Los Angeles, CA (September 28, 2020)—When Erik Nilsson opened a second LemonTree Studios in the L.A. area, he included a live room that any tenant can tap into through the facility’s Dante network and Focusrite RedNet audio interfaces.
Nilsson’s goal with his original facility was to offer fellow songwriters, producers and mixers reasonably priced yet well-constructed, acoustically treated rooms into which they could move their own equipment. He also hoped to build a room for himself.
But LemonTree Studios was so successful that Nilsson, who is originally from Minnesota and has been in L.A. for about 20 years, eventually rented every room, leaving no space for himself. So he opened another facility in the city’s Highland Park district. Working with Vintage King’s audio consultant, product specialist and system integrator Frank Verschuuren, Nilsson networked the 13 rental rooms — each with double-wall construction and floated from adjacent rooms — to a 400-sq.-ft. shared live space.
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“I was brought in at an early stage when Erik was trying to integrate one live room with about 12 studio control rooms,” says Verschuuren. “We were trying to figure out the best and easiest way of integrating the one live room with all the other rooms, and the Dante workflow came up. With that in mind, I designed work and signal flow of the system.
“We came up with the idea of setting up a ‘floater’ Focusrite Red4 Pre that the various rooms could use as their mainframe I/O on their recording system. All that was necessary was to plug the Red 4Pre into a network port in the room to connect to the live room. With a preset file for Dante routing and RedNet Control, it made it an easy, almost plug-and-play scenario for anyone to use.”
“You can record up to 32 Focusrite channels from the live room using our floating Red 4Pre in any studio,” Nilsson elaborates. “Or you can reamp in the live room with the Red 4Pre from any studio to the Red 8Pre line out/mic in. Or track on the local iMac or a personal laptop with the Red 8Pre and RedNet in the live room. Or use any lunchbox or vintage front-end by using line-in on the Red 8Pre in the live room while recording from your studio with the Red 4Pre.”
There has been no shortage of talent working in LemonTree’s rooms. Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Skrillex have all worked on projects at one location or the other, and tenants include some of the talent behind artists such as Rihanna, Ariana Grande, Camila Cabello, Post Malone, Katy Perry, Mark Ronson, Kylie Minogue, Charli XCX, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Duran Duran, Jennifer Lopez, Mark Anthony and numerous others. Additionally, Adam Harr’s Blue Oak Mastering room is located at the Highland Park location.
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