In the basement of Keep Cottage, among crates of bike gears, seats, and racks of bike frames, lives Oberlin’s student-run and operated recording studio, Studio B. What began as an offshoot of the TIMARA department continues as an Oberlin College and community resource for music recording and documentation.
On a Wednesday evening, you will find a group of about 10 students gathered in the makeshift studio setting up microphones, lights, and cameras around a group of musicians. On Wednesday, April 9, a guitarist and violinist sit for the group as they position everything just so. Fairy lights flicker and hang from pipes, which occasionally make themselves known by their ambient sound of flowing water. Shotgun microphones are positioned for the instruments, one at the 14th guitar fret, two forming an XY setup above the violin.
On these Wednesday recording sessions, Sorah Guthrie and Liam Kozel, both College fourth-years, lead the Studio B ExCo; so in addition to setting up the session, they are teaching students how to do the recordings they’ve spent years practicing.
“Who wants to change the color of the lights?” Guthrie asks the group.
“Who wants to try audio?” Kozel says.
Students take turns filming the musicians and checking the microphone levels, and Guthrie and Kozel answer questions along the way.
“It took us a bit to get into the steady rhythm,” Guthrie said, reflecting on the learning curve of first starting at Studio B.
She’s been working with Studio B since her first year at Oberlin, and the ExCo allows experienced students like her to pass on their knowledge to future members.
“The ExCo is essentially a class on creating a high-quality video and audio recording,” she said.
In addition to Studio B’s Wednesday ExCo sessions, they record on Fridays and do live broadcasting through WOBC-FM on Sundays. These recordings are then edited, mixed, and uploaded to YouTube and Bandcamp.
Guthrie is the main videographer for Studio B.
“I will film all the sessions and also edit them after and do all the lighting and things like that,” Guthrie said. “The sessions take a lot of time to edit. I’d say it’s like the majority of [the work].”
Kozel is the audio engineer, along with College fourth-year Olivia Brash. He focuses mainly on microphone setup, recording, and mixing. After recording is complete, the mixing process can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks.
“Totally depends on the group,” Kozel said. “I mean, a group like this with just two people, it would take … from … two to four hours for the whole session. But … with that larger group, … it took weeks.”
Each set of musicians that comes through, depending on the group size and instrumental set up, presents their own unique puzzle for the group to tackle. Working with a limited amount of equipment and inputs means that students are looking for the most efficient and balanced audio setup possible.
“It’ll take basically any band that you throw at it, if you mic it in a way that’s sufficient,” Kozel said.
In the studio, cases of microphones and equipment stands are carefully attended to while students test out different setups. Between each song, microphones are repositioned and lights are adjusted. Achieving the best setup is accomplished through incredible attention to detail.
Running such a high-quality service with a small group of students is demanding and comes with its own set of unique challenges.
“Scheduling can be difficult, just because it’s … in a strange space and you’re working with bands that are on tight schedules,” Kozel said.
Guthrie explained that, although Studio B normally has a set schedule of artists for the semester, things don’t always go as planned.
“Doing audio [is] … kind of a time-intensive process,” Kozel said. “You’ve got to set up, like, an hour before each time, and there’s … no room for error. … You’re in the Bike Co-op filled with a bunch of … sharp s*** around you, and it’s a cool-sounding room, and it’s got a vibe. But … it means that you can’t … monitor exactly what you’re doing, so you can’t exactly hear the mic while you’re placing it [and you] kind of go off of [your] gut and off of learned experience having done it a few times. … We’re expected to be so fast, and it’s never fast enough.”
Studio B operates differently from a traditional recording studio in the sense that it is focused on live music recording, not getting perfectly-produced audio tracks.
“[It’s] very similar to NPR [Music] Tiny Desk [concerts],” Guthrie said. “We record local and student bands, bands that are touring, bands from Cleveland, we record people in the Conservatory.”
But there are no cuts mid-song, they don’t keep recording until they’ve got the perfect take, and they do not stop when the pipes start making noise. The musicians play their song, as if in front of an audience, and Studio B captures it.
“It’s kind of … a beautiful thing, especially at this school where there are so many talented musicians,” Kozel said. “I’m sort of obsessed with getting a real cohesive, accurate document of … what they sound like at a given time. And there’s something magical about that, especially looking back [in] a couple years and seeing something that’s preserved so well.”
By acting as a resource for College, community, and traveling musicians, Studio B actively supports the presence and documentation of art on Oberlin’s campus. As Guthrie and Kozel are preparing to graduate, they are also preparing a generation of Studio B members to continue their legacy and maintain Studio B as a valuable community resource.
“We put in so much work — … this club is … my lifeblood,” Guthrie said.