[ENGLISH] Ocean sound: Building an ocean-view recording studio in a tiny village with Henning Svoren | LOBBY Talks - For hospitality builders

Description

We head to Norway to unpack how an ocean-view recording studio got built on a rock in a village of 4,000, and why artists now fly in year-round. With Henning Svoren (Ocean Sound), we trace the line from a 2005 boathouse experiment to the 2009 opening: 13 landowners to convince, coastal-zone permits to win, a community to bring onside (open days, concerts, transparency).

Then the business: a lean day-rate model, four simple bedrooms above the control room, live-band rooms that also attract laptop producers who come for atmosphere, not just gear. Ops are DIY by design, shopping runs, a friend-chef, or a hired cook when budgets allow, because margins die fast when you over-staff a remote place.

We get tactical: why not overbuild Ocean Sound (RIP many “luxury” studios), how Atmos mixing (B-room upgrade) opens new revenue, and why July’s beach BBQ smells are fun for guests… and terrible for takes. The kicker: how a studio can seed a micro-ecosystem; festivals, restaurants, even a Green Day stadium show, when you treat neighbors like partners, not obstacles. If you’re building in the middle of nowhere, this one’s a field manual.

If it helps your roadmap, share the episode of Ocean Sound (ocean-view studio), subscribe, and drop a 5★ review—so more builders find it.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Hi everyone, I'm Kevin Le Goff, founder of Coastline Creative Club, and today I'm presenting you a podcast that aims to explore and talk about the hospitality universe, to understand how to develop your personal project, while talking about those who invent places out of the ordinary. Welcome everyone, you're listening to No Small Plans. I'm very happy to see you again for this new episode. 4 weeks of break have passed since the last release and it's the opportunity for me to take a little time and height on the different projects but also the opportunity to move and discover new addresses, new concepts here and elsewhere. The independent hotel at Porte de Lisbon, with hybrid concepts of places niched on the heights of Colares. And for this new episode, a little particular because it marks the launch of the English exchange, not necessarily obvious. We tried to do our best with foreign personalities It's important for me to show you places I've been to Ocean Sound, founded by Henning, is one of the projects that has really impressed me Jönsand is a recording studio in Norway, in a village of 4000 inhabitants positioned on a piece of rock surrounded by water and it was a bit of a crazy bet for the founders and today it's a success when you see the artists who were able to pass to record and in this episode we will dig into the way they built this project how they managed to build such an atypical project on such a remote territory and talk about the difficulties, the model, the vision of the founders and we will spend an hour with Enig in English So it's been a lot of fun, I have a few questions that I couldn't do again but we left the episode like that. But anyway, I wish you a very good listening and don't hesitate to give us feedback after the episode. Thank you very much, good listening to everyone. And how did you end up building a cool place like Ocean Sound? And maybe you can start just by introducing yourself for the people that don't know you yet.
Speaker #1
Yes, I'm Henning Svoren and I live in a town called Ålesund in northwestern Norway. And I am a producer and engineer and also run a part of a crew that's running Ocean Sound, our recording studio here. Yeah, I've been working with music pretty much all my life. I never had a real job. And I started out playing in bands. kind of got into studio and recording side of things through that and and also i've been kind of like what's it called uh an entrepreneur or i've been running my own kind of business from right after i left high school actually started like an indie like a independent yeah contractor i guess so yes but that's kind of to to achieve my dream which is to make a living from music that's that side of things is important to enable yeah yeah
Speaker #0
that uh yeah did you so so you you've been working on it as an indie like mainly all your life and uh what were you like like a a member of a band uh how did you end up like getting into the production part like which is you know we will maybe explain a little bit for the people that don't know the the difference between being a musician and also producer but what's what's the job uh
Speaker #1
Yeah, so I was playing in lots of bands and we had shows and in churches and country festivals. I played pretty much every kind of music, hard rock, country, pop, you name it. And so I guess I went to a studio when I was like a teenager and I just really loved... that part of music and how you can develop a song like in the studio and was really interesting to me so I got the opportunity to come and hang out in like local studio where I in the town where I grew up and just hanging out by the engineer who were mixing and looking at what he was doing. And also with my own bands and our own music, we kind of wanted to have some stuff back in those days, I guess to put up on MySpace. But yeah, so I started to collect some recording equipment. And I actually built a little studio in a defunct school, like a school that was abandoned. Oh, yeah? Where was that? That was actually a couple of hours from Giske, where I'm now, into this fjord here in Norway. So just like a tiny place. And so all the money I earned, I kind of spent on recording equipment. And I also got into the live sound for concerts and stuff, because that's a little bit easier to make money from. So the money I earned on doing concerts and stuff, I used on like... recording gear and stuff and did that for a few years and then in 2009 they started building ocean sound and i heard uh yeah they might need some help help with that and so i i knew the guys who built it a little bit from from my bands and that I want. the music scene i guess and so call them up and ask yeah i heard you might need some extra help here and yeah sure come come monday on 10 o'clock and so uh yeah but i i think they they knew a little bit about me and since I had both some playing experience studio experience and I had actually in high school I did like electrical engineering or so and some and some electronics so I could actually help soldering up like the all the connections and cables when they when we were installing the studio so yeah I had um I could help them in some various capacities.
Speaker #0
Because the studio was born actually back in 2005. There is a story about a boat or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker #1
so there are kind of two... versions of Ocean Sound. The first one started way back in 2005 when and it was in an actual boathouse where we just used to store a boat and for fishing and yeah I don't know. So there was this band called the Margarets from this island Giske. They did kind of... pop music which had like 60s aesthetics like really vintage retro kind of sound so and they did pretty well around that time so they had our record deal and they had done some records they traveled to sweden and it was mixed in new york and some of the Yeah. bigger Norwegian studio so they had kind of traveled around and worked here and there and experienced like the big city way of doing things and yeah and for their next record they asked the record label to instead of having money to Spaniel Studios, they want to buy their own gear, like analog gear, tape machines and old microphones, stuff like that, and do it in this boathouse on Iske. And it turned out really good, and it was a really creative place to make music and work. And since they kind of had this set up with the tape machines and stuff, other bands and artists in that kind of scene also wanted to come to Giske to record and try that. And they kind of soon realized that the tiny boathouse was way too small. So then kind of the plan to build Oceansound 0.20.
Speaker #0
yeah grew out of that so um yeah okay so so then you you ended up like uh uh being part of the project back in 2009 and yeah and was uh the margaret's part of it uh still in in 2009 or is it like a different crew that set it up the place how how did it end up yeah so so uh
Speaker #1
It took so long to actually get the permits right and everything in order, and not at least build the studio. So the Margaret's was pretty much not active when the studio opened. So we've done some like small, we did like a 20-year anniversary. re-release of some stuff where they did some choirs and percussion but we have actually not had a real uh the margaret's session in the studio because yeah yeah i kind of moved on but but yeah the guys who were in the band like two of them a guitar player and bass player They are the guys who... still are the owners of Ocean Sound, and they also run several festivals in Norway and have a microbrewery in the city, restaurants in the city. And we have an event company just right outside where I'm sitting now, which does everything from... political conferences, weddings, marine seminars, lots of stuff. But all of those things kind of grew out of the studio. So the studio and then the festival around the studio kind of grew into the region here.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
So that's pretty cool, actually.
Speaker #0
So just to get the timeline, but back in 2009, did you have the place already or were you looking for a place to get the permit and stuff like that? How did you end up building the place where you are now? Is it something that was already in the pipe or did you have to look for a place during a few years? How did it...
Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah, so the studio now is just a stone's throw from the old boathouse. It's really close. But if they were going to spend that much money and time and effort on building a proper studio, there was this one spot where it kind of had to be, because the location would be everything. So if it was further into the island where you didn't have the ocean view and that... whole thing it wouldn't really make sense so what they did is uh yeah the the spot was owned by i think actually 13 like farmers and it was like a shared shared land yeah okay so they first had to make all 13 of them agree to sell sell the land and Then also start the process of, since it's so close to the coastline, we have, I'm not sure how it's on your side, but here in Norway, the coastline is considered like a free, an area where everyone should have access and do recreational stuff. and walk around. So it's very, very strict with what you can build. So they sent in permits and there were massive protests in the newspaper because the neighbors and people were maybe a little bit scared if this was going to be some alien thing on the beach. with weird hippies and drugs and I don't know. Even the priest was massively against it, even though he's actually been recording. He's a great opera singer. So he's been recording in the studio. So we're all friends now. But yeah, there was... a lot of people were very divided in the beginning.
Speaker #0
That's funny because the first reaction was related to the more about the people going there more than the building actually.
Speaker #1
Yeah yeah I guess.
Speaker #0
People from the music industry you know they're gonna have hippies everywhere.
Speaker #1
Yeah yeah so And then I guess it went first to your municipality kind of thing and then off to the regional authorities. And then this case kind of went all the way up to the cultural department in Norway, where it got its final blessing. So that took some years to get all that stuff. right but um but what we actually did in the beginning we used to have a studio concert where all the neighbors and local citizens could come and have some good artists playing and try to i've had open days where like kids could come in and play some drums or whatever and just try to be open to the local community yeah i think it's very important you know when you especially when you build this kind of creative project into like small cities or like
