[Scott Dorsey]

Moshe Goldfarb wrote:
Rents have come down a great deal, but it's still far too expensive to
operate a small studio in all but the worst sections of NYC and even
those become expensive when they are declared "trendy" by the yuppies
or whatever they are called these days.

Perhaps. But, in the seventies and eighties there was also a big build-up
of nice studio facilities in rural areas where there wasn't much around.
These facilities were mostly intended for the use of rock bands who would
want to get out of town to a remote location where they could work quietly.
Consquently, most of them weren't built to handle larger groups and as
they weren't in areas where there were a lot of good studio musicians to pick
from, they were mostly used for laying down tracks which would be added to
later on.

Even THESE facilities collapsed right and left. It's not as if there
was a big real estate boom in the Catskills, for instance. I feel kind
of bad about Future down in Virginia Beach; they had a nice facility in
a tourist town with a lot of resources, and they specialized in hip hop
music and brought a lot of people down from NYC for week-long lock-outs.
But even they couldn't make a go of it under current conditions.

In the meantime, those of who actually _do_ work with acoustic music have
fewer and fewer alternative places to go. And those places are much less
likely to cut a good deal for odd time between big bookings.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."