Everybody brings something sacred: Carbondale recording studio captures the music of valley locals

Dave Taylor has spent innumerable hours at his boutique recording studio in Carbondale, mastering, mixing, recording, and editing audio from a swivel chair in the center of a mixer room.

Like the rest of Cool Brick Studios, the space is a carefully engineered auditory playground. 

Perfectly positioned between multiple speakers measured to Taylor’s exact ear height, the chair marks the room’s sweet spot — when he works with a sound file, it sounds exactly like a live performance. 

“They come in, and they bring in their computers and their measurement microphones, and they tune the room, so that when you’re sitting where I sit in that spot, what they call the sweet spot, you’re getting a true reference mix of what’s recorded with nothing to color the sound or affect what you’re hearing,” he said, explaining how the specialized company he hired created the perfect mixer room. 

“For what I do, it’s kind of like using a compass, right?” he added. “If your first bearing is off, then everything is off after that. It just compounds.”

The mixer room is just one part of the versatile boutique studio that he created in one of Carbondale’s historic homes. 

A modified version of a classic American Foursquare home, the property on 86 S. Third St. was purchased by Samuel Pascoe in 1887 from the Carbondale Town and Land Company, according to the Historic Carbondale sign affixed to the house’s wrought iron fence. Ward Tucker, who served as mayor of Carbondale in 1901 and 1902, briefly owned the house after Pascoe until it was sold again in 1905. 

Taylor began renting the property as his commercial studio space in 2011. After purchasing the house in 2019, he was finally able to create the boutique studio he’d envisioned in the historic home. 

Over the next few years, he slowly transformed the residential brick building into his recording studio — which doubles as his home — aptly named Cool Brick Studios. Through thoughtful updates, he kept the original warmth and charm of the historic residence while crafting his optimal recording space. 

The studio has two recording spaces, separated by acoustic glass, that can be operated independently or combined. A vocal booth and an additional room, both part of Studio A, allows him to fully utilize the space. He can record multiple performers in a band simultaneously while preserving the delicate sound of a string section and mitigating interference in the vocal track. 

“I feel like what we’re putting out now can stand with anything that’s coming out of any studio anywhere — New York, Los Angeles, Nashville, Austin,” he said. “I’m really proud of this — the work we do and the people that come in here and do it.”

He’s recorded everything from small string orchestras to EDM artist Illenium, who has gone on to tour internationally, in the boutique studio.

“Typically, I’ll have the drummer and the bass player in (Studio A) where they can groove together, they can lay down the foundation tracks, and then everyone else will be in (Studio B) with the acoustic glass that protects (them from) the bleed over from the drums,” Taylor said. 

Local creatives keep him busy. He’s currently working on a multitude of projects, including an audiobook recording, multiple songs, and documentary sound design. 

“This is a great valley, we have some great musicians,” Tayheor said. “We have some real talent here. We have people that travel and tour with A-list artists that live here or that come here, so I have the opportunity to work with some really great people.”

Carbondale-based band Typical Ghost is one of many of his local clients.

“It was a great experience. The recording sessions were super comfortable and the atmosphere was relaxed,” Typical Ghost bassist Sam Chittenden said. “I thought Dave was awesome to work with. He was encouraging, had good insights, good suggestions, and was very receptive to feedback from us throughout the entire process.

“I don’t think the value of a local recording studio of that quality can be understated,” he added. “Having a space like Cool Brick along with an experienced and professional engineer like Dave, and having it in the valley is an amazing thing for local musicians to be able to take advantage of.” 

Although he’s worked with big artists, some of Taylor’s most memorable sessions are with local creators and students.

“Everybody brings in something that is sacred. It’s their creation,” he said. “So I get to work with them and help them see what they’ve created, go to the next level or become what they had envisioned. That probably is the best thing.”

A young rapper and his mother made a particularly large impact on him. 

The day after her son’s recording session at Cool Brick Studios, the rapper’s mom called Taylor.

“‘She said, ‘I just want you to know how important this was because my son, he’s adopted. He came out of the foster system. He had a really hard childhood, a really tough life. He’s been with us for a while and when we left your studio, we were walking down the steps and he said to me, ‘Mom, I’m really proud of myself,'” Taylor said. “She said ‘He’s never called me mom.’

“I think it gave him some self confidence that he didn’t have before because he came in and did this,” he added. 

Not one to be confined to a singular creative field, his skillset is as versatile as his studio space. 

Although he has a bachelor’s degree in economics with a minor in chemistry, he started his diverse career in broadcast radio. He’s been a radio DJ and morning zoo show host, done voiceover work for television, film and commercials, and apprenticed at mastering houses in New York City. He has even produced his own music — he plays guitar and bass and composes — and multiple documentaries, including “Whitewashed: The Ethnic Cleansing of America,” and the short film “Unthinkable.” 

“The interesting thing is, it’s all very similar,” he said. “Music is very similar to film. It’s very similar to photography. We’re all doing that same layered creative production, so it kind of meshed in the end.”

Currently in the midst of producing another documentary, Taylor is confident that the creative process will lead him in the direction he needs to go. 

“That’s what I find with all creative stuff, like with music, somebody will bring in a song and we’ll start working on it, and then if we’re careful, we don’t get in the way, the song will sort of direct us as to where it wants to go,” he said. 

“I look at all of them as living, breathing things — they’re born, and they grow, and they mature, and then eventually, you let them go out into the world,” he added. “They will kind of self direct, in a creative sense, if we can just get out of our way to listen to what they’re bringing to us as a creative entity.”