Speaker #0
like like we do to actually engage you know some people are just coming over and they've got their project that they don't care about the local community and and then they end up like getting a lot of troubles because you know people are not like against the project that just you know they're going to give a piece of their land to someone and you know i think the way back is just to give a piece of the project to the local community and you know make them part of it yeah and would you say that it was a bigger trigger you know to to get them into the into the project to make it work.
Speaker #1
Yeah. Because, like you say, it's a small place, so... Yeah, you have to, everyone wants to have a home, live in harmony and like now, everyone is really happy about studio and I think that the studio is here have contributed a lot to the reputation of Giske and also Ålesund which is a the larger city like 15 minutes from here so so it was an area which was kind of declining like young girls went on out to study and that there was it was a pretty like male dominated work environment with since It's a lot of like ship industry and fishing and marine kind of businesses. So there wasn't a lot of jobs for like typical female careers. And I'm not saying the studio did. change that but it was kind of a part of like little bits of snowball effect where we had the studio which made the area interesting for artists and then like the festivals and concerts came after that and kind of built and then with a restaurant so so now the whole region is in a lot better shape than it was 10 15 years ago not again not because of the studio but i i think uh it's part of it yeah it's a little part of it so yeah yeah definitely i think it's the kind of you know the kind of project that is
Speaker #0
going to i mean you're not changing the the the city you live in but it's uh you know it's actually contributing to the to the to highlight you know the city and and just to to put the light on the spot and make people discover how it is like since years and years. But you actually, you know, just help the city out to, you know, get on the internet, get some visual, make them, you know, not famous, but, you know, I mean,
Speaker #1
highlight. I think... if we have some cool artists that come here then even like citizens themselves think oh yeah if they're coming here it might actually be a cool place yeah definitely because it can be a bit hard when you grow up here and see why it's a beautiful place and what it actually has to offer and stuff
Speaker #0
like that so yeah yeah it's it's very similar to uh to to brittany for example you know like if if you talk to all the kids over there they're gonna tell you ah man i just want to leave the city and go in you know in paris or in london or whatever and then at the same time they see they see like all those creative coming back and they're like why why are those people like liking this place like i've i've been wanting to you know i wanted to leave this this spot for years now people are coming back. But because we're highlighting the spot in a new way, you know? Yeah. And I think that what they used to see is a bit different of what we see of the spot, you know? Especially when you get older, actually. Yeah. You don't need the same amenities, you see? and so To come back to the timeline, when did you actually open the place? When was the studio open?
Speaker #1
I think it was October, maybe, 2009. So like autumn 2009, yeah.
Speaker #0
And did you have any idea of the business model at the beginning? Was it... huh I know a little bit about how it works for a music studio. Was it exactly the same way? Are you renting for a day or a week or a month or whatever? How does it work?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so we have a day rate. So some studios, they do like an hourly thing. Since you kind of have to travel here, it makes most sense to do most of the stuff by day. And then we also do quite a bit of editing and mixing where the artist doesn't have to be present. So we do that stuff, some of it by the hour. Okay. And yeah. But I like to mention that... When we opened in 2009, we actually got a lot of the gear, like the previous console we had, came out of a studio called Mayfair in London, which had just closed. So it was a period where a lot of the big studios were closing down.
Speaker #0
all around the globe really yeah yeah due to the the i mean the music industry was changing at this time you know it was the the beginning of the you know the i wouldn't say internet but streaming stuff mp3 yes and and was a all new way of you know producing and listening to music yeah and some of the previous recording studios were
Speaker #1
pretty massive and big and luxurious and very expensive to run on a like day-to-day business now yeah day-to-day basis yeah yeah yeah so uh what we tried to do here was it shouldn't be too small and we we have we have four bedrooms like just upstairs in studio where most of the artists state They are super simple with just two beds and that's pretty much it. So everything in there looks good and has an okay standard, but it's not like over the top luxurious thing. So I think that was a little bit of the key of the success here. that that was pretty much what we needed but it wasn't like excessive over the top super expensive to run so that was maybe the problem of the studios that closed down and they had a lot of stuff and we tried to keep the organization pretty pretty slim yeah yeah stuff like that So that was also important for the business model too.
Speaker #0
Because when you set up the project, the business model, you actually said that you have four rooms. Four bedrooms. Four bedrooms, which is different. So you've got four bedrooms. Did you actually target a kind of bend to make sure that you could... you know they could fit in the studio and and i mean a band wouldn't even if you know it's an orchestra but it won't be like you know 15 or 20 people but did you actually manage to target the kind of band you wanted at ocean sound to build the place and make sure that you could you know it could look like the the the targets yeah
Speaker #1
but this kind of surprising thing was It's built a little bit with the recording rooms as well. It's very suitable for live bands that want to do some live stuff with several musicians and jazz projects. But because of the location and the closeness to the ocean and nature here, a lot of artists who basically do everything on a laptop want to come as well, just because they find it inspiring, and they don't necessarily need all the drums and guitar amps and recording rooms we have, but they're just... there's something about the atmosphere that helps them, even though they can sit at home or a hotel room with their laptop.
Speaker #0
find new ways to write music when they are here.
Speaker #1
Do you have hotels and stuff like around the place? Like to you know if you want to gather more people or stuff like that?
Speaker #0
Yeah so we have a pretty simple hotel like the airport hotel. It's just five minutes from here and then in Olsund there's like there's all there's super boutique uh super nice hotel and yeah and cheaper ones so so if if an artist wants like the comfort of having the room made every morning and stuff and proper breakfast they can live
Speaker #1
in the city yeah how do you how do you manage to you know that that's some very operational question but like how do you manage like the
Speaker #0
the food and stuff like do you have people around that can help you out or how do you do it by yourself or i don't know yeah so so it's a little bit diy i think most most of the artists here they actually go shopping and just fill the fridge and make make their own food And some bands or artists have like a friend who is into cooking that joins them and helps them out with those kind of practical things so they can focus on the music. And then also we sometimes hire a chef or like a proper, yeah, do like a proper thing. the wages here in for chefs in norway are pretty high so yeah so uh not everyone can afford that but uh yeah we are pretty flexible with that but most uh most of the artists just cook themselves or if they're four in the band plus plus a photographer or something then they might do like one dinner each or
Speaker #1
stuff like that so yeah because that's a bit different you know from a from i would say a normal music studio you know like artists are gonna stay there uh they're gonna spend like as you said like they're not here for an hour or two or six or seven they're here for a days or few days um yeah so you have to actually build an experience also around the place and also around the main the main job that you do guys is actually recording music so that's you you're all doing the same uh i mean do you have people like uh are you working on the on the uh the planning stuff and are you managing like all the the as you said it's a diy stuff but do you do you manage
Speaker #0
all of it or do you have more people that are taking care of the of the agenda you know and the daily yeah we have uh yeah so we are three guys that uh have this as a full-time job so taria which is the studio manager he does most of the planning for but it kind of depends a little bit on the artist if if it's an artist i've worked a lot with i usually deal with that or Also, since we're such a small organization, it's pretty fluid who's doing what. But Tari does most of the planning, and we also have meetings to discuss who's doing what. Are you open yearly? like all like no season especially you you open all the year yeah we actually used used to have closed between uh new uh christmas eve and new year okay but
Speaker #1
so no no no seasonal business i mean it's not just during summer or during winter oh no no no and that's kind of uh uh
Speaker #0
I would actually say that the worst time to record here is in like July or like the high summer when when it's hot and it's right next to a beach. And the beach is a public place, so I have lots of kids and people have barbecuing with sausages and the studio smells of barbecued sausage. So even though it's nice in the summer, it's not the best studio season. the studio can actually be pretty nice to work in studio when it's cloudy and a bit rainy outside because yeah then you kind of want to stay in there yeah and you get the atmosphere also like yeah yeah so so i i know some bands if they want to make a little bit darker music they might come in november and uh record because there's less light uh we have shorter days here so yeah yeah what do you have any uh any
Speaker #1
names of bands you can share with us like who came over like the maybe the first to believe in the project at the beginning or i don't know like some some cool bands who came over ocean Yeah.
Speaker #0
There was, like in the beginning, the biggest projects we had was a Scottish band called Travis. If you know them, they were pretty big at some point. And also, do you know Arcade Fire?
Speaker #1
Yeah, definitely. I was listening to the last album, actually.
Speaker #0
So they did like a... I'm not sure if it was the Reflektor album. Like the singer and... Two front persons. I can't remember their names now. They came to just write. Like write the songs for what was to become the Reflektor album, I think. Okay. And I think they ended up winning a Grammy for Artist of the Year or something. Crazy. So those two projects were kind of important for us to establish our name or be taken seriously by the smaller bands, because everyone wants to know what the big... stuff you've worked on so exactly if you have worked on some big stuff it's easier to be considered for like the smaller things i guess and you know to to i'm asking this
Speaker #1
question because i would love to know like how do you end up having hard cut fire coming over like do you have like a like a commercial guy in the team that are gonna make the calls and and you know to make
Speaker #0
