Why Gowanus?
When I found out my wife was pregnant with our first kid, I was working out of a great studio in DUMBO, but I wanted something I could walk to from Park Slope, Brooklyn. When I looked around at all of the best music studios near me, I wasn’t happy with what I saw, and so I decided to build my own in nearby Gowanus.
The first priority for me was to build a space with tons of natural light, which is almost unheard-of in the NYC studio scene. I spent a great deal of time looking at spaces, and finally came across a raw loft space in the corner of a building in Gowanus with a 300 yard view of the historic elevated F and G subway lines. From the second I walked in, I knew it was the right place, and the price was right too. Gowanus was, at that point, still an up-and-coming neighborhood. How times have changed!
I started construction on the studio with the help of an amazing crew. I was also experiencing one of the busiest times of my professional life, and so I worked on the studio bit-by-bit. First I finished some office spaces, and I set up my rig in a tiny unfinished room, which is where I got all of my work done for a while. Once the studio shell was complete, I was able to move in with some temporary acoustic treatment, and I operated that way for a while. I was planning to finish it up in spring of 2020, but a global pandemic had other plans. In the tumult of the Covid 19 pandemic, it became incredibly hard to find people to work on construction projects, and so I, along with Will Chu and a varied cast of characters, finished the whole thing ourselves.
The room itself is wildly overbuilt, and I would argue that it’s one of the most soundproof studios in the area. Acoustically, Jim Keller of Sondhus did an amazing job with the plans. In terms of frequency and time-domain response, it’s about as good as you can get without a significantly more scientific approach. Working in this space has been a total revelation for me, personally, and it has allowed Untouchable to churn through a volume of work that most single-room studios wouldn’t be able to handle in the same amount of time, mainly because one never has to second guess what they are hearing. The monitoring is pin-point accurate.
Vibe-wise, I went with a bit of a Scandinavian-chic-meets-yoga-studio theme. This serves two purposes: One, it looks gorgeous and quite different from other studios in NYC. Two, that stylistic theme is inherently calm, and I would argue most people’s blood pressure drops a tick or two upon walking in.
Untouchable is one of the nicest vibes of any music studio in Gowanus. Come experience it for yourself sometime!