Los Angeles, CA (September 9, 2025)—Suzy Shinn’s Los Angeles home studio, perched like a haunted house on a hill, inspires instant intimidation. The metal gate buzzes open after a few firm pushes; then begins the climb to the multi-storied structure. Stepping into the foyer, all intimidation falls away. This space is a music creator’s dream.
The first floor houses an elaborate control room and isolation booth, plus a second room that is a storage space for guitars and synths—but could quickly become another functioning studio. Next door is a guest room and a bathroom. Upstairs, the entire living area is an open-plan studio with a pitched roof featuring five skylights, lots of arched windows pouring in natural light, a spacious kitchen, and a couple of rooms that are living spaces for Shinn and her partner, Fidlar’s Zac Carper.
“I live where I work,” Shinn states, tucking into one of the couches with her dog, Jack. “I combined the two so that essentially the house is a recording studio, and music encompasses our lives.”
This setup is what Shinn has been working toward for most of her life. A native of Wichita, Kansas, she began writing songs as a child, attended Berklee College of Music for a couple of years, and interned in a Los Angeles studio while working as a server at a strip club. She connected with Crush Music, one of the studio’s clients, who snatched her up and put her with producer Jake Sinclair (Panic! at the Disco, Weezer). Serving, literally, as Sinclair’s right hand while he recovered from an injury, Shinn honed her studio skills, becoming a triple threat as an inventive producer, intuitive engineer and natural songwriter.
She produced Weezer’s Van Weezer, engineered Panic! at the Disco’s Pray for the Wicked and vocal produced Dua Lipa’s “Begging” and Sophie’s “Reason Why,” plus she co-wrote Bethany Cosentino’s “Natural Disaster,” to mention just a handful of credits. August saw the release of the Freakier Friday soundtrack and stripped back versions of select songs from Jack’s Mannequin’s debut album, Everything in Transit, marking its 20th anniversary, all produced by Shinn. A Modest Mouse EP is soon to be announced, and she’s working on songs with Kid Sistr, a Los Angeles-based trio at the cusp of its career, and a passion project for Shinn.
Many of these upcoming releases were worked on in Shinn’s home, where the laid-back atmosphere is welcoming and low-pressure. “I always start the session off with some conversation,” she says. “We’re in a beautiful space. I’m very good at reading the room. I try to match the level and meet people where they are. I have a mental list of what I want to get done each day, and I aim for that.”
THE HOME STUDIO
Organization is a cornerstone of Shinn’s workflow. For example, she has a Pro Tools template that lists every instrument in the home studio with the correct inputs. In the comments section, she has the signal chain. This assists in smooth and speedy capture of performances, from anywhere in the house, which is entirely connected by tielines to Shinn’s rig downstairs, making every room a live room or an iso booth as needed.
The iso booth downstairs holds an array of amps as well as a Wunder CM7 microphone, which sometimes functions as a guitar mic, or she’ll use a Royer R-121, Shure SM57 or Sennheiser MD 421. A couple of Apogee Symphony Mk IIs (32/32 and 16/16 combined) serve as the audio interface, and the studio is laptop-based so anyone who installs the driver can plug into the system. A Starsound Dynamix 3000 console with Dave Gallo mods is the centerpiece with 48 inputs, all of which are used. Shinn purchased the board from Phil Feinman, one of the owners of Los Angeles’ defunct music mecca Bedrock.
Upstairs is what Shinn refers to as “the drum room,” as there’s a full olive badge Ludwig kit miked up, ready to go. Shinn sees this room as Studio B, which she says is “relaxed, for when I don’t want the darker, serious vibe.”
“It’s very complicated and intricate setting this place up and getting stuff to work,” she continues. “A lot of the time, I don’t have an engineer. Everything stays up, ready to record. When inspiration hits, you don’t want to then be like, ‘Okay, well, I need an hour to set up.’”
The drum room has AKG 414s about 20 feet across and six to seven feet in the air. A Yamaha U3 piano has a pair of AKG N8s, and a Monheim microphone is a faraway stairwell overhead for any of the instruments upstairs to provide what Shinn calls “that really far weird sound.” Behringer Powerplay 16 headphone systems are everywhere upstairs and downstairs, and anyone who uses them can control their own levels, from wherever they are in the house.
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“I can get all the same sounds that I could at most other studios that I would usually have rented out in L.A.,” says Shinn, who prefers creating sounds by playing or tapping on instruments, as opposed to using soft synths, although she admits she loves those, too.
“I can get really lost in soft synths,” she says. “I can spend a lot of time looking for the perfect sound instead of trying to make something that is musical….It’s interesting how quickly a song gets made and sounds full [with a band] rather than me going through samples or synth sounds. At the end of the day, music isn’t about having a piece of gear. I feel that giving people limitations, in a way, goes back to the song.”
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