The Place

01.15.2007- CST

Hey Gibson! I'm Andy Chase, one of the three partners at Stratosphere. I actually started the studio way back when - it was first called The Place. I was pretty inexperienced and thought for some crazy reason that building my first recording studio right above a bar nightclub might be an okay idea. It hung in there despite my stupidity, and I learned a thing or two along the way about the business.

Before The Place ran it's course, I had started Ivy (www.myspace.com/ivy) with Adam Schlesinger and Dominique Durand, so I've been wearing two hats - musician and studio owner - as long as I can remember. I eventually parted ways with my partners at The Place, and I started talking to Adam and another friend James Iha about the idea of them coming in and us changing the name to Stratosphere. The truth is, I felt sorry for those guys, both struggling with their careers, so I took them under my wings in hopes that Stratosphere might be the first successful endeavor they could finally be proud enough to tell their parents about. That was in 1999 and the studio has grown and flourished despite the music industry carnage all around us.

Ivy - Thinking About You

One thing that's helped is that all three of us are in active bands and we also produce, so we've augmented the commercial business that we've gotten (Depeche Mode, Ryan Adams, Secret Machines...on and on...it's a pretty respectable list actually) with our own personal projects.

I started another band back in 2003 called Brookville and after recording our second album at Stratosphere last year we released it this summer. Brookville just got back from doing a U.S. tour with Tahiti 80, one of the bands I've produced at Stratosphere. The thing they always remark on about recording with me here (I've done two albums with them at my studio) is they can't get over how many guitars and basses there are sitting around, all for the taking.

Most studios have the perfunctory guitar or two that a client can use, but special items are definitely a rental. Not at Stratosphere. We have about 40 guitars and basses all from the 1950s up to present day and reissues. And I'd say about half of them are Gibsons. So writing this Gibson blog is sort of a no brainer.

The ad I placed in the Village Voice back in the early 90's, which led me to Adam and, ultimately the formation of Ivy, said my musical influences included a band called The Go Betweens. Their singer, Grant McLennan, died tragically this past year, so Brookville was in Studio A last week recording a song for a Grant McLennan tribute album coming out later this year. The only guitars I used to record this song was my Gibson J-160E acoustic and my Gibson ES 335 electric.

Last year I signed a band called The Postmarks to my small indie label (www.unfilteredrecords.com) after mixing their debut album at Stratosphere. Their record comes out this February. They just debuted on college radio as #1 most added this week on the CMJ Top 200 chart, so right now I'm pretty psyched.

I'll be back in the studio the rest of this January producing the new Juliana Hatfield album, so I'll write some more about how that's going, as well as give you some Brookville and Postmarks updates...stay tuned!