Recording Studio! Rehearsal Spaces!

As of September 1, we have expanded our facility to include two more rehearsal rooms. The beauty of them is that they are acoustically isolated from our recording space, so can have rehearsals and recordings going on at the same time. That means more availability for both our recording and rehearsal clients!

While the rooms are currently set up and ready for rehearsal, over the next month we will be renovating the spaces to make them more comfortable and more functional. Please bear with us during the transformation!

On a different note, remember that fire we had? Well, Universal Audio, manufacturer of tons of high-end audio gear, featured our studio fire story in their webzine this month! Click here to read the article and hear about the generous gift they gave us!

We are excited to announce that we are officially open again for business! All of our new gear was installed this past week and we had our first tracking session on Saturday, which was a huge success. If you liked our studio before, you will love it now! The new gear has an amazing sound and our new room arrangement is much more streamlined and easier to work in, making our sessions run much more efficiently and smooth.

Be sure to check out some pictures of the new studio at www.mysterystreetrecording.com/studio-pictures/ or on our myspace at www.myspace.com/mysterystreetrecording.

Now that we have fully recovered from the fire, our next step is expanding our facility by adding two more rehearsal rooms, a production suite, and a second bathroom! We expect this expansion to be complete between the first and second weeks of September.

Again, we want to thank everyone for their patience, understanding, and support as we worked through our reconstruction. It has been a very difficult summer and we could not have done it without the help and encouragement of all of our clients. In the next few days we will be announcing our Grand Re-Opening and One Year Anniversary Event. We look forward to seeing you all there!

Onward!

-Joe and Mickey

The contractors who are fixing up all of the fire damage are almost done! The walls are up and they are almost done painting. Take a look at the video below for a quick tour of the progress…

At the beginning of next week, they will be finishing up the floor and they will be out the door! At that point, we should be able to start running rehearsals in one of the rooms. We still have a lot of work to finish up next week before the second room is ready for rehearsals and before we are ready to hit the record button. We are still aiming for July 1 as our reopening day, but it may be a few days longer now as it really depends on how quickly the contractors finish up.

Besides construction, this past weekend we were able to start purchasing new gear for the studio. We have a lot of new toys to play with and we sure are excited put them to work! Our new console, an Amek Big, is a 32 channel, fully automated beast! Its got some amazing features and sounds great. Also, you can look forward to seeing some new gear from Manley, Universal Audio, John Hardy Co., Bricasti, Studer, and some other fairly rare and unique pieces of equipment. We will have a fully updated gear list up in the next few days, so keep your eyes open for it!

Expect more frequent updates over the next two weeks, as things are starting to move quickly!

First and foremost we want to thank our good friends at Kuma’s Corner who, last Friday held a benefit for us which raised over $1000 for the reconstruction of our studio! It was the first time I’d ever been there and it was an awesome place with really kick ass food. They are located at 2900 W. Belmont… go check them out!

As for rebuilding, the contractors are now in the studio working everyday to get our place back up to standard. Click link below to watch a video of the former Red Room, but with no walls…

We are completely closed for all business during this process, but rest assured that we are working very hard to finish everything as quickly as possible. On Monday, we should have new walls and in the next two weeks, we should have the entire place repainted and the floors finished.

Some of our other plans for the space include moving the control room to the back room, building a vocal booth/ isolation room along side the control room, and creating a comfortable lounge area. These changes will be made before the reopening. In the few months after we reopen, we will be acquiring “Two Rooms Rehearsals,” the rehearsal space located in the back our building. We will be doing a remodel of the those spaces along with building a highly functional “B” studio in one of the rooms.

Below is an illustration of what Mystery Street will look like…

When you come back to Mystery Street, things will be a little different than what you are used to, but I’m sure you will find that the overall functionality of our space will be much higher and that there will be less competition between rehearsal bookings and recording bookings.

Once again, we want to thank everyone for their patience while we rebuild our facility. We look forward to seeing you all in July!

We can now guarantee that all client data has been recovered and safely backed up onto fresh new hard drives! Tomorrow we begin the process of finding replacements for our gear. If there is anything you want to see us have, please let us know and we will do our best look for it and to maybe fit it into the new room. Other than that, we have posted some photos of the post-fire control room at www.myspace.com/mysterystreetrecording. Now go there, become our friend, look at the pictures, feel our pain, and cry yourself to sleep tonight with visions of an oven full of great recording gear.

To Our Good Friends and Clients:

On Friday May 2, a fire broke out in the control room of Mystery Street Recording Company. No one was in the building at the time, however, a patron of Two Rooms Rehearsal Studio, smelled smoke and called 911. The Chicago Fire Department showed up just minutes before Mystery Street‘s engineers, Joe and Mickey, arrived with a new upright piano for the studio. The fire was quickly controlled and no one was hurt. However, everything in the control room has been destroyed by either the fire directly, heat, smoke, water, or any combination of the above.

Joe and Mickey’s first concern was client data on the hard drives in the room. Before entering the building with the water hose, one firefighter asked Joe, “What is the most important thing in the room?” Joe quickly replied “The hard drives. They are below the desk.” The firefighters then proceeded to move the hard drives away from the source of the fire and covered most of our equipment with tarps in order to minimize water damage. After the smoke cleared, Joe and Mickey quickly began work on data recovery. There were four external drives in the room and one drive in the Mac. As of today, they have managed to recover all data from three out of five drives. The forth drive, although damaged beyond recovery, had previously been backed up on one of the other drives. As for the Mac, it will be brought into the Apple Store within the next two days and will have the hard drive removed and data transferred into a fresh drive. In conclusion, Mystery Street is nearly 100% confident that no client data has been lost!

As for reconstruction, we will be doing a complete structural overhaul of the red room (control room) and due to smoke damage we will be repainting the walls and refinishing the floors throughout the entire facility. We expect the entire process to be completed no later than the beginning of July, but we are hopeful that we can finish sooner. In the meantime, we hope to continue accommodating some rehearsals, mastering, and format transfers, but most recording sessions will have to be put on hold. However, in certain circumstances we may be able to do some recording projects, so please call if you have specific questions.

We greatly appreciate everyone’s support and understanding as we work through this difficult time. Our client’s loyalty and friendship will make the reconstruction process worthwhile and very meaningful to us and we are doing everything we can to ensure that we continue to meet the needs of our clients while we rebuild.

We ask that you continue to call us for future bookings as we guarantee that our rebuilt studio will serve you even better than our studio already has. We will not downgrade anything. In fact, we plan to upgrade our system tremendously!

Thank you all for your help through out this past year and we look forward to seeing you at the Grand Reopening party!

Sincerely,

Joe Tessone and Mickey T. Craft

Mystery Street Recording Company

For email updates regarding the fire and for monthly Mystery Specials, please fill out the contact form at http://www.mysterystreetrecording.com/booking-contact/ and check the bottom box!