don't have any experience."

JR: How is that even possible? We'd also get other schools around the area that were asking, "We can only get our students so far. Can we send them to your studio?" Basically for free, without any checks and balances on what they're getting. That's a crazy model. We started looking at all the programs and where all the holes were. People would come to us and say, "I have some skills, but I don't really know how to work in this industry." We put this whole list together of what we thought would be what people needed. We have this great space that's the real deal. The other issue for people tended to be these high-volume class sizes. We’ve made sure that the classes are really small; our in-person class is six people. We’re still updating, working on it, and developing it more.

KGR: There’s no endpoint with that, because needs keep changing and shifting.

JR: Everybody's very involved. They're all getting hands on. Another thing we heard was people didn't have access to their instructors much, so we wanted them to have one-on-one access. After all the classes, we built in extra periods where they can stay and still talk with somebody or do stuff again. In the online classes it's 12 people max. It's coming up on ten years now that we've been doing all this.

Are there semesters here?

KGR: It's a certificate based. It's less of the collegiate semester and quarter system. It used to be a year-long course, and now it's two six-month courses. It has more flexibility for students than it used to.

Who does the teaching?

KGR: Joe is the senior lead.

JR: There are three other people right now. One does our Ableton Live training, and then us others trade off who's mixing this day and who’s tracking this day. Some of our students have gone on to do really amazing things.

KGR: We're teaching about the industry. There's not really a direct A to B to C to D. Even though you two have a lot in common, your paths getting there could be completely different. There are so many doors available, but they also have to have the personal responsibility, organization, vision, motivation, and willpower, as well as a willingness to go beyond their comfort zones. That knowledge helps ease some of the anxiety and confusion.

How do you two have the time for all this?

JR: Well, I'm sure you have this experience, too. Time manages itself; we don't manage it. We have to manage ourselves. Time's going to be what it is. Karyn is a superstar with this, helping with the admin and all the state protocol with the school. We have a couple of different instructors. We're dividing a lot of the work.

KGR: It's a lot of back end to maintain.

JR: I'm more of a "flow" guy. And Karyn's more by the numbers.

KGR: We both need to get things done, but also to be creative.

I can't have too many unfinished sessions going at once.

JR: Right. Sometimes people will not want to finish something because they're afraid to let go. They only have control when it's not finished. There's an artist where I had to hand it over to my other engineer. I was thinking, "I can't anymore with this." He was done, and then he showed up with some wind chimes.

KGR: It slows down the creative process. It's chasing something, and trying to make something great, but also letting that get in the way of making something good that facilitates the further process of greatness.

This is an unpredictable business, and expectations can be interesting.

JR: After recording, when people start asking, "What do I do with it?" I simply say, "We don't offer management services. We handle the production."

"Are there any labels in town?"

JR: Right. Can you introduce me to Macklemore?

Yeah. [laughter]

JR: We did the first couple of big Macklemore records at Orbit, and somehow we got coined as the rap studio.

Bringing in different clients and different genres can help balance out the income.

JR: Yeah, it does. Being around for so long is a real blessing. Because we've been around so long, it's organically higher on search engines.

People that own and run commercial studios are not gatekeepers, unless they've set up a separate business to do so.

JR: Right.

"We have a production company; we'll sign and manage you."

JR: Right.

But there are not very many people left playing that game.

JR: Yeah, it seemed like an older generation thing.

"Sign this, kid!"

JR: Yeah. Since we've started, I don't do points on records.

I've never received any!

JR: I don't want to be chasing somebody down for how many records they sold that night. I want it to be clean. Work for hire. Pay for the time used. That's it. Any ideas that happen to come through me during a production process are theirs to keep. A hundred percent. Go. Bring cool art into the world!