Berklee graduate opens local studio
A love for music and passion for recording and audio engineering led Rayce Coyle to open Windowpane Studios in Siloam Springs.
The studio, located at 18187 Old Hwy. 68, hosted a grand opening on Aug. 15. It offers audio production, recording and mixing services, and also has space available for video production, according to Coyle, a 2019 graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston, Mass. The studio works with all genres of music with an emphasis on heavy and progressive music, he said.
Coyle grew up in Lonoke in a musical household and started playing guitar at age six, when his father Ben Coyle gave him an instrument for Christmas. Coyle’s family didn’t play a lot of music but listened to “quite a bit of everything,” he said. He grew up emulating his favorite musicians and bands, such as Mastodon, Opeth and Porcupine, and began writing his own music.
When his father died in 2009, Coyle moved forward with his love of music.
“He was always very supportive of me in music, so just in his memory, I did my best to kind of be the best musician I could be,” Coyle said. “Luckily that paid off. With this studio, one of my goals is to honor his memory by being able to provide these services to the musicians of Northwest Arkansas.”
In 2015, Coyle’s band Cathuria, which he describes as a progressive metal, recorded with Winterwood Recording Studio in Eureka Springs, sparking his interest in the recording process. Over the next two years, Coyle worked on his engineering skills by recording his friends’ bands at his mom’s house, with drums in the living room and vocals in the closet, the Windowpane Studios website states.
After graduating from Lonoke High School in 2016, Coyle auditioned and was accepted into the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied music engineering and production, graduating a year early in 2019. At Berklee, a top college for music, Coyle studied under engineers and producers such as Matt Ellard, Sean McLaughlin, Jonathan Wyner and Mitch Benoff, he said.
After graduation, Coyle decided to return to Arkansas and open a studio in Siloam Springs, remodeling an old church building for the space. Even though he grew up in central Arkansas, he has always had a love for the Northwest corner of the state, he said.
Coyle said every artist deserves to have their music heard exactly how the envisioned it. His goal for the studio is to provide a great studio experience and end product on to artists on a budget, he said.
More information is available at windowpanestudioes.com or on the studio’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages.