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There are a couple of core guiding principles that shape the decisions made at Covered Bridge Recording, a new Dolby Atmos-compatible recording studio in Bellevue, TN, a few miles outside of Nashville. First, the belief that good input leads to good output; and second, each piece of gear must be congruent with every other piece of gear in the studio. That’s how the one-year-old establishment, with 3000 square feet of dedicated studio space, is quickly building a name for itself among a selection of artists from diverse genres.
In a short period of time, co-owners Grace Ritter, a drummer and audio engineer, and her musician/engineer/producer father Don have built a versatile recording studio that is ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best in the Nashville area. The outboard gear is well curated, offering both titans of pro audio and boutique designs. The analog gear is complemented by a modern hybrid digital workflow. Classic vintage mics share shelf space with custom-made mics built by Grace herself.
With that background, it’s no surprise that when it came time to select a console for their space, they went with the API 2448 24-channel console for its legendary tone, versatility, and efficient workflow.
We sat down with Grace and Don to talk about their space, what drew them to the API 2448 console, how they selected the gear for their studio, and what Vintage King brought to the process that they really appreciated.
Tell us a bit about Covered Bridge Recording and the work you do.
Grace: Covered Bridge Recording is a full-service recording studio. We have a Dolby Atmos room with a 9.1.4 setup, and we can do both tracking and mixing in Dolby Atmos. We've got an extensive collection of guitars, keyboards, outboard gear, and microphones, and we try to have an all-in-house experience for our studio, meaning everything that you need is here. Our beautiful API 2448 console is the main feature of the studio.
Don: I've had a guitar amplifier company for about 20 years called Category 5 Amplification. Our design philosophy has been to make old-school-style tube amplifiers with a few new features. We've built more than 60 different models of amplifiers over 20 years. At the studio, we’ve got about 25 of them, covering a large swath of Marshall, Vox, Fender, and Trainwreck-style tones.
At the studio, we have 44 channels of analog; 24 with the console, and then another 20 channels, of which 12 are 1073 Neve channel strips. We’ve got quite a bit of power where we can essentially have almost everything mic’d up and leave it that way. So, it's not your normal home studio; it’s a studio that's in a home, but it's not a home studio.
On the record label side, we've had a record label called Station House Records for about five or six years, and we've done four records with the label. We just finished one with the singer/songwriter Kara Grainger, who did some recording here at the studio as well, so we have a little bit of history in the music business.
Grace has been a drummer for most of her life, and discovered she really enjoys recording and mixing great music. She has employed her engineering skills with hands-on work to build the studio from scratch. We believe Covered Bridge Recording is a special place here in Nashville.
Have there been any sessions at the studio that were particularly memorable?
Grace: Our true first session, while testing out the studio, is definitely not a normal first testing session that many people would have. We had Erik Eldenius, the drummer for Billy Idol; the guitar player Lance Lopez from Two Wolf; bassist Michael Devin for Whitesnake; and Peter Keys on the keys, who plays with Lynyrd Skynyrd. That was our band to figure out if everything was working, so it was a really great first session.
We’ve also had some really cool events here, like when we had Tommy Sims hosting an event to support Chuck Rainey’s new book. It was a whole night dedicated to bassists, and we had a big roundtable of some of the greats, which was so fun to have in Nashville! They also had a Zoom call to show Chuck some love for what he has done for the industry, with even Sheryl Crow on the Zoom call. It was a standout night for sure!
We also recently hosted a songwriting camp with Popville, and had around 20 songwriters at the studio, which was a great way to use the unique space.
Recently, we had a really cool session with the alt-country artist Kitty Coen, where there was a mostly all-girl band and an all-girl engineering team here at the studio. It was really, really cool to have just women as a part of the whole experience!
What drew you to the API 2448 24-channel console?
Don: When we started off, we were actually just looking for a place where Grace could have a nice Dolby mix room. Then we found this house in Bellevue, and aside from the space for a mix room, it also had the ability to do some tracking, so we went from needing just a good Dolby speaker system and some outboard gear to thinking we needed a console as well.
