Eric Garcia, owner and president of 48 Windows, a Santa Monica-based mix, music and sound design shop, once worked in a studio that had 48 windows. Hence the name of his new shop. The company’s logo is not a window, by the way; it’s a Nautilus seashell. Garcia explains that the shell became a metaphor for the design philosophy of the studio. "We took the concepts of curves and applied that to the whole studio combination of angles and curves," he says. "For me, a lot of it became the aesthetic of how we wanted to work. We wanted an environment that was really relaxed and comfortable and informal, yet at the same time had the latest equipment and had the best stuff that we could find."
Garcia, who founded the company in August ’98, comes from a record producing background and collaborated at one time with Dave Jerden, the producer who has worked on albums for bands such as Jane’s Addiction and Soundgarden. Garcia, a composer, mixer and producer, continues to keep one foot in the musical world, even as he tends the garden of spotmaking. He ended up in the Santa Monica location because of an affiliation with Hollywood Digital West/Todd-AO Video Services, Santa Monica. Based in the same building, 48 Windows leases from Hollywood Digital West and can access that facility’s machine room and client services. "For me, a guy without a lot of money, it was a lot of opportunity," Garcia says.
Garcia describes himself as a musical chameleon able to switch into different styles, and notes that other sound designers and mixers at the company have their own fortes. Garcia describes Dan Schwartz as a "texturalist" and musicologist who likes to explore and layer alternative sound universes. David Spear is an orchestral composer who was formerly a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to mixing audio for spots, 48 Windows has Chip Mullaney, who mixes longform work, including a recent project for NASA.
A temporary addition to 48 Windows is Jeff Payne, formerly of POP Sound, Santa Monica. Payne is a renowned mixer who is making the 48 Windows pad his interim home while he prepares to launch his own company, Eleven Sound. While that is gestating, Payne has been renting one of 48 Windows’s mix rooms, where he has worked on spots such as Nike’s "Quarantine" through Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, Ore. Dante Ariola directed the spot via bicoastal/international Propaganda Films. Payne’s Eleven Sound facility will be open in the summer.
Recent work for 48 Windows includes sound design, music and mix for a Spanish-market Kia spot directed by David Siqueros of Hollywood-based Via Hollywood, which also doubled as the agency. Past 48 Windows work includes music, mix and sound design for "Musical Chairs," a Spanish-market Honda spot for La Agencia de Orci & Asociados, Los Angeles, as well as music and mix for "Wilderness," a Toyota spot for Saatchi & Saatchi L.A. in Torrance, Calif.
With a few La Agencia collaborations under his belt, Garcia says that the Spanish market has undergone a remarkable evolution in recent years. "They’re getting much hipper than they used to be," he observes. "Their sense of visuals, their sense of music is getting much more sophisticated."
Studio Designs
48 Windows studios are set up in a modular style, enabling equipment to be swapped out easily for upgrades. The facility is also designed to be multi-purpose. "I ultimately wanted an environment where any room could transform itself to be able to do any aspect of digital audio," he says. "Every room has duplications of the same gear, so that although their physical look and size are different, you can move any project to any room and mix, do radio, compose [or] do an album." The facility currently has two larger rooms, dubbed "Room A" and "Room B," where mixers work with a 64-track, 24-bit ProTools system. The two rooms have a Dolby Surround system, while "Room C," a smaller space, is used mainly for recording and mixing for radio and television. All of the rooms have an all-digital, 24-bit signal path and are equipped with tools including a DA-88 timecode DAT deck as well as a regular DAT deck. All of the rooms have synthesizers and microphone pre-amps. 48 Windows can layback tracks to D-1, D-2, and Digibeta. Garcia says that 48 Windows’ sound equipment is set up for HDTV and says that HDTV sets will be brought in by the end of this year. At press time, the company had just installed ISDN lines.
The company is currently in the process of building another room that Garcia says will specialize in radio production. When that room is finished in mid-May, Garcia projects that the company will add an additional mixer along with four new staff people.
Besides its commercial work, 48 Windows has provided resources for musicians recording and remixing albums and songs. One high-profile visitor to the studio since its August opening includes Butch Vig, a producer of bands such as The Smashing Pumpkins, and who currently is a member of the band Garbage. Vig was in the 48 Windows studios recently to remix a Korn track. Other artists that have used 48 Windows include Poe, who records for Atlantic Records, Angelique, a singer on Red Ant Records, and Goldo, a rap artist on Immortal Records, a subsidiary of Epic. Garcia worked with Poe on her first and second albums and recorded a song for the Great Expectations film soundtrack with her.
With the musical world evolving into many different genres, Garcia says that one of the ways he keeps up with emerging music and the contemporary music scene is the presence of musicians working on albums and other artists who drop by the studio. Having worked in the business now for a decade, Garcia notes that he has seen the importance of music in advertising climb up notch by notch. "When I first started 10 years ago, [spots] were dialogue-based," he says. "And now things are textural. There are many [spots] that I think of now [where] it is about the mood and texture of the spot followed by the logo, rather than the ‘see-and-say.’ "x
