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Cherry Beach Sound – A Passionate Commitment to Music

Toronto, November 1, 2004 - Cherry Beach Sound in Toronto has recently undergone a $1 million renovation and redeployment of its 30,000 square-foot facility, and the results are breathtaking. The magnificent new Control Room 1, the centerpiece of the renovation, is a surround mix room featuring a 56-input SSL 6000 console, Studer A-827 analog 24-track tape recorder, 48-track 192 kHz capable Pro Tools HD system, and Genelec 1034B 5.1 surround monitor system.

Perhaps even more eye popping than the equipment, however, is the four-and-a-half foot wide corridor that runs between the control room and the studio, with floor-to-ceiling double glass walls on each side to allow eye contact between performers and engineer.

Don’t call this the new Cherry Beach Sound, though, because its core feature hasn’t changed since it opened in 1982, and that’s the passionate commitment of owner-manager Carman Guerrieri to live music and musicians.

“I like music, I like all music,” Guerrieri says. “It’s all about the groove. It makes you get up and dance and shake, it makes you move, it makes your mind think. That’s what music’s all about - it’s about being creative. It’s not about the business. All we’re trying to do is create an environment so that people who are serious, who want to go it at the global level, can compete. That’s why we bought the SSL console, that’s why we bought the very best high-definition Pro Tools system that you can buy, that’s why we bought the best analog processing gear you can get. That’s why we preserve this live room for recording. That’s why our piano’s a $45,000 piano.”

“Everybody else seems to be getting away from live floors, but that’s our forté. Our forté is to bring back live instruments properly and focus on that. We’re about giving people who are serious an opportunity to be able to get the very best quality they can buy, and that’s happening here at Cherry Beach Sound.”

Guerrieri long ago realized the truth in the axiom that whatever it took to get you here isn’t enough to keep you here, and he has added versatility and full service to his business arsenal.  In addition to its two control rooms and 900 square-foot live studio, Cherry Beach Sound now includes three video suites, encompassing an Avid 9000, chromakey shot box, and a full Beta online suite, 11 rehearsal rooms, a rental department for film and television production equipment, and a repair shop. Rounding out the complex are several affiliated companies including V Films – an award-winning film and television production firm – and Trew Audio Inc., a retailer of production sound equipment for film and television.

“It’s not just the equipment that makes great recordings, it’s the people,” Guerrieri notes.  He credits the entire Cherry Beach Sound team, which today includes co-owner and co-founder Rob Natale, a graduate of the Classical Music program at the Royal Conservatory of Music, University of Toronto, as well as engineers Richard G. Benoit and Inaam Haq, and assistant Sierra Negri.

“The success of this facility is also due to its versatility,” Guerrieri notes. “Our corporate clients can come here with their productions and have three or four studios working at the same time on different components – music and sound design in one, voiceovers in another, off-line editing in another, online editing in yet another, and then back to post-audio mixing after we’re done with the master visuals. So it keeps us in control of what’s going on. I don’t have to shift the project to another part of town; I can keep it all here and focus on it to make sure the entire project is going to be taken care of. The best way for me to keep my customers happy is to have as many services under my roof as possible.”

Cherry Beach Sound is located in a former munitions factory built in 1911 in the head of Toronto’s port area. Because it was originally constructed as a bomb factory, the outer walls are 18 inches thick. This massive construction aids considerably in providing the isolation necessary for live recording in a city environment.

About one-third of the almost 30,000 square feet in the facility remains undeveloped. Situated at the rear of the building, this space is also very versatile. It has at times served as a performing arts space for live theatre and opera, with some 700 seats temporarily installed on risers, and has accommodated a number of large dances and parties. The space is occasionally used as a set shop for construction of scenic elements for film and television. Tie-lines are also available to connect the space to the recording control rooms at the front of the building.

“We’ve done a lot of wonderful recordings back there with some of the bigger bands that can afford it. They love the big room with its three-inch thick wooden ceiling. It has a wonderful sound. And last year, before the big SARS concert in Toronto, AC/DC spent a week back here rehearsing for the show,” Guerrieri recalls.