to drop the name of the studio in a conversation or i don't know like how do you end up having them over there i i actually not sure if i did i think i actually worked on a record with a norwegian singer a female singer and piano player and she knew like the drummer in arcade fire and there were friends so he wanted to come over and play on her record and i think maybe he just liked it so much so he told like the rest of the guys in the band so i i think that was how that
Speaker #1
came about um and do you have like today is it like just people coming over or do you have to to actually be um in in the How do we say that in English? I don't know. But do you have to be in touch with music labels, stuff like that, to make sure that you are in the list or in the shortlist to have artists coming over? Or is it just friendship, relationship coming over and then it works like that by itself?
Speaker #0
Yeah, I guess we have, of course, we are friendly with some labels and You're asking about how we get people to come?
Speaker #1
Yeah,
Speaker #0
exactly. Yeah, we are friendly with some labels, but it seems like it's a lot of one artist or producer or musician have been here, and he has another project which might be suitable, and they have a friend who has been here, or there's a lot of small connections. And also, since we all... obviously have our own social media channels but we could probably just delete those because the important thing i guess is like the artists social media channels so when they are in studio or have been in the studio posting photos from here like the artists or musician friends see it and they want to come yeah it does the job yeah yeah okay so uh but i i'm at times surprised by like this some of like today there there's a american band coming it's a pretty hardcore music. And we have, I don't think we have any connection to them. They want to come here and stay for 14 days or something. And we have had artists from Russia, which we've never heard. And artists that are massive over there. And same with Swiss artists. Say if I... We have some Norwegian jazz musicians who are pretty renowned in their field because there's kind of a Scandinavian jazz sound. And then we might have a band in Switzerland which is really into that artist. And then they want to come and record in the same studio and stuff like that.
Speaker #1
How long do I have to wait if I want to come over with my band? What's the wait list?
Speaker #0
Usually we say a couple of months, I guess. So it depends on...
Speaker #1
On the project and stuff like that.
Speaker #0
Yeah, but usually it's pretty much booked.
Speaker #1
yeah three four months so i had i guess okay yeah what's the how is the project living right now do you have any any uh uh any project you want to add to ocean sound you want to build another place do you want to you know make the place grow uh yeah what's what's in the they're actually uh
Speaker #0
I'm sitting in the B studio now, which is where we mix. And this is kind of the latest thing we've done. Actually, it's not officially launched yet, but we've upgraded it to something called Dolby Atmos. if you yeah Nobody that's that's like that's a technology that's been available in the cinema for 10-15 years, but It hasn't been used for music so that so that's like a 3d Surround kind of format but last summer Apple music started to stream in Dolby Atmos and then Amazon followed and Tidal followed, Spotify might be working on some solution for it. But yeah, so a lot of like the game music or game sound is in surround or Atmos already. There's no reason... If you make a documentary for Netflix, it will not be accepted unless it has, like, Atmos around it. version of it.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
So the point being that like the music has been lagging behind kind of the technology there so a lot of studios have been upgrading for Atmos and yeah so we can deliver mixes in that format then or create music for
Speaker #1
that format so yeah which which is good especially that now you know people are i mean that was a question i have for you but uh different from from the place you know but what how do you what do you think actually about the the music today and the fact that you know most of the people are listening to the when when we see a studio like like yours and and the way we listen to music today what's what do you think about that you know like the quality of the sound actually you know that's a good news that that streaming platform are gonna use this kind of technology to to come
Speaker #0
back to quality sound yeah but yeah what do you what do you think about the yeah i i think uh yeah there's a lot of people listening on headphones and ear pods and they can sound pretty good and I guess a lot of people listen on a bluetooth speaker and including myself actually just want to listen to a song in the background I guess like the stereo hi-fi systems there are less and less, if you have a wife or girlfriend who's not interested in speakers in the living room, I guess. So, yeah, there are some soundbars that are pretty good and getting better. We actually bought... kind of part for part of teaching like artists about Atmos format we purchased the like big sound bar for a lounge just so people can listen to music while they're cooking and stuff and then and and and it has like a separate microphone so it's calibrated for the room and that sounds very very good So I'm not too pessimistic about or worried that people will not hear or play it back as it sounds in the studio. But yeah, really, I'm sitting in an amazing room. I'm not expecting anyone to hear it.
Speaker #1
Like you do.
Speaker #0
I don't know. There are some core systems now I think are really, really good. So, yeah. I'm not too pessimistic.
Speaker #1
Which is good. I mean, you know, especially as it's getting better and better. As you said, like back in 2009 or 2012. You know, 12. Where the streaming was just compressed, super compressed.
Speaker #0
And you have also the high quality settings. For example, you have Tidal Hi-Fi, I guess. And high quality settings in Spotify and YouTube. I guess a lot of people are actually listening on YouTube, which used to sound horrible. but they also changed something so i think youtube actually sounds pretty good now okay so yeah that was my uh my question about the the the internet where you are guys like how do you do you have the fiber do you have this satellite or like how does it work over there yeah we have fiber so yeah even though if you're on island i think like just a fiber cable runs by the bridge or something into the mainland
Speaker #1
That's pretty cool because we don't have it over there. Okay. So it's satellites are... Okay. Oh, that's it. Okay. And would you... How is the local community today with the project? Is it fine that they actually handle the project and it's now part of the city?
Speaker #0
Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. And it's stuff like... Like the same guys who started Ocean Sound, we did a Green Day concert in the football stadium in Ålesund last week on Thursday with 18,000 in the audience. Crazy. Yeah, I think the community has really embraced what they are doing. And for the studio, I think we have a pretty good connection now with the neighbors. And also, it's a different... Do you know, like... the kiting scene, kiting and windsurfing. You did regular surfing?
Speaker #1
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker #0
It also seems like kiting and windsurfing has gained popularity in like the recent years or something, so the area around the studio has become very popular for that.
Speaker #1
Okay, cool.
Speaker #0
So we have, there's a lot of wind here, so there's a lot of people doing that. And yeah, we're very open with, we don't have any no parking signs or anything of that sort. So they're free to come and set up their equipment on our space and stuff like that.
Speaker #1
and yeah that's pretty cool all right yeah and uh we're gonna yeah we're gonna reach the end of of the interview and uh do you have any uh what can we follow actually ocean sound like do you have a you guys have social network what can we just if you can give them to you know listeners whatever i actually have to
Speaker #0
Because we used to call ourselves Ocean Sound Recordings, but it was so long, so we tried to say Ocean Sound now. I guess it's just... Yeah, on Instagram we're Ocean Sound Recordings, and on Facebook I think we're... Oh shit. Ocean Sound. Yeah, we're just Ocean Sound. And we also have a website called oceansound.no.
Speaker #1
Okay. I will put all the links in the description of the episode.
Speaker #0
That's cool.
Speaker #1
Also sharing a few pictures, and then people can just understand the particularity of this spot. Do you have any... I mean, you're probably the only one closest to the ocean. The closest one to the ocean, actually. I don't know any other studio, music studio.
Speaker #0
No, I don't. It is a really special place and location. And what was important to us is that we... That's all. kind of well and good but it's important to us that like the equipment and the acoustics and like the workflows in the studios or like on a really high level so that we don't want to kind of rest on we have a cool spot but none of the gear works or we don't know what the hell we're doing. So we want it to be a proper working... environment and deliver like a really high quality service and keep it clean and stuff like that which a lot of studios you go into are dirty and not cleaned and messy and cables everywhere so yeah so It's important to have a whole,
Speaker #1
complete experience, which is not just providing music, but also having a good environment.
Speaker #0
And just a little funny thing, we installed a jacuzzi last year.
Speaker #1
Oh yeah,
Speaker #0
I saw that. Not last year, but a couple of years ago. And that was kind of cost a little bit of money and we wasn't sure if we should buy some microphones or...
Speaker #1
Or jacuzzi.
Speaker #0
Or jacuzzi. And we ended up buying the jacuzzi. And that's just to kind of add to the experience so you can kind of sit in the jacuzzi and watch the sunset or... Because it can actually be a problem for some musicians, they work so long hours, they get so into it, that it's good to have something other than sitting with your instrument or in front of a screen, so we can get out and... yeah sit and step back yeah take a break take a break and then also there are lots of opportunities to go sightseeing and hiking or skiing or yeah pretty much everything around yeah yeah super cool i will share like all the the pictures then you know people can realize how it looks like and that's that's super cool and uh all right thank you very much henning that was uh i mean it's really fun and uh it's good to meet your like-minded uh
Speaker #1
yeah and especially you know now you will have to come explore brittany and uh yeah and see if you've got a piece of land where you can just set up like a new music studio but i'm pretty sure that you know friends needs it so we will keep in touch definitely and uh super cool and uh thank you for your time i was super glad to have you on the show and um actually you know learn a little bit more about uh ocean sound if people want to you know ask you question or get in touch the best to to to get in touch with with you or uh ocean sound is the website you know the the Yep. That would be the best one? Okay, cool.
Speaker #0
Awesome.
Speaker #1
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Speaker #0
Thanks for having me.
Speaker #1
And talk to you soon. Thank you very much for listening to me until the end. Don't hesitate to send me your feedback. I love receiving your comments. And if you liked this episode, don't forget to share it around you, to subscribe to your favorite platform. And if you have a little time in front of you, leave a 5-star note and a little comment. It will help me to get into the rankings. No Small Plans is produced by The Crafted Hospitality Garage, a professional platform dedicated to those who create places out of the ordinary. A space to exchange, form, share and get answers to these questions. You can find the platform on no-smallplans.com and I'll see you in 15 days for a new episode. Thank you very much and see you soon.

