Recording Studio Just A `Heart' Beat Away

Its name is Bad Animals, but it might also be called the recording studio that homesickness built.

If Seattle rock 'n' roll musicians Ann and Nancy Wilson didn't miss Seattle so much - and their friends and the city's relaxed lifestyle - they might not have minded spending six months or more in Los Angeles every time their nationally acclaimed band Heart recorded an album.

But after living in Los Angeles for seven months in 1990 while cutting their album "Brigade," the sisters decided there had to be a better way. They talked it over with Steve Lawson, owner of Lawson Productions Inc., one of Seattle's top recording studios. The result is that in January, Lawson will open a $2.2 million state-of-the-art recording studio.

The studio, nicknamed Bad Animals after one of Heart's most successful albums, will be equal in technological sophistication and acoustic design to anything available in Los Angeles, Lawson said. The Wilson sisters, Lawson and his wife, co-owners of the new studio, expect that, once word gets out, musicians from all over the country - including some of the biggest names in the music industry - will want to record there.

Lawson and his wife have a 51 percent interest in the studio, with the Wilsons holding 49 percent interest. Their ties go back to the days when Lawson and Ann Wilson attended Sammamish High School on the Eastside.

"I hope that Bad Animals will be more than a technology center and that it will also be a creative meeting place where people can come together and shape ideas and share creative talent," said Ann Wilson. "That's my ideal."

The Wilsons and Lawson hope that Bad Animals also will be a boon to the growing music scene in Seattle.

With a number of Seattle rock 'n' roll bands now winning national attention, Ann Wilson said that Los Angeles record companies are starting to scout the Pacific Northwest for hot new talent. Bad Animals could allow those bands to stay on their home turf - surrounded by the Pacific Northwest influences that have shaped their music - while they record.

Ed Birdwell, managing director of the Seattle Symphony, said he expects chamber-sized groups from the symphony to use the new studio, especially when they do recordings for movies and television, which require complex mixing.

"I think it will be a big shot in the arm for what the symphony has started and what others in the area have started. It will get the local recording industry going," said Birdwell.

Jane Smith, vice president of Hoyt & Walker, an advertising agency that specializes in radio commercials, said she will use Bad Animals as part of her pitch for new business when she talks to prospective clients outside of Seattle.

"Something like this is the kind of image you need to attract business," Smith said. Hoyt & Walker use Lawson Productions and other local studios for their post-production work.

Lawson said the new studio will also likely attract a new influx of producers, technicians and studio musicians who need to live near a world-class recording studio in order to pursue their careers.

"A preeminent keyboard player from the Bay Area just moved to Seattle, partly because of the studio," Lawson said. "And we've had (sound) engineers moving up here like crazy."

Besides recording music albums, Lawson said the new studio will have the equipment for dialogue editing for movies, a complex process of matching dialogue to video.

A former production director and disc jockey, Lawson got into the recording business 13 years ago when he opened a one-studio production house on Sixth Avenue, where he expanded the business by specializing in the production of radio commercials. Two years ago, he bought the former Kaye-Smith Productions studio on Fourth Avenue near Bell Street.

The Wilsons will inaugurate the new studio by recording an album there as soon as construction is complete.

Though recording for commercials now accounts for about 70 percent of Lawson Productions' business, Lawson says the new studio should help bring in album-recording work that he hopes will eventually account for half of his business.

The studio, which will command a basic rent of about $2,200 per 24-hour period, will be large enough to accommodate groups such as the symphony and large jazz bands. The main recording area, not including the control room and two smaller recording booths, is 2,100 square feet, about twice the size of a typical recording room.