Rami Jaffee, who is a founding member of the Grammy-winning rock band The Wallflowers and now keyboardist for the Foo Fighters, owns the studio with music producer Ran Pink, who has produced for PiNk & NoSeWoRthY and has composed for TV shows such as Happily Divorced and The Fran Drescher Tawk Show. Together, they operate half of the building as a recording studio and the other half, which features a big sound stage, as a live performance space.
"We've hosted crazy parties, with performances by big-name musicians, ever since our launch," says Jaffee. "Now, we've been doing it more frequently, with parties every two weeks. We even live-stream the concerts to the web. We wanted Fonogenic to be an environment where artists felt comfortable emotionally investing in their music. We're a family here and we want our clients to feel like this is their home too. We want it to be a creative haven for them. They shouldn't have to worry about the sound quality we're providing them."
To ensure adequate sound coverage at the space, Jaffee and Pink hung four Cerwin-Vega! P-Series P1500X speakers from the ceiling and positioned two additional speakers as centre-stage monitors. The setup was completed with CVA-118 subs for front-of-house and CVA-115 subs for the drums.
"When we compare our previous arrangement to our P-Series setup, it's like night and day," says Pink. "Getting the levels of the vocals and of the mixes of the music just right used to be a challenge for us because of the elongated shape of the room. But now, since we deadened the room and installed the larger P-Series system, we've had no problems."
(Jim Evans)