About LOBBY Talks - For hospitality builders

Je suis Kevin Le Goff, fondateur du studio de création LOBBY, et aujourd’hui je vous présente un podcast qui vise à explorer et faire parler l’univers de l’hospitality, pour comprendre comment développer votre projet personnel, en faisant parler celles et ceux qui inventent des lieux hors du commun.

Dans cette nouvelle saison de Lobby Talks, j’ai voulu rencontrer ces personnalités qui créent des lieux uniques. Ces fameux lieux qu’on imagine ne pas exister, jusqu’à tomber dessus et se dire que c’est exactement ce qu’on aurait aimé créer ou voir à côté de chez soi.

Des lieux de vie dans lesquels séjourner, travailler, partager des moments.

Des lieux construits sur l’expérience, souvent imaginé par des passionnés.

L’idée est d’aller creuser et vous partager le cheminement créatif et entrepreneurial qu’il y a derrière chacun de ces projets, pour que vous puissiez vous aussi, bénéficier de leur expertise et peut-être, ouvrir cette nouvelle adresse qu’on image ne pas exister.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

About LOBBY Talks - For hospitality builders

Des lieux de vie dans lesquels séjourner, travailler, partager des moments.

Des lieux construits sur l’expérience, souvent imaginé par des passionnés.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Description