We started looking at consoles that were more Dolby Atmos-oriented, and about halfway through that process, we decided that we wanted to build this place not just for Grace to work in, but as a destination for other producers and engineers. We then had to think differently about industry standards and what console had more flexibility and could still work with Dolby Atmos. Vintage King really helped us direct that discussion back towards the API 2448, and it became the focus to build this space around.
The folks at Vintage King did a fantastic job. We were really only eight weeks out from the time we ordered the console to the time it arrived, custom-built with the producer’s desk in the middle, and a whole selection of other industry EQs in the console, in addition to the API EQs. That really gave us an opportunity to have something that anyone could come in and produce or engineer.
One of our design criteria was that we wanted the quality of everything in this studio to be congruent. We want the guitars to be as good as the console, the console to be as good as the outboard gear, which should be as good as the mics and the monitors, and so on. We didn't want to leave a spot in the studio experience that was subpar, and it’s quite a gear list! We built a unique place with great gear available, so you can just show up and be in the creative mindset.
Grace: As we were figuring out if we wanted to be an in-the-box studio or a console studio, I was influenced by some great producers who said if you build it with a console, they will come! Vintage King was great with helping us set up meetings with these giants of pro audio so that we could ask questions about their consoles, learn about the gear, and figure out what was right for us.
You can follow the traces of the API sound throughout music history; there’s a reason you see it turn up a lot with classic records. I had worked on a lot of APIs in the past, so I felt really comfortable with the console. It’s also really helpful for my creative process to have the ability to mix things up and use it truly as an inline console, or use it as a split console with how it's set up. It gives you a lot of possibilities for your sessions, and Vintage King was really great with helping us figure out exactly what we wanted in the console, how it should be set up, and coordinated for easy installation.
API also just lends itself to being the best possible place to begin for everyone. At Covered Bridge, we have all types of genres come through. My background is in blues, so I've had a lot of blues productions come through here. We also do a lot of Americana, soul and gospel, rap projects, and some classic country as well, and the API has really been a great starting point. That console can take anything. It can give you the best sound in whatever genre or workflow you’re looking for.
How did you customize it for your studio’s needs, and what are some of your favorite features?
Grace: We split it up to have a 30-inch producer's desk in the middle, so the API is now truly the center of the room; everyone is drawn to it because it’s the center point. People can work right in the middle with the computer and then go to each side to work with the faders.
We opted for the Flying Faders, which have been really helpful with the DAW infrastructure. We use it a lot for controlling Pro Tools and setting up groups, and it has made the workflow so much easier because you can just tap two buttons and everything's already set up for you. It’s great to be able to have some recall, and having control with those faders has made sessions so much easier. Especially with other people coming in, if you need to set it to zero, you just press these two buttons, and it’s done.
Don: Another thing is, because we were very focused on Dolby Atmos, we had to have – I wouldn't say line of sight – but we had to have line of ear to the monitors. We did not want a computer screen getting in the way of speakers, so that's the other thing that’s great about this API design. It really is the best console for the Dolby Atmos experience.
What’s also great about the 2448 is that it integrates very well for a hybrid analog/digital workflow, right?
Grace: We definitely switch back and forth between the DAW integration and fully analog sessions. It’s also great that you can use both at the same time, so you can get that classic sound from API, but it’s also well integrated with a modern workflow. We have a lot of young producers and engineers who come through here who might not have much experience with true classic consoles, so for them, to be able to press a few buttons and get control through the DAW has been great. It gives us an opportunity to have everyone be comfortable, find their sound, and be in control.
Don: Also, you can pull up all the classic plug-ins and manage them very quickly in a session, pretty much while you're recording. If you wanted to pull up an 1176 and dial something in really quickly, you can do that with a plug-in and then later go back, take the plug-in out, and put a real 1176 in. Since you've already figured out how that's going to work, you can enhance the entire workflow with all the great analog gear that we've got.
