Songfinch’s Brad Dollar On The Company’s New Chicago Studio

Since its founding in 2016, Songfinch has delivered an astounding amount of custom-made music to customers around the world—over 250,000 songs and counting. The Chicago-based start-up is known for transforming deeply personal story prompts into giftable songs with the help of 1,800 songwriters working remotely, but Songfinch is up to something a little different, as evidenced by the new studio that’s slated to open soon in its hometown. To learn more about Songfinch and the gear they chose to fill their new studio with, we spoke with Director of Artist Services and self-described “studio dork” Brad Dollar.

Can you explain what Songfinch is for somebody who's never heard of it? What exactly do you guys do?

We help customers from all over the world create personalized songs that reflect their lives. We connect them with artists who can bring those songs to life. They go through our platform and input details that prompt a song to be born. Then our artists get that information and put the song together between four and seven days after receiving it. That's kind of the bones of the business. Our overall mission is to empower creatives to have a life outside of the struggle of being an artist, and actually give them a sustainable source of income that can support everything else they're doing. Every day we’re grateful that we're not making toxic stuff. Like, we're actually making something that's really bringing joy to people's lives.

Songfinch has built a new studio, is that right?

Right. So, we have 1800 artists globally that are part of Songfinch. A huge chunk of them are in Nashville, and the other chunk of them are in Chicago, which is our home base. And we have a building just outside of downtown in an up-and-coming area. We've had this building for about two years, and at the top of this year, we started construction on the fifth-floor studio, mostly for Songfinch projects but also for Songfinch artists later down the pipe. It's not meant to be a commercial space, it's purely meant to facilitate how a label studio would. We want our artists to come there and be able to craft higher-quality versions of their songs. We also have a lot of different content projects and things we're gonna do in the studio.

Our artists are all awesome engineers and producers—they all have great shit. Like, they don't even need our studio at all, so we wanted to build a place that they would want to come to, but where it's easy to kind of plug in and play. So, it's got a lot of sweet analog kind of stuff. We’ve got a nice mic collection coming in, nice outboard gear, and stuff. But it's really meant to be as simple as they can come in and plug and play, bring their laptops, use our computer if they want, and just be able to start creating and feel like they're at home, but in a different place. There’s an iso room, a nice-sized control room, floor-to-ceiling glass windows that look out to the real world. It's a cool little space.

Do you have a debut project you're going to break the studio in with?

Yeah. We've been trying to hedge our bets on this AI thing a little bit going forward. One of our goals, which is definitely this year but definitely beyond, is to empower artists with those tools. We don't want them to get left in the dust, even outside of Songfinch.

I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the gear you’re using for the studio. What are your thoughts on the Universal Audio Apollo x16 Heritage Edition 18x20 Thunderbolt 3 Interface? How do you foresee using that in the studio?

A big part of this is for artists to be able to come, plug in, and play, and a lot of them currently use Apollos. We survey our artists frequently and they constantly say they’re using universal audio gear to bring our songs to life. Many of them have their own studios, so we want them to have them. For me, as the person who sourced all the gear, I wanted to have some super high-end Prism rig or something that costs $10,000 a channel. But again, getting back to the heart of this, we're just trying to make music and it was like, do we really need to do all that? And the Apollo, the Universal Audio stuff is right on that campus. It sounds great. We also added a UAD-2 Satellite, so we'll use a lot of the real-time processing they use when they come in—all that analog modeling sauce they have. So that was probably a big part of it too.

How about that Neve 1073OPX 8-Channel Mic Preamp?

Again, our artists already have great stuff, so we want them to feel excited about coming to us. And one thing a lot of our artists often don't have, are racks of Neve preamps. It wouldn't have been cost-effective to spend $4,000 on one channel. The OPX is an eight-channel unit, so, you spend four grand, and you get eight channels. Does it sound like a vintage Neve? No, but the discernible difference to our artists and our customers is not really going to matter. When we tell our artists about it, they're excited about it. And I think at this point in time in 2023, gear snobbery is down, and people are just really into brand and name recognition. You put “Neve” on anything, and it's like ‘That's neat, it must sound good.’ So I think that's a part of it, but also it’s a really flexible creative tool.

So, if I'm getting this right, it's a really high-quality product combined with accessibility for the artist so they can come in and quickly know how to work with it and everything?

For sure, yeah. We want them to be excited because we know they don't have to come here. Our whole platform is built on them being self-sufficient. So if they're coming here, we want them to be genuinely juiced to be in a studio and to be using the gear and to wanna be here with us.

Do any of the new studio mics stand out as ones you're really excited about?

We just tried to build a solid collection that would last us for a long time. I think it was hard to whittle it down to the few that we have. We got a Manley Reference Cardioid vocal mic, which is a really great value mic. I think that is probably the shiniest mic on the list. It just sounds beautiful, and it's really not a sound that everybody has access to.

What was it like working with Jacob Schneider and Vintage King in general?

Awesome. I mean, it's just great to have personal support. I think when you spend this level of money on gear, it's nice to know it's not just like a shopping cart of stuff that’s delivered and no one knows what’s happening. There were a few things that, just given the climate, were back-ordered, so it was nice to have that support making sure they got delivered. Everything is so personal, just like everything is so personalized for our customers. We don't get to experience it very often, so it's nice to kind of get that a little bit.

What else is in store for Songfinch? Anything else you want to mention?

Just doubling down on our artists and on this approach of replenishing them so they can replenish customers with songs. Replenishing people's lives with the joy that comes from these songs. Like, an average person who hears a song about Eileen in Iowa might not care much about it, but for Eileen in Iowa, it could be one of the most important things she's ever heard in her life. She's never made a song. She got this for her husband who just passed away and it's got details about their life and she's moved to tears. And so, for artists to be able to have that one-to-one connection, which is the entire reason they make songs in the first place, we want to use all of our efforts to make that more of a normal thing for them to experience.

If you’re interested in purchasing any of the gear mentioned in this blog, contact a Vintage King Audio Consultant via email or by phone at 866.644.0160.