Cherry Beach Sound wasn’t always as busy or as big as it is today. A drummer by training, Guerrieri first got involved in the business recording bands in his house in the late 1970’s. “The first recording system that I bought cost about $3000. It was the first Fostex A-8 quarter-inch 8 track tape machine in Canada,” he says. “I had a young family with two kids, and I was disciplined enough not to just go crazy and spend the money I needed for the house, the family, the car, and the bills. So I took a second job to pay for the equipment. I drove for Pizza Nova for a year and saved all the money. There I was in my basement recording people left, right and centre. It got to the point where I was so busy I had to ask people to leave my house, because my wife and kids had to go into the bedroom when I needed the laundry room or the family room to record in! Finally I said, ‘I can’t do this any more, I have to take this out of the house.’”

When he moved out, Guerrieri decided to build the studio in its present location. He confesses to being “really green” and making a lot of mistakes in the beginning, but built a good room in the end with design help from Terry Medwedyk. He also had ample assistance from then unknown recording engineer Richard G. Benoit, who had just graduated from Fanshawe College. “Rich didn’t have a place to stay, so I said, ‘OK, I’ll let you stay here, I’ll give you a home, but you have to help me build the studio.’ It was a great studio, but I bought the wrong console. It was a DNR out of Holland. That was a mistake – it was unbalanced and in the very first session we did we were getting RF interference. So I started looking for an alternate console. I couldn’t afford a Neve or an SSL back then, but I bought a Sony MPX-3000, which I still have today in Control Room 2. Then Rich went off to do great things – for example, he’s worked with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Alannah Myles to name a few – and now he’s back in Toronto from L.A. and we’re going to try to keep him very busy here,” Guerrieri says.

Mixing the first project in Control Room 1, Benoit feels that “the new room is translating as good as – if not better than – any other room in Toronto.” He also appreciates the choice of EQs on the SSL 6000.  Half the strips have the black EQ, half the brown, which Benoit characterizes as being “a little warmer” in the low-end. (The SSL EQs derive their nicknames from the colour of the insert on the low-frequency control, and have gone through several revisions, including orange and yellow, over the years.)

Partly due to his early experiences with console technology, Guerrieri spent close to 18 months choosing the board for his new mix room. He’s enthusiastic about the choice. “What I like about this SSL 6000 is not only the EQ configuration. I wanted a console that would be very musical, and the nicest thing about this console is that all the microphone preamp inputs are equipped with Jensen transformers. So you really get that iron-in-the-fire sound throughout the whole console, which is very rare. It’s an expensive option – if I’m not mistaken, about a $500 - $600 option per channel, and every channel on this console has it, and we’re now able to get the sound nice and warm coming in.”

To preserve that warmth, Control Room 1 provides the option of recording acoustic music live to analog tape, with vintage analog signal processing. Guerrieri notes, “We have a sidecar of Neve 1073’s, API’s, Focusrite and Manley gear because it’s the best – we didn’t cheat anywhere.” The signal can then be digitized to Pro Tools HD at sample rates up to 192 kHz to take advantage of the ease of editing and other signal manipulation afforded only by random access digital technology.

“I wanted the best of today’s technology and I wanted the best of the old technology. We can toggle easily between Pro Tools with ProControl and 5.1 surround, and Studer A-827 analog multi-track with the SSL.” He observes that while musicians seem to prefer bouncing off analog before digitizing their audio, corporate clients are more than happy to go straight to digital most of the time. The SSL 6000 has been modified to interface with Pro Tools using custom electronics supplied by Los Angeles-based Desk Doctors. A MultiMax EX multi-format monitor controller converts the console output buses to the correct 5.1 six-channel surround format.

The 5.1 surround monitor system in Control Room 1, comprised of Genelec 1034Bs for the left, right and stereo surrounds, a 1034BC for the centre, and a 7073A subwoofer is capable of reproducing the full range of musical audio at the threshold of feeling, at both the frequency extreme – a solid 19Hz at the bottom end – and at the amplitude extreme, over 125dB SPL per unit. That this earth-shaking sound field can be isolated from the studio is a testament to the design skills of acoustician Martin Pilchner of Pilchner-Schoustal International Inc. as well as to the massive 6-ton glass walls on both sides of the corridor separating the control room from the studio.

