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Ryan Lewis can best be described as a creative powerhouse. He began his career as an in-demand photographer and videographer, enjoyed worldwide success as a composer/producer/engineer through his GRAMMY-winning collaborations with rapper Macklemore, his genre-spanning work with artists like Kesha and Dan+Shay, and his co-write on the opening song of The Greatest Showman, to name a few. Now, he can add studio designer to his list of talents.
Over the past few years, Ryan has been building two ambitious studios on the West Coast: one in Northeast LA, and another, more private, destination studio in Central Washington State, on which he’s putting the finishing touches with a team from Vintage King.
We sat down with Ryan recently to learn about his two studios, why the Harrison Audio 32Classic console was the perfect choice for his creative process, what it’s been like working with Vintage King’s James Good and Frank Verschuuren through the installation process, and what he’s looking forward to for the rest of the year.
What was your vision for both of your studios?
I’ll start with the one in Central Washington State. When I was working on the second full-length album with Macklemore, we were trying to get outside of the city, so we went out to my parents’ cabin with a U-Haul for almost two months and just set up. When I got back, I was like, ‘Wow, I would love to have something like that which has gear set up and is built for making music’.
I grew up in Spokane and moved to Seattle when I was 15, so I hadn't spent much time in Central Washington, but both of my parents and grandparents are from Central Washington – my grandpa was actually born in a shack five minutes down the road from the Washington studio, which is crazy! So I fell in love with the area, and I found this old 1940s genuine log cabin on a stretch of canyon where you drive through a pear orchard to get to it. I just loved it, so I got that around 11 years ago now, and then it just became this evolving build.
Back in the city, I’d had some experience building studios, like our downtown Seattle studio for example, but out here in the canyon, it was really my first time building a studio from the ground up, and learning just how complicated that is. I made plenty of mistakes, re-imagined and redesigned things along the way – and ended up with something really unusual, and really special to me.
My vision was a place where you can disconnect without giving up the power of a real recording studio – and a place where you can invite a lot of people out. I’ve always found that going somewhere a bit remote to make music unlocks something you just don’t get in the city.
Having worked in Seattle and Los Angeles, it’s amazing to be in hubs with incredible musical history and famous studios, but now, more than ever, it feels like the human process of being creative – songwriting, producing – is being challenged in every way, shape and form. That’s a part of my motivation and excitement to open the doors to this place – a magical destination for people to connect, and one that, up to this point, has been available only to me and to friends of mine.
It’s been a multi-year-long, slow-moving evolution of designing the studio itself, and the philosophy and thinking behind how it could work and what it can do. It’s a bit of a unicorn. On the one hand, it’s a beautiful and remote spot, but then it truly has the most state-of-the-art facilities and equipment.
My other studio is in Los Angeles, where my wife and I moved back in 2020. A few years later, a kind of DIY rock studio popped up for sale right on the edge of Highland Park. I wasn’t hunting for a studio, but it stood out to me, so I went to check it out – and it had an amazing foundation, the bones really. My experience of LA has been Northeast LA, and having a studio that serves Highland Park, Eagle Rock, and that whole zone where so many creatives live was exciting to me. I’m building it up to be its own thing – and a companion to the studio up north.
The Washington studio has always been personal – almost like a house – even though I imagined that at some point I’d open the doors. Down in LA, the idea was always a place for community: to record and mix, with a vibe all its own, a gathering place of sorts.
While the two studios have their own vibe and style, in really different environments, they’re built as sister studios – the same Harrison 32Classic console, and a lot of the same philosophy and gear. If you started working in one, moving to the other would feel familiar.
Let’s talk about the Harrison 32Classic which is at the heart of both studios – what drew you to the console and what are some of your favorite features?
The modern Harrison 32Classic console is built on top of what I see as a sleeper legend; I mean, the Harrison 32C is Michael Jackson, it’s ABBA – it was a monster hit machine for specific artists, but also for other lesser-known, more niche artists.
Then of course there are the EQs and the filters, with Dave Harrison himself having invented the in-line console signal flow. I’ve actually had an MCI tape machine since well before these consoles – and Harrison worked with MCI in the ’70s before building boards under his own name.
So there’s a lot to love in the history – the sound of the pres and EQs and all that – but none of that is why I bought the console. What got me was the execution: they brought these legendary components back to life in a modern machine, and they put converters almost everywhere – on every channel, every bus, the master – with a built-in Dante interface carrying it all to the DAW. Onboard conversion isn’t a brand-new idea, but the way Harrison did it opened up completely new thinking for me about how a studio could function when the AD/DA happens inside the console.
That sounds exciting, tell us more.
The design of this studio was built around two things I really wanted: effects routing and insert routing at the push of a button. It’s not that patching is bad – every normal on the patchbay can still be broken and re-routed however you want – it’s about leveraging new technology to make the analog world move faster and easier. It keeps things fun, and it keeps ideas moving.