You’ve curated a variety of EQ tones for your clients to choose from in the console. Tell us more about that.
Grace: I wanted to have a lot of the classic API EQs in the console so that we have the API sound through and through, but I also wanted to give people the opportunity to use different styles of EQs. For example, some people want Neve EQs on vocals, or they like to use a Pultec to really drive in certain details, and the 2448 is so modular that if you really wanted to, you could just switch everything around.
Engineers and producers who come in really love that about the 2448 because they can just move the EQs wherever they want to on the channels and set it up for their session and for the sound they're trying to produce. So that was super important to us, to really have a very versatile experience in the studio, so you don't feel like you're boxed in.
For our bus section, we wanted the API 529C stereo compressor to stay in the console and work as a good glue because it’s such a great bus compressor. We also wanted to have the Smart Research C1LA compressor from Sunset Sound in the bus section because it’s a very classic compressor, and, for us, that was the best way to put it into the studio. Since it’s in the bus section, people can route to it pretty effortlessly and put it into their sessions with ease.
We also have the Stam Audio 4000 MK3+ 500 Series SSL version, and Stam’s SA-1b, which is their 500 series version of the CL 1B stereo compressor. We have some API filters as well that people can use as returns or to help glue certain aspects of the mix.
What was it like working with Kyle Hunt and Vintage King during the purchase of the console?
Don: They brought a lot of experience to the process. Especially when we were teetering back and forth between consoles, having their input was great. A console is a major purchase; you're spending way north of $100,000, so you want to do that part right. [Laughs] We were in a bit of a hurry at first, but then we had to step back and think a little bit more about it, and they were great about being able to help us get to the right answer.
And then to have the 2448 show up in record time was great! It’s probably because Vintage King buys a lot of API consoles. [Laughs] I don't think they were talking to the junior salesperson at API when it came time to get our console ordered.
Grace: Their network is amazing! They gave us a lot of references to people in Nashville who had bought API consoles through Vintage King, and everyone was so nice and welcoming because of the great relationship that Vintage King has with its clients.
We were able to go to a few studios and actually check out the consoles in person because of Vintage King and Kyle Hunt’s connections. It really helped that we could see the console in person and figure out if this was the direction we wanted to take.
Building a community, one console at a time! You have some great outboard gear ranging from Rupert Neve classics to pieces from newer developers like Stam Audio. Tell us about how you select your outboard gear.
Don: I noticed something about the way Stam Audio built their outboard gear; it was old-school, tube-oriented, and very accurate to the vintage sound, but then they put three or four other features in that had never come with the original unit, and that is actually the exact same design philosophy we have at Category 5. To me, that was the other congruent piece of the design; there are clear connections between how they think about and design their equipment, and how we design amps at Category 5. We’ve got more than 20 pieces of outboard gear from Stam Audio at the studio.
Their mics are fantastic as well! Grace has built a bunch of mics, so we know a little bit about that, but the ones that Joshua van der Stam builds are fantastic, too.
As far as Rupert Neve goes, I mean, Rupert is the best, and anything that he's making has got enough new thought processes in it. He's not just trying to recreate a 1073; he’s got something that's even better, and we wanted some of the ‘even better’ stuff in the studio as well.
Grace: Another piece of outboard I love is the classic Tube-Tech CL 1B. We’ve built a pair of Covered Bridge LA-2As, and I will say I really like that as well. I might be a little bit biased, but that's a favorite for me. [Laughs] I also love our 1960s Ludwig drum kit; it’s my favorite kit to play here. And my last pick would be our 1957 Fender Precision Bass.
Don: And then, I'm a guitar guy, so we do have a pretty outstanding collection of vintage guitars. There are Les Pauls, Stratocasters, and Telecasters from the ‘50s and ‘60s; we've got Jazzmasters, Jaguars, some old 58 Danelectros and Supros as well, which are just classic slide guitars. It’s been great to have a really, really deep collection of guitars.