If it helps your roadmap, share the episode of Ocean Sound (ocean-view studio), subscribe, and drop a 5★ review—so more builders find it.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Hi everyone, I'm Kevin Le Goff, founder of Coastline Creative Club, and today I'm presenting you a podcast that aims to explore and talk about the hospitality universe, to understand how to develop your personal project, while talking about those who invent places out of the ordinary. Welcome everyone, you're listening to No Small Plans. I'm very happy to see you again for this new episode. 4 weeks of break have passed since the last release and it's the opportunity for me to take a little time and height on the different projects but also the opportunity to move and discover new addresses, new concepts here and elsewhere. The independent hotel at Porte de Lisbon, with hybrid concepts of places niched on the heights of Colares. And for this new episode, a little particular because it marks the launch of the English exchange, not necessarily obvious. We tried to do our best with foreign personalities It's important for me to show you places I've been to Ocean Sound, founded by Henning, is one of the projects that has really impressed me Jönsand is a recording studio in Norway, in a village of 4000 inhabitants positioned on a piece of rock surrounded by water and it was a bit of a crazy bet for the founders and today it's a success when you see the artists who were able to pass to record and in this episode we will dig into the way they built this project how they managed to build such an atypical project on such a remote territory and talk about the difficulties, the model, the vision of the founders and we will spend an hour with Enig in English So it's been a lot of fun, I have a few questions that I couldn't do again but we left the episode like that. But anyway, I wish you a very good listening and don't hesitate to give us feedback after the episode. Thank you very much, good listening to everyone. And how did you end up building a cool place like Ocean Sound? And maybe you can start just by introducing yourself for the people that don't know you yet.
Speaker #1
Yes, I'm Henning Svoren and I live in a town called Ålesund in northwestern Norway. And I am a producer and engineer and also run a part of a crew that's running Ocean Sound, our recording studio here. Yeah, I've been working with music pretty much all my life. I never had a real job. And I started out playing in bands. kind of got into studio and recording side of things through that and and also i've been kind of like what's it called uh an entrepreneur or i've been running my own kind of business from right after i left high school actually started like an indie like a independent yeah contractor i guess so yes but that's kind of to to achieve my dream which is to make a living from music that's that side of things is important to enable yeah yeah
Speaker #0
that uh yeah did you so so you you've been working on it as an indie like mainly all your life and uh what were you like like a a member of a band uh how did you end up like getting into the production part like which is you know we will maybe explain a little bit for the people that don't know the the difference between being a musician and also producer but what's what's the job uh
Speaker #1
Yeah, so I was playing in lots of bands and we had shows and in churches and country festivals. I played pretty much every kind of music, hard rock, country, pop, you name it. And so I guess I went to a studio when I was like a teenager and I just really loved... that part of music and how you can develop a song like in the studio and was really interesting to me so I got the opportunity to come and hang out in like local studio where I in the town where I grew up and just hanging out by the engineer who were mixing and looking at what he was doing. And also with my own bands and our own music, we kind of wanted to have some stuff back in those days, I guess to put up on MySpace. But yeah, so I started to collect some recording equipment. And I actually built a little studio in a defunct school, like a school that was abandoned. Oh, yeah? Where was that? That was actually a couple of hours from Giske, where I'm now, into this fjord here in Norway. So just like a tiny place. And so all the money I earned, I kind of spent on recording equipment. And I also got into the live sound for concerts and stuff, because that's a little bit easier to make money from. So the money I earned on doing concerts and stuff, I used on like... recording gear and stuff and did that for a few years and then in 2009 they started building ocean sound and i heard uh yeah they might need some help help with that and so i i knew the guys who built it a little bit from from my bands and that I want. the music scene i guess and so call them up and ask yeah i heard you might need some extra help here and yeah sure come come monday on 10 o'clock and so uh yeah but i i think they they knew a little bit about me and since I had both some playing experience studio experience and I had actually in high school I did like electrical engineering or so and some and some electronics so I could actually help soldering up like the all the connections and cables when they when we were installing the studio so yeah I had um I could help them in some various capacities.
Speaker #0
Because the studio was born actually back in 2005. There is a story about a boat or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker #1
so there are kind of two... versions of Ocean Sound. The first one started way back in 2005 when and it was in an actual boathouse where we just used to store a boat and for fishing and yeah I don't know. So there was this band called the Margarets from this island Giske. They did kind of... pop music which had like 60s aesthetics like really vintage retro kind of sound so and they did pretty well around that time so they had our record deal and they had done some records they traveled to sweden and it was mixed in new york and some of the Yeah. bigger Norwegian studio so they had kind of traveled around and worked here and there and experienced like the big city way of doing things and yeah and for their next record they asked the record label to instead of having money to Spaniel Studios, they want to buy their own gear, like analog gear, tape machines and old microphones, stuff like that, and do it in this boathouse on Iske. And it turned out really good, and it was a really creative place to make music and work. And since they kind of had this set up with the tape machines and stuff, other bands and artists in that kind of scene also wanted to come to Giske to record and try that. And they kind of soon realized that the tiny boathouse was way too small. So then kind of the plan to build Oceansound 0.20.
Speaker #0
yeah grew out of that so um yeah okay so so then you you ended up like uh uh being part of the project back in 2009 and yeah and was uh the margaret's part of it uh still in in 2009 or is it like a different crew that set it up the place how how did it end up yeah so so uh
Speaker #1
It took so long to actually get the permits right and everything in order, and not at least build the studio. So the Margaret's was pretty much not active when the studio opened. So we've done some like small, we did like a 20-year anniversary. re-release of some stuff where they did some choirs and percussion but we have actually not had a real uh the margaret's session in the studio because yeah yeah i kind of moved on but but yeah the guys who were in the band like two of them a guitar player and bass player They are the guys who... still are the owners of Ocean Sound, and they also run several festivals in Norway and have a microbrewery in the city, restaurants in the city. And we have an event company just right outside where I'm sitting now, which does everything from... political conferences, weddings, marine seminars, lots of stuff. But all of those things kind of grew out of the studio. So the studio and then the festival around the studio kind of grew into the region here.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
So that's pretty cool, actually.
Speaker #0
So just to get the timeline, but back in 2009, did you have the place already or were you looking for a place to get the permit and stuff like that? How did you end up building the place where you are now? Is it something that was already in the pipe or did you have to look for a place during a few years? How did it...
Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah, so the studio now is just a stone's throw from the old boathouse. It's really close. But if they were going to spend that much money and time and effort on building a proper studio, there was this one spot where it kind of had to be, because the location would be everything. So if it was further into the island where you didn't have the ocean view and that... whole thing it wouldn't really make sense so what they did is uh yeah the the spot was owned by i think actually 13 like farmers and it was like a shared shared land yeah okay so they first had to make all 13 of them agree to sell sell the land and Then also start the process of, since it's so close to the coastline, we have, I'm not sure how it's on your side, but here in Norway, the coastline is considered like a free, an area where everyone should have access and do recreational stuff. and walk around. So it's very, very strict with what you can build. So they sent in permits and there were massive protests in the newspaper because the neighbors and people were maybe a little bit scared if this was going to be some alien thing on the beach. with weird hippies and drugs and I don't know. Even the priest was massively against it, even though he's actually been recording. He's a great opera singer. So he's been recording in the studio. So we're all friends now. But yeah, there was... a lot of people were very divided in the beginning.
Speaker #0
That's funny because the first reaction was related to the more about the people going there more than the building actually.
Speaker #1
Yeah yeah I guess.
Speaker #0
People from the music industry you know they're gonna have hippies everywhere.
Speaker #1
Yeah yeah so And then I guess it went first to your municipality kind of thing and then off to the regional authorities. And then this case kind of went all the way up to the cultural department in Norway, where it got its final blessing. So that took some years to get all that stuff. right but um but what we actually did in the beginning we used to have a studio concert where all the neighbors and local citizens could come and have some good artists playing and try to i've had open days where like kids could come in and play some drums or whatever and just try to be open to the local community yeah i think it's very important you know when you especially when you build this kind of creative project into like small cities or like
Speaker #0
like like we do to actually engage you know some people are just coming over and they've got their project that they don't care about the local community and and then they end up like getting a lot of troubles because you know people are not like against the project that just you know they're going to give a piece of their land to someone and you know i think the way back is just to give a piece of the project to the local community and you know make them part of it yeah and would you say that it was a bigger trigger you know to to get them into the into the project to make it work.
Speaker #1
