Students turn pro in studio
ISSUE: 02/28/07 > A&E > Students Turn Pro in Studio
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Photos by Sierra Mitchell Ben Klise, above, works on a project at TripleHouse Studios. Klise founded the business with fellow Belmont student Charles Irby, standing, left. More information about this unique student-owned company can be found at their MySpace or at http://www.triplehouse.com/. |
For many students at Belmont, it is a dream to run their own recording studio. For senior audio engineering major Ben Klise, this dream has already come true.
Klise’s dream came to fruition last July when he and Charles Irby, a junior music business major, opened the doors of TripleHouse Productions Inc., a recording studio run by Belmont students in the Berry Hill area.
“I knew that I could trust Ben,” said Irby, the owner and studio manager of TripleHouse. “We could handle the stress of a business relationship and he is a skillful, passionate and driven engineer. A lot of people can engineer, but they don’t have the dedication and talent.”
For Klise, working with TripleHouse has been another step into a career of audio engineering. Klise started recording with friends in high school where he had a small home studio.
“We just became obsessed with it – every day, all day, we’d stay up until 7 o’clock in the morning,” he said.
This obsession became a reality when Klise left Chicago and moved to Nashville to study audio engineering.
“All the professors at Belmont are really fantastic and at school you learn about concepts, about the physical, technical side of things, but that doesn’t make you professional; that makes you knowledgeable,” he said. “What makes you professional is the experience of doing what you learn about.”
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Klise has plenty of time to put what he learns at school into practice because he lives in an apartment above the TripleHouse studio.
“When you have a place where you can do three sessions a week, you put learning into action and you start to get the ball rolling,” Klise said.
TripleHouse is student-owned and operated, which enables their engineers and largely student clientele to take time for learning in studio sessions. The learning environment that TripleHouse provides offers a solution for students who don’t have access to studios on campus as much as they need.
“There are all these people at Belmont who have these ideas but they don’t have the means to get it onto a CD and that’s where we come in,” Klise said.
Klise and TripleHouse have worked with numerous Belmont bands including Moon Taxi, Darla Farmer, Six Gun Lullaby, Claire Gonwa, Answers for Dancers and Ben Weber, among others.
“We have an idea and TripleHouse provides the facility to conceive this idea and the engineer makes it a reality,” said Trevor Terndrup, the lead singer and a guitarist of Moon Taxi.
Terndrup, a senior Spanish and philosophy double major, explained that Moon Taxi trusts the engineers at TripleHouse to get the best results out of their recordings.
“They have just as much of a creative element as we do.”
Klise’s role as an engineer is to use the available recording tools to create the highest quality version of a recording. The better an engineer’s ability to utilize these tools, the stronger their recordings will be.
“He’s been working with those boards all year so he knows them like the back of his hand,” said Casey Saul, a junior music business major and violin and piano player for Darla Farmer.
Klise’s development as an engineer is facilitated by his access to a studio at school, work and home. The TripleHouse studio is flexible to the needs of learning engineers and musicians because they too are learning.
Even though they are still learning, TripleHouse hosts a professional but college-friendly environment that not only caters to the recording needs of emerging bands but also to their financial needs.
“We’re not about money. Our main goal is to get experience and network. All we want to do is cover cost to pay for what we’re doing,” Irby said.
TripleHouse is even offering promotional rates for Belmont students as low as $35 an hour to make their services more accessible to budgeting college students and independent bands. The standard rate is $55 an hour.
“We’re looking at this as an opportunity, not only in recording but also as students working with students, cutting each other deals and helping each other so that everyone can become stronger from the whole thing,” Klise said.
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