You have some great keyboards in your collection, too.
Don: We are blessed with that as well. I do have ownership in a piano company here in Dallas, so we have a selection of Steinways that we can draw upon. We found an old 69 Steinway B with a nice walnut case, and we completely rebuilt the entire action to have it at concert level. All of the working parts of the piano are new and have all been tuned to concert-level touch and feel. Then we've got the vintage B3, a vintage Wurlitzer, a restored 1978 Fender Rhodes as well, and a 76 Hohner Clavinet for the funk.
Grace: I asked a bunch of studio owners and keyboard players I’d worked with: “Hey, when people come in, what are they expecting for keyboard sounds?” I wanted to know what some of the backbones of creating a variety of genres were. The Juno-60 came up in that conversation, as did the Mellotron, as well as the Prophet 10. We wanted to give people a lot of versatility to create and craft through sound in the studio. We also have a Nord Stage 3 to cover any ground we missed. The idea is that all the base gear is here; you don't need cartage.
Which microphones do you find yourself using most often?
Grace: We have a pair of vintage RCA 44s, which is one of my favorite mics; we love to pull that out all the time. It’s a classic ribbon, and it's really versatile, so it gets used a lot.
Don: Grace has built about ten mics for the studio, including classics like U67s, U87s, C12s, M49s, and 414s, and those have all turned out to be very, very good. We’ve had shootouts with some of the real McCoys, and they hang right in there. We put NOS tubes in them, so they're essentially the same circuit that you see in $20,000 or $30,000 mics. It's really helped us have a very broad range of mics for a smaller studio.
One of the sayings that we have at Covered Bridge is: ‘good inputs make good outputs’. So we’ve really attempted to make sure that we have the best of inputs, and then it's left to the artist to put their magic into it. So that's a little bit of our philosophy kind of wrapped up in a nutshell, and we’ve already experienced some really great outcomes on the music side.
Do you have any favorite plug-ins?
Grace: FabFilter Pro-Q 4 is one of our favorites; it’s kind of the classic that I go to for pretty much all the time. I'm loving Soothe2 from Oeksound, and we have almost all of the plug-ins from Universal Audio. You can choose anything from their batch, and it's fantastic, so it’s hard not to go with something from their collection to add to another input.
What's a typical day in the studio like?
Grace: A lot of people start between 9 and 10:30 am and then go until about 6 or 7 pm. People come in, get coffee, catch up for an hour or so, and then once people get comfortable with the space, we go into the songs.
We've got a basketball hoop, a pickleball court, and a pool, so sometimes we'll go out, shoot hoops, and then go back in. We’ve had people jump in the pool in between sessions, too, and it’s nice to get some sunlight. Thankfully for us, we've got a lot of windows, so it's not a very dreary or dark studio, but to actually go outside and give yourself a breath before you get back to work is nice.
In the back, we have an outdoor stage, so we have private events and shows during the summer, once it's warm enough outside. We've got a place where you can put food trucks or tour buses, plenty of parking, and we have a lot of friends that just want a place to have a show or have people come out for an album listening party. We’ve had a lot of fun experiences with that. You can actually watch the sun go down, and then at night you can see the stars. It’s a good location where you can be in the realm of music and also be pretty close to nature.
Are you working on any exciting projects right now that you're able to talk about?
Grace: I've been working on the Kitty Coen project, and it's sounding really cool, so I’m looking forward to that.
Don: We’ve also got a big jazz project that I can't say a lot about yet, but once that gets underway, it’ll be a really interesting project to share later.
And then we've got a project that we're going to do with Luther Dickinson, who is a guitar player for the North Mississippi Allstars at the moment, but he's also played for the Black Crowes for a few years. He’s a good friend and a Category 5 artist, and we're going to get some of the A-lister session musicians to come to the studio to take it over. They can't bring anything; we're just going to make a record with whatever we've got here at the studio and see how it turns out.
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