Yeah. Because, like you say, it's a small place, so... Yeah, you have to, everyone wants to have a home, live in harmony and like now, everyone is really happy about studio and I think that the studio is here have contributed a lot to the reputation of Giske and also Ålesund which is a the larger city like 15 minutes from here so so it was an area which was kind of declining like young girls went on out to study and that there was it was a pretty like male dominated work environment with since It's a lot of like ship industry and fishing and marine kind of businesses. So there wasn't a lot of jobs for like typical female careers. And I'm not saying the studio did. change that but it was kind of a part of like little bits of snowball effect where we had the studio which made the area interesting for artists and then like the festivals and concerts came after that and kind of built and then with a restaurant so so now the whole region is in a lot better shape than it was 10 15 years ago not again not because of the studio but i i think uh it's part of it yeah it's a little part of it so yeah yeah definitely i think it's the kind of you know the kind of project that is
Speaker #0
going to i mean you're not changing the the the city you live in but it's uh you know it's actually contributing to the to the to highlight you know the city and and just to to put the light on the spot and make people discover how it is like since years and years. But you actually, you know, just help the city out to, you know, get on the internet, get some visual, make them, you know, not famous, but, you know, I mean,
Speaker #1
highlight. I think... if we have some cool artists that come here then even like citizens themselves think oh yeah if they're coming here it might actually be a cool place yeah definitely because it can be a bit hard when you grow up here and see why it's a beautiful place and what it actually has to offer and stuff
Speaker #0
like that so yeah yeah it's it's very similar to uh to to brittany for example you know like if if you talk to all the kids over there they're gonna tell you ah man i just want to leave the city and go in you know in paris or in london or whatever and then at the same time they see they see like all those creative coming back and they're like why why are those people like liking this place like i've i've been wanting to you know i wanted to leave this this spot for years now people are coming back. But because we're highlighting the spot in a new way, you know? Yeah. And I think that what they used to see is a bit different of what we see of the spot, you know? Especially when you get older, actually. Yeah. You don't need the same amenities, you see? and so To come back to the timeline, when did you actually open the place? When was the studio open?
Speaker #1
I think it was October, maybe, 2009. So like autumn 2009, yeah.
Speaker #0
And did you have any idea of the business model at the beginning? Was it... huh I know a little bit about how it works for a music studio. Was it exactly the same way? Are you renting for a day or a week or a month or whatever? How does it work?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so we have a day rate. So some studios, they do like an hourly thing. Since you kind of have to travel here, it makes most sense to do most of the stuff by day. And then we also do quite a bit of editing and mixing where the artist doesn't have to be present. So we do that stuff, some of it by the hour. Okay. And yeah. But I like to mention that... When we opened in 2009, we actually got a lot of the gear, like the previous console we had, came out of a studio called Mayfair in London, which had just closed. So it was a period where a lot of the big studios were closing down.
Speaker #0
all around the globe really yeah yeah due to the the i mean the music industry was changing at this time you know it was the the beginning of the you know the i wouldn't say internet but streaming stuff mp3 yes and and was a all new way of you know producing and listening to music yeah and some of the previous recording studios were
Speaker #1
pretty massive and big and luxurious and very expensive to run on a like day-to-day business now yeah day-to-day basis yeah yeah yeah so uh what we tried to do here was it shouldn't be too small and we we have we have four bedrooms like just upstairs in studio where most of the artists state They are super simple with just two beds and that's pretty much it. So everything in there looks good and has an okay standard, but it's not like over the top luxurious thing. So I think that was a little bit of the key of the success here. that that was pretty much what we needed but it wasn't like excessive over the top super expensive to run so that was maybe the problem of the studios that closed down and they had a lot of stuff and we tried to keep the organization pretty pretty slim yeah yeah stuff like that So that was also important for the business model too.
Speaker #0
Because when you set up the project, the business model, you actually said that you have four rooms. Four bedrooms. Four bedrooms, which is different. So you've got four bedrooms. Did you actually target a kind of bend to make sure that you could... you know they could fit in the studio and and i mean a band wouldn't even if you know it's an orchestra but it won't be like you know 15 or 20 people but did you actually manage to target the kind of band you wanted at ocean sound to build the place and make sure that you could you know it could look like the the the targets yeah
Speaker #1
but this kind of surprising thing was It's built a little bit with the recording rooms as well. It's very suitable for live bands that want to do some live stuff with several musicians and jazz projects. But because of the location and the closeness to the ocean and nature here, a lot of artists who basically do everything on a laptop want to come as well, just because they find it inspiring, and they don't necessarily need all the drums and guitar amps and recording rooms we have, but they're just... there's something about the atmosphere that helps them, even though they can sit at home or a hotel room with their laptop.
Speaker #0
find new ways to write music when they are here.
Speaker #1
Do you have hotels and stuff like around the place? Like to you know if you want to gather more people or stuff like that?
Speaker #0
Yeah so we have a pretty simple hotel like the airport hotel. It's just five minutes from here and then in Olsund there's like there's all there's super boutique uh super nice hotel and yeah and cheaper ones so so if if an artist wants like the comfort of having the room made every morning and stuff and proper breakfast they can live
Speaker #1
in the city yeah how do you how do you manage to you know that that's some very operational question but like how do you manage like the
Speaker #0
the food and stuff like do you have people around that can help you out or how do you do it by yourself or i don't know yeah so so it's a little bit diy i think most most of the artists here they actually go shopping and just fill the fridge and make make their own food And some bands or artists have like a friend who is into cooking that joins them and helps them out with those kind of practical things so they can focus on the music. And then also we sometimes hire a chef or like a proper, yeah, do like a proper thing. the wages here in for chefs in norway are pretty high so yeah so uh not everyone can afford that but uh yeah we are pretty flexible with that but most uh most of the artists just cook themselves or if they're four in the band plus plus a photographer or something then they might do like one dinner each or
Speaker #1
stuff like that so yeah because that's a bit different you know from a from i would say a normal music studio you know like artists are gonna stay there uh they're gonna spend like as you said like they're not here for an hour or two or six or seven they're here for a days or few days um yeah so you have to actually build an experience also around the place and also around the main the main job that you do guys is actually recording music so that's you you're all doing the same uh i mean do you have people like uh are you working on the on the uh the planning stuff and are you managing like all the the as you said it's a diy stuff but do you do you manage
Speaker #0
all of it or do you have more people that are taking care of the of the agenda you know and the daily yeah we have uh yeah so we are three guys that uh have this as a full-time job so taria which is the studio manager he does most of the planning for but it kind of depends a little bit on the artist if if it's an artist i've worked a lot with i usually deal with that or Also, since we're such a small organization, it's pretty fluid who's doing what. But Tari does most of the planning, and we also have meetings to discuss who's doing what. Are you open yearly? like all like no season especially you you open all the year yeah we actually used used to have closed between uh new uh christmas eve and new year okay but
Speaker #1
so no no no seasonal business i mean it's not just during summer or during winter oh no no no and that's kind of uh uh
Speaker #0
I would actually say that the worst time to record here is in like July or like the high summer when when it's hot and it's right next to a beach. And the beach is a public place, so I have lots of kids and people have barbecuing with sausages and the studio smells of barbecued sausage. So even though it's nice in the summer, it's not the best studio season. the studio can actually be pretty nice to work in studio when it's cloudy and a bit rainy outside because yeah then you kind of want to stay in there yeah and you get the atmosphere also like yeah yeah so so i i know some bands if they want to make a little bit darker music they might come in november and uh record because there's less light uh we have shorter days here so yeah yeah what do you have any uh any
Speaker #1
names of bands you can share with us like who came over like the maybe the first to believe in the project at the beginning or i don't know like some some cool bands who came over ocean Yeah.
Speaker #0
There was, like in the beginning, the biggest projects we had was a Scottish band called Travis. If you know them, they were pretty big at some point. And also, do you know Arcade Fire?
Speaker #1
Yeah, definitely. I was listening to the last album, actually.
Speaker #0
So they did like a... I'm not sure if it was the Reflektor album. Like the singer and... Two front persons. I can't remember their names now. They came to just write. Like write the songs for what was to become the Reflektor album, I think. Okay. And I think they ended up winning a Grammy for Artist of the Year or something. Crazy. So those two projects were kind of important for us to establish our name or be taken seriously by the smaller bands, because everyone wants to know what the big... stuff you've worked on so exactly if you have worked on some big stuff it's easier to be considered for like the smaller things i guess and you know to to i'm asking this
Speaker #1
question because i would love to know like how do you end up having hard cut fire coming over like do you have like a like a commercial guy in the team that are gonna make the calls and and you know to make
Speaker #0
to drop the name of the studio in a conversation or i don't know like how do you end up having them over there i i actually not sure if i did i think i actually worked on a record with a norwegian singer a female singer and piano player and she knew like the drummer in arcade fire and there were friends so he wanted to come over and play on her record and i think maybe he just liked it so much so he told like the rest of the guys in the band so i i think that was how that
Speaker #1
