The last concert the Beatles ever played was on a rooftop. Now Capitol Records, the label that distributed the Fab Four’s records in the U.S., is bringing that moment full circle. In addition to a refresh of the recording studio at the iconic platter-shaped building that sits on Vine St., near its legendary intersection with Hollywood Blvd., the label is also hosting live music performances on the roof. It’s another indicator of how the narrative arc of the music business has changed, with live music now the dominant revenue generator.
Symbiosis is the name of the game here. The studio below and the performance area above (known informally as the Top of the Tower) are linked, using Focusrite’s RedNet 4 network interfaces. These put 32 remote mic preamps on the roof that act as A/D converters, allowing Capitol’s recording studios in the building — which never recorded the Beatles, but did host major recordings for artists including Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and The Beach Boys — to track rooftop performances for later uses, and to act as the control room for live streaming of shows.
“This is transported via Cat-6 to a Cisco fiber converter, then sent via fiber from the roof to our phone closet and converted back to Cat-6; that then goes into a RedNet 5 unit and directly into Pro Tools,” explains Arthur Kelm, VP, general manager and chief technical engineer at Capitol Studios. “From Pro Tools, the tracks go into the Neve VR analog console in Studio C for mixing and effects.”
Up On The Roof
Performances have included a show by Best Coast, covered by a multi-camera shoot, including one mounted on a drone and another live streaming the performance online. A performance by Tori Kelly recorded earlier this year really shows off the building’s unique setting among Hollywood’s architectural gems from the mid-20th century.
The studio has already made its mark on remote recording. For the last three years, the facility’s Studio A has been the site of the live orchestra for the Academy Awards show, held at the Dolby Theater, three quarters of a mile down Hollywood Boulevard. It’s part of a larger technical renovation that will also keep its unique components in tip-top shape, including the concrete echo chambers 30 feet underground that were designed by Les Paul.
But the rooftop performances are a new proposition, and it reflects the realities of the times we’re in with the music business. The concerts done there so far have used what Kelm characterizes as a basic house P.A. system that includes QSC mains and monitors as well as a mixer. Capitol’s house engineer oversees the sound recording in the studios while coordinating with an assistant engineer on the roof. The combination of performance area and studio also allows music performances to be taken directly to streaming and satellite distribution.
Considering the economic realities of recording studios and real estate lately, it’s good to see that there’s a Capitol Records building with a roof still on it and a studio still in it. The building and its unique architecture has long been stalked by property developers and was even in danger of being torn down completely in 2011, when the assets of the company were in the hands of Citibank after a disastrous ownership stint with a hedge-fund manager.
Been There, Done That
Capitol is hardly the first to combine studio and live-music venues in the same building, nor singular in its real-estate concerns. On the other side of the country, in condo-crazed Williamsburg, Brooklyn MetroSonic Recording Studios has used its spacious tracking room as a performance venue since it opened in the early 1990s, and in the last two years has created a more formal proposition that’s live-streamed before a live audience from there. Artists perform through a custom-made P.A. and monitor system — cobbled together by studio owner Pete Mignola, who earned his soldering stripes working in the legendary boom-box stores on New York’s Canal Street in the 1980s — and are mixed through a decidedly analog Amek TAC Bullet console.
“The recorded-music business is contracting, and people like to watch their music as much as they like to listen to it,” he explains. “It seemed like an obvious thing to do, especially these days,” which is why he added the live-streaming component to the shows, as streaming moves closer to the core of music distribution. Those shows’ audio is recorded live to multi-track, and the artists will use that content in any number of ways later on. But, says Mignola, what it does is create a complete package for an artist in a comprehensive environment, where traditional recording, a live performance and a broadcast help project the artist through the content clutter that surrounds music today. “You need recorded music and you need to perform live — you need both today,” he says. “I don’t see why you can’t do both in the same place.”
For the record business, the handwriting has been on the wall for years now. The hoped-for participation in live-music revenues from 360 deals never materialized to any significant degree, and with streaming deals like Tidal, successful artists are increasingly taking charge of their own distribution. Using what had been the engine room of the legacy music industry to help get some traction with the live paradigm to which it’s moved makes plenty of sense. What better place to raise the roof than up on the roof?
