Lou Gonzalez chose an SSL AWS900+ SE console for his new Quad Lakeside studio.
Quad Nashville owner and veteran engineer Lou Gonzalez makes this important distinction about his new facility, Quad Lakeside: “It’s a studio in a home, but it’s not a home studio.”
Quad Lakeside is built into a historic house in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., where vaudeville entertainer Herb “The Diamond King” Lloyd once operated a dance hall, and then a speakeasy during Prohibition. Later, the buildling also housed a bed and breakfast. Gonzalez, who says he found the structure essentially abandoned in 1993, turned the dance hall space—which had an existing floating floor and fieldstone walls—into a 30×40-foot tracking room with two 11×16-foot drum/iso rooms and bed-and-breakfast accommodations for musicians. Gonzalez now operates Lakeside as a commercial studio with the help of engineer Rick Slater.
Opened in the winter of 2009, Quad Lakeside also includes a 12×12-foot control room that is equipped with a new SSL AWS900+ SE analog console, Studer A827 machine, Pro Tools HD3 and a variety of newer and vintage mics, monitors and outboard gear, some of which Gonzalez had retained after the sale of his Quad Studios complex in Manhattan five years ago.
“I sold the Manhattan facility thinking I was going to basically retire from the business,” Gonzalez recalls, “and after about three months, I missed it so bad I had to do something.”
Now Gonzalez is happily busy again, recording bands and ensembles in a more relaxing location: “I have a guest house on the property,” he says, “so if someone takes over the house, like a couple of weeks ago when we had a group of 12 musicians in, I can find peace and quiet in the guest house. And with a good running start, you can jump from the front of the house into the lake.”