came about um and do you have like today is it like just people coming over or do you have to to actually be um in in the How do we say that in English? I don't know. But do you have to be in touch with music labels, stuff like that, to make sure that you are in the list or in the shortlist to have artists coming over? Or is it just friendship, relationship coming over and then it works like that by itself?
Speaker #0
Yeah, I guess we have, of course, we are friendly with some labels and You're asking about how we get people to come?
Speaker #1
Yeah,
Speaker #0
exactly. Yeah, we are friendly with some labels, but it seems like it's a lot of one artist or producer or musician have been here, and he has another project which might be suitable, and they have a friend who has been here, or there's a lot of small connections. And also, since we all... obviously have our own social media channels but we could probably just delete those because the important thing i guess is like the artists social media channels so when they are in studio or have been in the studio posting photos from here like the artists or musician friends see it and they want to come yeah it does the job yeah yeah okay so uh but i i'm at times surprised by like this some of like today there there's a american band coming it's a pretty hardcore music. And we have, I don't think we have any connection to them. They want to come here and stay for 14 days or something. And we have had artists from Russia, which we've never heard. And artists that are massive over there. And same with Swiss artists. Say if I... We have some Norwegian jazz musicians who are pretty renowned in their field because there's kind of a Scandinavian jazz sound. And then we might have a band in Switzerland which is really into that artist. And then they want to come and record in the same studio and stuff like that.
Speaker #1
How long do I have to wait if I want to come over with my band? What's the wait list?
Speaker #0
Usually we say a couple of months, I guess. So it depends on...
Speaker #1
On the project and stuff like that.
Speaker #0
Yeah, but usually it's pretty much booked.
Speaker #1
yeah three four months so i had i guess okay yeah what's the how is the project living right now do you have any any uh uh any project you want to add to ocean sound you want to build another place do you want to you know make the place grow uh yeah what's what's in the they're actually uh
Speaker #0
I'm sitting in the B studio now, which is where we mix. And this is kind of the latest thing we've done. Actually, it's not officially launched yet, but we've upgraded it to something called Dolby Atmos. if you yeah Nobody that's that's like that's a technology that's been available in the cinema for 10-15 years, but It hasn't been used for music so that so that's like a 3d Surround kind of format but last summer Apple music started to stream in Dolby Atmos and then Amazon followed and Tidal followed, Spotify might be working on some solution for it. But yeah, so a lot of like the game music or game sound is in surround or Atmos already. There's no reason... If you make a documentary for Netflix, it will not be accepted unless it has, like, Atmos around it. version of it.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
So the point being that like the music has been lagging behind kind of the technology there so a lot of studios have been upgrading for Atmos and yeah so we can deliver mixes in that format then or create music for
Speaker #1
that format so yeah which which is good especially that now you know people are i mean that was a question i have for you but uh different from from the place you know but what how do you what do you think actually about the the music today and the fact that you know most of the people are listening to the when when we see a studio like like yours and and the way we listen to music today what's what do you think about that you know like the quality of the sound actually you know that's a good news that that streaming platform are gonna use this kind of technology to to come
Speaker #0
back to quality sound yeah but yeah what do you what do you think about the yeah i i think uh yeah there's a lot of people listening on headphones and ear pods and they can sound pretty good and I guess a lot of people listen on a bluetooth speaker and including myself actually just want to listen to a song in the background I guess like the stereo hi-fi systems there are less and less, if you have a wife or girlfriend who's not interested in speakers in the living room, I guess. So, yeah, there are some soundbars that are pretty good and getting better. We actually bought... kind of part for part of teaching like artists about Atmos format we purchased the like big sound bar for a lounge just so people can listen to music while they're cooking and stuff and then and and and it has like a separate microphone so it's calibrated for the room and that sounds very very good So I'm not too pessimistic about or worried that people will not hear or play it back as it sounds in the studio. But yeah, really, I'm sitting in an amazing room. I'm not expecting anyone to hear it.
Speaker #1
Like you do.
Speaker #0
I don't know. There are some core systems now I think are really, really good. So, yeah. I'm not too pessimistic.
Speaker #1
Which is good. I mean, you know, especially as it's getting better and better. As you said, like back in 2009 or 2012. You know, 12. Where the streaming was just compressed, super compressed.
Speaker #0
And you have also the high quality settings. For example, you have Tidal Hi-Fi, I guess. And high quality settings in Spotify and YouTube. I guess a lot of people are actually listening on YouTube, which used to sound horrible. but they also changed something so i think youtube actually sounds pretty good now okay so yeah that was my uh my question about the the the internet where you are guys like how do you do you have the fiber do you have this satellite or like how does it work over there yeah we have fiber so yeah even though if you're on island i think like just a fiber cable runs by the bridge or something into the mainland
Speaker #1
That's pretty cool because we don't have it over there. Okay. So it's satellites are... Okay. Oh, that's it. Okay. And would you... How is the local community today with the project? Is it fine that they actually handle the project and it's now part of the city?
Speaker #0
Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. And it's stuff like... Like the same guys who started Ocean Sound, we did a Green Day concert in the football stadium in Ålesund last week on Thursday with 18,000 in the audience. Crazy. Yeah, I think the community has really embraced what they are doing. And for the studio, I think we have a pretty good connection now with the neighbors. And also, it's a different... Do you know, like... the kiting scene, kiting and windsurfing. You did regular surfing?
Speaker #1
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker #0
It also seems like kiting and windsurfing has gained popularity in like the recent years or something, so the area around the studio has become very popular for that.
Speaker #1
Okay, cool.
Speaker #0
So we have, there's a lot of wind here, so there's a lot of people doing that. And yeah, we're very open with, we don't have any no parking signs or anything of that sort. So they're free to come and set up their equipment on our space and stuff like that.
Speaker #1
and yeah that's pretty cool all right yeah and uh we're gonna yeah we're gonna reach the end of of the interview and uh do you have any uh what can we follow actually ocean sound like do you have a you guys have social network what can we just if you can give them to you know listeners whatever i actually have to
Speaker #0
Because we used to call ourselves Ocean Sound Recordings, but it was so long, so we tried to say Ocean Sound now. I guess it's just... Yeah, on Instagram we're Ocean Sound Recordings, and on Facebook I think we're... Oh shit. Ocean Sound. Yeah, we're just Ocean Sound. And we also have a website called oceansound.no.
Speaker #1
Okay. I will put all the links in the description of the episode.
Speaker #0
That's cool.
Speaker #1
Also sharing a few pictures, and then people can just understand the particularity of this spot. Do you have any... I mean, you're probably the only one closest to the ocean. The closest one to the ocean, actually. I don't know any other studio, music studio.
Speaker #0
No, I don't. It is a really special place and location. And what was important to us is that we... That's all. kind of well and good but it's important to us that like the equipment and the acoustics and like the workflows in the studios or like on a really high level so that we don't want to kind of rest on we have a cool spot but none of the gear works or we don't know what the hell we're doing. So we want it to be a proper working... environment and deliver like a really high quality service and keep it clean and stuff like that which a lot of studios you go into are dirty and not cleaned and messy and cables everywhere so yeah so It's important to have a whole,
Speaker #1
complete experience, which is not just providing music, but also having a good environment.
Speaker #0
And just a little funny thing, we installed a jacuzzi last year.
Speaker #1
Oh yeah,
Speaker #0
I saw that. Not last year, but a couple of years ago. And that was kind of cost a little bit of money and we wasn't sure if we should buy some microphones or...
Speaker #1
Or jacuzzi.
Speaker #0
Or jacuzzi. And we ended up buying the jacuzzi. And that's just to kind of add to the experience so you can kind of sit in the jacuzzi and watch the sunset or... Because it can actually be a problem for some musicians, they work so long hours, they get so into it, that it's good to have something other than sitting with your instrument or in front of a screen, so we can get out and... yeah sit and step back yeah take a break take a break and then also there are lots of opportunities to go sightseeing and hiking or skiing or yeah pretty much everything around yeah yeah super cool i will share like all the the pictures then you know people can realize how it looks like and that's that's super cool and uh all right thank you very much henning that was uh i mean it's really fun and uh it's good to meet your like-minded uh
Speaker #1
yeah and especially you know now you will have to come explore brittany and uh yeah and see if you've got a piece of land where you can just set up like a new music studio but i'm pretty sure that you know friends needs it so we will keep in touch definitely and uh super cool and uh thank you for your time i was super glad to have you on the show and um actually you know learn a little bit more about uh ocean sound if people want to you know ask you question or get in touch the best to to to get in touch with with you or uh ocean sound is the website you know the the Yep. That would be the best one? Okay, cool.
Speaker #0
Awesome.
Speaker #1
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Speaker #0
Thanks for having me.
Speaker #1
And talk to you soon. Thank you very much for listening to me until the end. Don't hesitate to send me your feedback. I love receiving your comments. And if you liked this episode, don't forget to share it around you, to subscribe to your favorite platform. And if you have a little time in front of you, leave a 5-star note and a little comment. It will help me to get into the rankings. No Small Plans is produced by The Crafted Hospitality Garage, a professional platform dedicated to those who create places out of the ordinary. A space to exchange, form, share and get answers to these questions. You can find the platform on no-smallplans.com and I'll see you in 15 days for a new episode. Thank you very much and see you soon.

