Listen
Press play. That’s the room.
Thirty years of records cut on one desk, and full sessions filmed on the floor they were made on. No description of a studio is worth one minute of listening to it.
The records
Metal, outlaw country, cumbia, soul, rock. Play any two from different rows back to back — the point is how little they sound like each other.
512
512
Drawn from public credits and the frames on the wall, and not complete — thirty years of sessions does not fit on a page, and plenty came out under a label’s name rather than the studio’s.
Watch a session, start to finish
Every one of these was filmed in the live room. Same floor, same console, same producer behind the glass. It is the closest thing to standing in the doorway.
Season 19 · Episode 13
Vallejo
Season 19 · Episode 10
Matney Broken Teeth Garrett Talamantes Brodie Lane Ian Moore
Season 19 · Episode 12
The Mox Ronnie Bowen Ian Moore Jackie Venson Boone Carter
Season 19 · Episode 11
Midnight Butterfly SOR SW Austin Ignitor Jacob Glen
Season 19 · Episode 9
Bruce Smith Ronnie Bowen Boone Carter Love and Chaos SOR RR
Season 19 · Episode 8
Track Five Guilty Innocents Guy Vincent Brodie Lane BLK ODDYSY
The full episode archive → The channel →
What to listen for
The room in the takes. A band tracked together on a 22-foot floor leaves something in the recording that cannot be assembled afterwards from parts played separately. It is the difference you hear and cannot name.
The low end. A band tracked through a large analog frame gets something in the bass and kick that is not a plug-in setting. Play a 512 record next to a laptop record on the same speakers and it arrives in the first bar.
The range. Put Dead Earth Politics next to Como Las Movies. Same desk, same producer, no house sound imposed on either — the hardest thing for a studio to demonstrate and the easiest for you to check.
What is not there. No gratuitous editing, no tuning applied as a default, no arrangement flattened into a template. Records made here sound like the bands that made them.
The wall
Every frame in the building is an album tracked, mixed or mastered in this room, with the Steamboat marquee lit in the middle of them. Read the sleeves and you get the range in ten seconds: Vallejo, the Chris Perez Project, Matt Begley & Bitter Whiskey, Bubba Westly, LC Rocks, Dirty Wormz, Derrick Davis, Devoja, Equal People, STATX, Jame Garcia, MC Overlord. There is a Texas Longhorns record up there.
Always on
512 Radio streams records made in this room alongside the rest of what this city is putting out. If you want your record on it, send it over — you do not have to have recorded here.