The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Studio fire destroys vintage equipment

Toast and Jam Studio owners seek aid for rebuilding.

- By Amanda C. Coyne Amanda.Coyne@ajc.com

A Buford recording studio lost “hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth” of vintage musical instrument­s and equipment in a fire last week, the studio’s owner said on a GoFundMe page.

Artists who use Toast and Jam Studio on Main Street will have to finish their recordings at other metro Atlanta studios while the business’s owners rebuild, a process that could take weeks or months, owners Dominick Maduri and Noah Wright told the Atlanta Journal-Constituti­on in an interview.

The studio was part of the 120-year-old building that served as the distributi­on cen- ter and office for leather com- pany Tannery Row. No other businesses were damaged in the fire, including the cowork- ing space that the studio also owns in the same building

The fire was an accidental electrical fire, according to the fire department.

Toast and Jam Studio suffered “extensive water dam- age, moderate smoke dam- age and minor fire damage,” according to Gwinnett County Fire and Emergency Services. There was no structural dam- age, Wright said.

coming at A 12:41 911 caller out p.m. of reported Monday; a crawl smoke space firefighte­rs arrived four minutes later. Despite two fire-acti- vated sprinklers inside the building, the fire had traveled from the crawl space up a first floor wall. Firefighte­rs extin- guished it before it reached the second floor, a depart- ment release said.

By the time Maduri, the only owner who was in town at the time, arrived at the studio, he saw nine firetrucks and smoke coming out of the front door. The building’s electrical meters were being switched from state to city providers Monday, Maduri said. “I knew something was not good,” Maduri said. “I had no idea what would have caused it. A thousand and one things were running through my head at the time.” A significan­t number of vintage instrument­s and equipment were destroyed in the fire, including a piano. Multiple vintage guitars that were “hard to find” sustained significan­t water damage. One of the biggest potential losses is a unique soundboard the studio used to make recordings. The board was custom-made for NASA in the 1990s for the agency’s broadcasti­ng efforts, and Maduri, Wright and co-owner Matt Wood bought it secondhand.

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