“This is the largest piece of glass you’ll ever see in pretty well any studio in the world,” Guerrieri says proudly. “It weighs 12,000 pounds and just the glass alone cost $30,000. We went overboard with the monitors; we got the very best that Genelec offers. Nobody has ever done this in Canada. We wanted to do something really special, so we brought them in. But the amplifiers create so much heat that I’m going to have to get an air conditioning unit just for the machine room, and I can’t put the Studer A-827 in there until I get that sorted out!”

The move from 2-channel stereo to 5.1 surround was motivated in part by a phone call Guerrieri received from singer-songwriter Neil Diamond a few years ago, inquiring whether Cherry Beach Sound was surround-capable. Guerrieri recalls, “All of a sudden I was talking to people who were beginning to remix videos in 5.1, and you know what? It’s really different. It gives us back our desire and our creativity, because now we can do things with 5.1 that are different, we can be like painters trying to create new art forms.”

This appreciation of music as art, as opposed to business, is at the root of Cherry Beach Sound’s approach to the recording industry and the changes that have beset the industry in the last two decades, closing many other studios. The introduction of synthesizers and samplers, the project studio explosion, music downloading on the internet – have all rocked the industry in ways that could not have been foreseen in the early 1980’s.

“Musicians, artists, are the storytellers of this world. They relate the world the way it is. We cannot afford to lose this. Creativity is so important. But in big business, art is looked down on and is not taken seriously unless it can be related to business. If the art form can be taken and made into a business then it’s OK, it’s acceptable. That’s what happened to the record industry. The record industry took that art form and turned it into a business, but they forgot about one thing – the artists. It became all about making money. And now they’re running, running with their tail between their legs, not knowing what’s going on. Thank God I’ve been able to sit back and analyze and make moves. That’s the advantage of having this large property, because I can take the risk, I can see where the industry’s heading and I can go for it,” he says.

“You can’t focus on one style of business. If you do that, it’s like you’re on an island with no boat. The key to our success at Cherry Beach Sound is that we’re versatile. We can do a cartoon one day, the next day it’ll be a classical singer, then a rock band, then a jazz band, then voiceovers, then TV post. What does that actually do? It creates more exposure to anybody who’s using audio.”

“When I first got into this business, there were maybe 5 or 10 big studios in Toronto, and I was considered in the middle. But I was doing more jingles per room than anybody in town. We would take a day or two to do a 30- or 60- second spot. The first crunch in the way the industry changed was losing the band. Producers decided they could make more money creating their own tracks on synthesizers, so that was the beginning of when synthesizers took over from real players. The business started to get slower and slower in terms of recording live music. Producers would bring in just the singer or voiceover, mix it, and then – out the door.

“Then that started to change when a lot of these producers went into their own little basement studios with ADAT's and DA-88’s, and non-linear wasn’t even around back then. I had this building, almost 30,000 square-feet. So I bit the bullet and over the past 10 or 12 years, I’ve been developing the facility where almost the whole building is involved in production. I brought people into the building who are in our business, but not in audio. I saw that video people needed sound design and post audio, so then I started building studios for doing video. My goal was to create an atmosphere here to bring people in who want to be part of a community.”

“I thought if I get the bands here rehearsing, then when they’re finished rehearsing they’ll want to come into the studio and record. So I built 11 rehearsal studios, each one about 650 square feet with floating floors and walls. Now six are rented out full time to bands and the other five are rented out on an hourly basis.

“I believe in musicians,” Guerrieri avows, “and I want to make a statement on the outside of this building, on a big sign out there so that people who drive by everyday will see it and think about it: ‘life without music is like a journey through a desert.’”

 It is this passionate commitment to music, which – perhaps even more than a million dollar makeover – will secure Cherry Beach Sound’s place among the elite recording studios of the world. 

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