Old Forge Studio aims for quality recordings
Open since January, David Cope is working on growing his vision
Mystic — David Cope adjusted the two shiny, gold ribbon microphones — modern reincarnations of 1930s RCA microphones — placed in front of a rustic chair, and added a third mic. He affixed mic screens, explaining that they “protect the delicate inner bits from air blasts.”
This led to an impromptu exchange between Cope and Craig Edwards, a local-roots musician, on the kinds of sounds one does not want going unfiltered into a mic.
“Supercilious scoundrel,” Cope said.
“I’ve got this whole concept for Elmer Fudd and Donald Duck singing Simon & Garfunkel,” Edwards chimed in from the rustic chair.
Cope continued the setup in front of three tube pre-amplifiers made by
Tree Audio. A “wise guy” critic once described them as looking like something out of a 1950s submarine command deck, he said. Cope likes that.
Cope, 63, had spent 15 years doing marketing and shows for Audio Note, a UK-based manufacturer of audio reproduction equipment. But in October, he signed a lease on a space in the front of the Packer Building, and in January, his recording studio/hi-fi called Old Forge Studio, was up and running.
So far, Edwards and some of the musicians who play with him are the only ones who have recorded in the studio, but Cope is working on growing. He knows a number of jazz musicians in the northeast corner of the state and would love to get them down here.
On Friday morning, Edwards was in doing test recordings of his original song “The Happenstance of Circumstance.”
The tune conveys a knack for getting out a lot of words in not a lot of time and a penchant for creative rhymes, with lyrics like, “I never made no mistakes, I can leave you the icing and make off with the cake. I got the impudent audacity and unlimited capacity to steal your sheets while you’re asleep in your bed.”
He will have a trumpeter for an interlude but, for now, he mimics the instrument with his voice.
Cope said he is not into “giant, jacked-up special effects.” If an individual, duo or a trio wants to record in his studio, they need to be able to get through a song in one piece. Edwards says he has several different groups that are well suited for that type of stripped-down recording.
Cope can tell you all about the variety of equipment in his studio, whether it’s a La Scala dac or a Shindo power amp or Rethm Bhaava speakers that Edwards described as being “like a hot tub for your ears.”
Furniture is placed around two listening areas in the space. Upon getting married last year and moving into his wife’s 18th-century Ledyard farmhouse, Cope found there wasn’t room for some of his furniture there. But it works well with his vision for the studio.
“I don’t really want the place to look like a typical, hardcore recording studio,” he said. “I want it to look like somebody’s slightly weird living space.”
Aside from his work with Audio Note, Cope’s interest in recording came from singing in the Eastern Connecticut State University choir in the early-to-mid aughts.
The singers “work like dogs three or four hours every Tuesday night for 13 weeks, they perform it once, and poof, it’s gone,” he said.
So Cope started bringing a
50-pound reel-to-reel tape deck to rehearsals.
He originally just wanted to open a small recording studio, and so he rented a 500-square-foot space in the Velvet Mill. But he then decided to open a hi-fi shop — which sells high-fidelity, high-quality stereo equipment — in the studio and realized that space wasn’t big enough, so he ended up in the Packer Building.
Cope doesn’t charge musicians to record in the studio, which he realizes may upset other recording studios. Rather, his money will come from the hi-fi shop; he sells stereos by appointment only.
He said having the recording studio is about “wanting to have quality stuff to play and wanting to be able to have some role in helping talented musicians make good, natural-sounding recordings of their stuff.”