Electrical Audio

Electrical Audio started nearly 30 years ago when founder Steve Albini set out to build a studio that could be his own home base, as well as a hub for independent artists looking to make records on their own terms. Albini started his recording journey like many engineers, by recording his own musical projects. Soon after, he was friends and bands in his peer group, and gradually started getting called for recording gigs from bands he didn’t know personally. Through the 80s and 90s, Steve freelanced at professional studios locally and the world over, while also regularly working in a home studio built into his house on Francisco Ave in Chicago. That studio ultimately encompassed a few recording rooms in the basement of the house—a live room of framed drywall with a 7’ tall fabric-deadened ceiling, and a dead room with “walls” composed of exposed insulation between studs, plus a small “booth” that was rarely used— and a control room built into the attic, such that clients had to walk upstairs, through the kitchen, and then up another flight of stairs to hear playback. The Francisco house’s studio hosted some iconic sessions from bands including Don Caballero, Zeni Geva, Craw, and Dazzling Killmen. But there were significant limitations to working in a studio retrofitted into a house rather than a purpose-built recording environment. During that period Steve stockpiled ideas and reflections from his sessions at commercial studios, noting what worked and what didn’t, and many of those observations informed decisions critical to the design of Electrical Audio. EA founder Steve Albini in the Francisco house studio’s attic control room with Skin Graft Records band Yona-Kit (left to right: KK Null, Darien Gray, Albini, Thymme Jones, and Jim O’Rourke). This Neotek console is the same one still in use in Studio B today. The space where Studio A now resides- before construction. Click/ tap to see more photos of initial construction. Steve bought 2621 W Belmont, the future site of Electrical Audio, in 1995. Previously the building had been a screen printing shop, and before that, it is suspected (though not confirmed) to have been a part of the Bally pinball company. Originally the building was used as a dairy barn. Steve hired a number of folks in his orbit to gut and convert the building into a studio. A few were professional tradesmen, but most were aspiring engineers or just friends eager to lend a hand in the mammoth undertaking of turning a raw warehouse into a professional recording studio. This ragtag group included a number of people that can still be found around the studio- take a look at these pictures from construction and you may recognize the engineer from one of your sessions! In the course of construction, these folks tore out floors and walls. They removed the ceiling in the back of the building and built upwards to add height to Studio B’s live room. They knocked out concrete basement floors and dug trenches for new foundations for each studio room. They laid the adobe bricks that have become a defining part of Studio A, both visually and sonically. And after many months of arduous work, they had constructed a new recording studio. To equip the studios, much of the gear from Steve’s home studio was brought over to Electrical, including the console in Studio B and much of the outboard still in the racks of both studios today. But building two working analog studios meant requisitioning a lot of new equipment. A new Neotek Elite console was ordered for Studio A, and some of the studios’ tape machines were purchased and installed during the later part of the build-out. Many of the tube mics now considered crown jewels in EA’s collection were purchased for pennies on today’s dollar because they were considered undesirably noisy at the time- many studio owners in the 90s were liquidating their tube mic collections in favor of low-noise FET equivalents. Curating a collection of instruments, microphones, and outboard ge