E-MAIL PRINT MOST E-MAILED

Recording Studio Guide 2004: Sweatbox Studio

A place for punks becomes garage mecca

By Joe Gross
July 8, 2004

Photos by Sung Park/AA-S

With vintage amps and a keen sense of mic placement, Mike Vasquez, left, and Bryan Nelson (top photo) have helped Sweatbox draw bands from across the globe. Record covers (bottom) from past sessions are plastered on the walls of the recording space.

Is 304 E. Fifth St. haunted?

"This old lady once told us there's a ghost here," Sweatbox studio engineer Bryan Nelson says.

Nelson, owner and engineer Mike Vasquez is standing in the dark hall outside the recording studio, which is located on the second floor of the all-but-deserted downtown office building. There's some band rehearsal space, a dance studio and KOOP Radio here, too, but that's about it. You can see ghosts liking it just fine.

"She stopped by once and said, (in old lady voice) 'Have you seen The Black Thing?' I told her no." Nelson pauses. "She says, 'Don't worry, you will.' "

They say gallows were erected here in the mid-19th century. In the '40s, this building housed a local draft office. Maybe all those bad vibes explain the extraordinary presence in this place.

Since opening its doors in March 1993, Sweatbox, openly referred to as "legendary" in punk circles, has become one of the most famous garage rock studios in the world. Underground bands from as far away as Europe and Asia, not to mention several generations of Austin rockers, come here for a gnarly, live'r-than-God sound.

Vasquez started this place because there wasn't an affordable studio in town for the local punks. "At night, it was a ghost town down here," Vasquez says. "We could open the windows while bands were playing and nobody would care." These days, they have to shut the windows due to the city noise ordinance, but they've kept sessions remarkably cheap.

"We went from four track to eight track and just kept building," Vasquez says. Now they've got a 16-track, one-inch tape machine and 24-track digital capabilities.

Sweatbox looks held together with spit and baling wire, yet the sound they get is good enough for bands such as the New Bomb Turks, Mooney Suzuki and hundreds more, not to mention Japanese bands such as Lolita #18 -- and Marcus Nelson, director of the Austin Independent School District Blueprint Initiative, who recently cut some "positive rap" here.

"More than the garage rock thing," Nelson says, "I think we're increasingly known as a good 'live music' studio." Most of the bands cut their recordings live in the main room, with its vintage drum kit and amps. It doesn't look like much, but the Sweatbox guys know the room inside and out, where to put amps and how to mic them so the band can play live and get a great sound at the same time. "For us, the trick to good engineering is knowing what the band wants even before they verbalize it," Vasquez says.

It helped that big-name underground producers started bringing acts here. Local garage figurehead Mike Mariconda was the first to bring garage bands to the place, but it's punk icon Tim Kerr who really put Sweatbox on the international map, recording dozens of bands in the past decade here.

"Sweatbox is the only place that I want to do things at here in Austin," Kerr says. "The room sounds really really great and both Mike and Bryan really know the ins and outs of what they have. They have tried really hard to keep it affordable for bands to come in and record because they are both in bands themselves and know as a musician what others are up against."

"People feel very comfortable here," Vasquez says. "You walk in here and you don't feel like you're in a sterile environment."

Must be that ghost.