Guilford Sound studio Vermont
Posted on: Monday 15th of August 2016
Guilford Sound is a fully custom-built residential studio set on 360 acres of pristine Vermont landscape surrounded by pine, cherry, and maple trees in the foothills of the Green Mountains. Sitting on the studio’s back patio off of the kitchen the only audible sounds are the Finches and other birds announcing their Spring awakening – a far cry from the congestion and chaos of downtown Manhattan.
‘I wanted a residential studio – a kind of a destination space – and knowing that we were going to be in the woods I wanted to be able to supply as much as could be feasible being in the woods,’ says owner Dave Snyder. ‘In NYC people rent gear all the time and if they don’t have exactly what they want, they rent it. The idea was to make a place where people could just relax and write a whole record if they wanted to rather than just coming in for a day or two. They can take the place over. A getaway essentially. Because we were building it from the ground up I just thought of all the things that I thought were important in studio design. Things like decent isolation, really good sight lines, function over form.’
The result was the kind of facility that no one really builds anymore –big tracking room, huge control room – and enough amenities to accommodate a band, crew, and hanger-ons for the duration of writing and recording an album. Specifically for Dave, he wanted a control room that could accommodate his extensive collection of outboard as well as a full band. ‘The biggest goal aside from the amenities and the accommodations for people was I wanted the control room to sound incredible. I wanted to be really excited to be in that room. Back in New York we did everything we could to make the room as good as it could be and it was still terrible. The low end was horrible. So this room is as accurate as you can get.’