The console is what makes that possible. With converters on every output, your recording signal is already captured and delivered to the DAW faithfully – and every analog output is still sitting there, available for other purposes. In some ways it feels like having mults all over the place.
So I took all those free analog outputs – every channel, every bus, the mix – and fed them into what I call the effects matrix: a whole system of buttons that carries signal out to different pieces of outboard – reverbs, delays, saturation, modulation, whatever it is – and brings it back to the console, without a patchbay ever slowing you down.
Then, on the buses and the master, there’s the second piece: insert routers – the kind of routing devices you’d usually find in a mastering room (an SPL Hermes and a pair of Dangerous Liaisons, for the nerds). Push a button, and you’ve built a chain of EQ, compression and saturation; push again, and it’s a different chain, or a different order.
I grew up mostly producing inside the box, although I’ve always loved recording on a console – the Harrisons are the first I’ve owned. I don’t really believe in the “never-commit” mentality of working on a laptop. It’s how I’ve always been, and I don’t think it’s entirely helpful. At least not for me. But I’m still wired to expect that I can always go back. The trick of this console is that I feel comfortable committing ideas in the analog world, because the internal converters are always quietly holding onto unprocessed captures first. It pushes right against that hesitance producers like me can feel in the analog space – and it opens the door to the commit-as-you-go workflow I actually want my brain to be free to do.
And you can still run this console completely conventionally – spread a song across it, go Dante on everything, mix into the buses. The difference is having the option to fire up any piece of gear in the building and throw ideas at the wall, fast. That was my intrigue with the console – the Dante aspect – and it’s reshaped how I think studios can work.
Taking the historic sound of the console and all of the functionality that they've added to it, it appears that you’ve set up your workflow to really maximize its potential, which is great because when you're creating, the last thing you want is to stop and set up gear or repatch things.
Yeah! It’s an amazing-sounding console, and the way they’ve reimagined it allows for some of the fastest workflows I’ve ever had without any expense to quality. It’s different – it lets me work in ways I couldn’t on other consoles.
I read an old interview with you at the start of your journey with mixing, and listening to you now and the creative way you’re thinking about this console, really seems to reflect your evolution as a mix engineer.
Yeah, if I didn't love mixing, I wouldn’t do it. I love recording, and I love all of these things, but certainly, my thinking behind a lot of this comes from my interest in mixing.
What has it been like working with James Good and Vintage King during this entire process?
It's been great! James is such a pro, and he's become a good friend too. He is such an advocate for big, complicated visions, trying to figure out how to bring them together, and how to improve upon ideas and problem solve. I found a real teammate in him in what has now been a couple of years in the development of both these studios. He’s not just a good guy; he's also super smart, super accommodating, and really good at his job.
And then there’s Frank [Verschuuren], who has probably been to Washington five or six times at this point during the install of the studio because it's such a tremendous amount of work. It's a big, complicated system, and to do this the way that I thought we could do it was just unique. Frank is a fellow nerd, really smart, and has also become a dear friend, so it’s been great working with Vintage King. And the patchbay design alone – Frank spent months on that; it’s the reason this whole system works.
I would say I've been a lifelong customer, probably since my late teens, but I had never collaborated with VK before, and certainly not to this extent. They totally understood what I was going for and really got the potential of both these studios. The Washington studio, especially, is a really hard one to explain – you can show pictures and stuff, but it's a really special spot [which you only really get] when you go up there, so it was cool to have James up there, and obviously, Frank has been up there a bunch, and he now knows the area really well. He's got his favorite restaurants in the area and stuff! [Laughs]
What are you looking forward to for the rest of the year?
More than anything, I can’t wait to see this studio fully come to life. It’s been a long project, and there’s nothing more exciting about a physical space where music is made than wondering what amazing art is going to come out of it.
Heading into next year, I’ll finally get to start sharing what has been, up to this point, my special thing – one that I hope will become a lot of other people’s special place too. I want to see it put to the test, and see other people’s minds get blown when they get to mess around with all this gear and get re-inspired by sound and mixing and weird ideas and all the rest.
Also, the last thing I’ll say is, I’ve really found a passion for designing and building studios, kind of architecture and construction in general. That whole world of creativity outside of making music itself has introduced me to some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, working in acoustics, electricity, and the science of it all. I’ve learned so much! I feel so lucky that people with some of the craziest careers in the industry have had a hand in these rooms and the decisions along the way.
As much as recording studios in general are considered a nonessential in the music industry, I still think that collaborating is an essential, and being in a place where you feel like your best work can come out of you is still an essential. I’ve poured my heart and soul into these spaces – the colors, the fabrics, materials, and shapes – until they felt like they were functioning and feeling the best that they could. That’s been the mission, and I’m really happy to get to the other side of it – opening the doors to incredible artists, writers, and creatives of all types.