About LOBBY Talks - For hospitality builders

Des lieux de vie dans lesquels séjourner, travailler, partager des moments.

Des lieux construits sur l’expérience, souvent imaginé par des passionnés.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

About LOBBY Talks - For hospitality builders

Des lieux de vie dans lesquels séjourner, travailler, partager des moments.

Des lieux construits sur l’expérience, souvent imaginé par des passionnés.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

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If it helps your roadmap, share the episode of Ocean Sound (ocean-view studio), subscribe, and drop a 5★ review—so more builders find it.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Hi everyone, I'm Kevin Le Goff, founder of Coastline Creative Club, and today I'm presenting you a podcast that aims to explore and talk about the hospitality universe, to understand how to develop your personal project, while talking about those who invent places out of the ordinary. Welcome everyone, you're listening to No Small Plans. I'm very happy to see you again for this new episode. 4 weeks of break have passed since the last release and it's the opportunity for me to take a little time and height on the different projects but also the opportunity to move and discover new addresses, new concepts here and elsewhere. The independent hotel at Porte de Lisbon, with hybrid concepts of places niched on the heights of Colares. And for this new episode, a little particular because it marks the launch of the English exchange, not necessarily obvious. We tried to do our best with foreign personalities It's important for me to show you places I've been to Ocean Sound, founded by Henning, is one of the projects that has really impressed me Jönsand is a recording studio in Norway, in a village of 4000 inhabitants positioned on a piece of rock surrounded by water and it was a bit of a crazy bet for the founders and today it's a success when you see the artists who were able to pass to record and in this episode we will dig into the way they built this project how they managed to build such an atypical project on such a remote territory and talk about the difficulties, the model, the vision of the founders and we will spend an hour with Enig in English So it's been a lot of fun, I have a few questions that I couldn't do again but we left the episode like that. But anyway, I wish you a very good listening and don't hesitate to give us feedback after the episode. Thank you very much, good listening to everyone. And how did you end up building a cool place like Ocean Sound? And maybe you can start just by introducing yourself for the people that don't know you yet.
Speaker #1
Yes, I'm Henning Svoren and I live in a town called Ålesund in northwestern Norway. And I am a producer and engineer and also run a part of a crew that's running Ocean Sound, our recording studio here. Yeah, I've been working with music pretty much all my life. I never had a real job. And I started out playing in bands. kind of got into studio and recording side of things through that and and also i've been kind of like what's it called uh an entrepreneur or i've been running my own kind of business from right after i left high school actually started like an indie like a independent yeah contractor i guess so yes but that's kind of to to achieve my dream which is to make a living from music that's that side of things is important to enable yeah yeah
Speaker #0
that uh yeah did you so so you you've been working on it as an indie like mainly all your life and uh what were you like like a a member of a band uh how did you end up like getting into the production part like which is you know we will maybe explain a little bit for the people that don't know the the difference between being a musician and also producer but what's what's the job uh
Speaker #1
Yeah, so I was playing in lots of bands and we had shows and in churches and country festivals. I played pretty much every kind of music, hard rock, country, pop, you name it. And so I guess I went to a studio when I was like a teenager and I just really loved... that part of music and how you can develop a song like in the studio and was really interesting to me so I got the opportunity to come and hang out in like local studio where I in the town where I grew up and just hanging out by the engineer who were mixing and looking at what he was doing. And also with my own bands and our own music, we kind of wanted to have some stuff back in those days, I guess to put up on MySpace. But yeah, so I started to collect some recording equipment. And I actually built a little studio in a defunct school, like a school that was abandoned. Oh, yeah? Where was that? That was actually a couple of hours from Giske, where I'm now, into this fjord here in Norway. So just like a tiny place. And so all the money I earned, I kind of spent on recording equipment. And I also got into the live sound for concerts and stuff, because that's a little bit easier to make money from. So the money I earned on doing concerts and stuff, I used on like... recording gear and stuff and did that for a few years and then in 2009 they started building ocean sound and i heard uh yeah they might need some help help with that and so i i knew the guys who built it a little bit from from my bands and that I want. the music scene i guess and so call them up and ask yeah i heard you might need some extra help here and yeah sure come come monday on 10 o'clock and so uh yeah but i i think they they knew a little bit about me and since I had both some playing experience studio experience and I had actually in high school I did like electrical engineering or so and some and some electronics so I could actually help soldering up like the all the connections and cables when they when we were installing the studio so yeah I had um I could help them in some various capacities.
Speaker #0
Because the studio was born actually back in 2005. There is a story about a boat or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker #1
so there are kind of two... versions of Ocean Sound. The first one started way back in 2005 when and it was in an actual boathouse where we just used to store a boat and for fishing and yeah I don't know. So there was this band called the Margarets from this island Giske. They did kind of... pop music which had like 60s aesthetics like really vintage retro kind of sound so and they did pretty well around that time so they had our record deal and they had done some records they traveled to sweden and it was mixed in new york and some of the Yeah. bigger Norwegian studio so they had kind of traveled around and worked here and there and experienced like the big city way of doing things and yeah and for their next record they asked the record label to instead of having money to Spaniel Studios, they want to buy their own gear, like analog gear, tape machines and old microphones, stuff like that, and do it in this boathouse on Iske. And it turned out really good, and it was a really creative place to make music and work. And since they kind of had this set up with the tape machines and stuff, other bands and artists in that kind of scene also wanted to come to Giske to record and try that. And they kind of soon realized that the tiny boathouse was way too small. So then kind of the plan to build Oceansound 0.20.
Speaker #0
yeah grew out of that so um yeah okay so so then you you ended up like uh uh being part of the project back in 2009 and yeah and was uh the margaret's part of it uh still in in 2009 or is it like a different crew that set it up the place how how did it end up yeah so so uh
Speaker #1
It took so long to actually get the permits right and everything in order, and not at least build the studio. So the Margaret's was pretty much not active when the studio opened. So we've done some like small, we did like a 20-year anniversary. re-release of some stuff where they did some choirs and percussion but we have actually not had a real uh the margaret's session in the studio because yeah yeah i kind of moved on but but yeah the guys who were in the band like two of them a guitar player and bass player They are the guys who... still are the owners of Ocean Sound, and they also run several festivals in Norway and have a microbrewery in the city, restaurants in the city. And we have an event company just right outside where I'm sitting now, which does everything from... political conferences, weddings, marine seminars, lots of stuff. But all of those things kind of grew out of the studio. So the studio and then the festival around the studio kind of grew into the region here.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
So that's pretty cool, actually.
Speaker #0
So just to get the timeline, but back in 2009, did you have the place already or were you looking for a place to get the permit and stuff like that? How did you end up building the place where you are now? Is it something that was already in the pipe or did you have to look for a place during a few years? How did it...
Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah, so the studio now is just a stone's throw from the old boathouse. It's really close. But if they were going to spend that much money and time and effort on building a proper studio, there was this one spot where it kind of had to be, because the location would be everything. So if it was further into the island where you didn't have the ocean view and that... whole thing it wouldn't really make sense so what they did is uh yeah the the spot was owned by i think actually 13 like farmers and it was like a shared shared land yeah okay so they first had to make all 13 of them agree to sell sell the land and Then also start the process of, since it's so close to the coastline, we have, I'm not sure how it's on your side, but here in Norway, the coastline is considered like a free, an area where everyone should have access and do recreational stuff. and walk around. So it's very, very strict with what you can build. So they sent in permits and there were massive protests in the newspaper because the neighbors and people were maybe a little bit scared if this was going to be some alien thing on the beach. with weird hippies and drugs and I don't know. Even the priest was massively against it, even though he's actually been recording. He's a great opera singer. So he's been recording in the studio. So we're all friends now. But yeah, there was... a lot of people were very divided in the beginning.
Speaker #0
That's funny because the first reaction was related to the more about the people going there more than the building actually.
Speaker #1
Yeah yeah I guess.
Speaker #0
People from the music industry you know they're gonna have hippies everywhere.
Speaker #1
Yeah yeah so And then I guess it went first to your municipality kind of thing and then off to the regional authorities. And then this case kind of went all the way up to the cultural department in Norway, where it got its final blessing. So that took some years to get all that stuff. right but um but what we actually did in the beginning we used to have a studio concert where all the neighbors and local citizens could come and have some good artists playing and try to i've had open days where like kids could come in and play some drums or whatever and just try to be open to the local community yeah i think it's very important you know when you especially when you build this kind of creative project into like small cities or like
Speaker #0
like like we do to actually engage you know some people are just coming over and they've got their project that they don't care about the local community and and then they end up like getting a lot of troubles because you know people are not like against the project that just you know they're going to give a piece of their land to someone and you know i think the way back is just to give a piece of the project to the local community and you know make them part of it yeah and would you say that it was a bigger trigger you know to to get them into the into the project to make it work.
Speaker #1
Yeah. Because, like you say, it's a small place, so... Yeah, you have to, everyone wants to have a home, live in harmony and like now, everyone is really happy about studio and I think that the studio is here have contributed a lot to the reputation of Giske and also Ålesund which is a the larger city like 15 minutes from here so so it was an area which was kind of declining like young girls went on out to study and that there was it was a pretty like male dominated work environment with since It's a lot of like ship industry and fishing and marine kind of businesses. So there wasn't a lot of jobs for like typical female careers. And I'm not saying the studio did. change that but it was kind of a part of like little bits of snowball effect where we had the studio which made the area interesting for artists and then like the festivals and concerts came after that and kind of built and then with a restaurant so so now the whole region is in a lot better shape than it was 10 15 years ago not again not because of the studio but i i think uh it's part of it yeah it's a little part of it so yeah yeah definitely i think it's the kind of you know the kind of project that is
Speaker #0
going to i mean you're not changing the the the city you live in but it's uh you know it's actually contributing to the to the to highlight you know the city and and just to to put the light on the spot and make people discover how it is like since years and years. But you actually, you know, just help the city out to, you know, get on the internet, get some visual, make them, you know, not famous, but, you know, I mean,
Speaker #1
highlight. I think... if we have some cool artists that come here then even like citizens themselves think oh yeah if they're coming here it might actually be a cool place yeah definitely because it can be a bit hard when you grow up here and see why it's a beautiful place and what it actually has to offer and stuff
Speaker #0
like that so yeah yeah it's it's very similar to uh to to brittany for example you know like if if you talk to all the kids over there they're gonna tell you ah man i just want to leave the city and go in you know in paris or in london or whatever and then at the same time they see they see like all those creative coming back and they're like why why are those people like liking this place like i've i've been wanting to you know i wanted to leave this this spot for years now people are coming back. But because we're highlighting the spot in a new way, you know? Yeah. And I think that what they used to see is a bit different of what we see of the spot, you know? Especially when you get older, actually. Yeah. You don't need the same amenities, you see? and so To come back to the timeline, when did you actually open the place? When was the studio open?
Speaker #1
I think it was October, maybe, 2009. So like autumn 2009, yeah.
Speaker #0
And did you have any idea of the business model at the beginning? Was it... huh I know a little bit about how it works for a music studio. Was it exactly the same way? Are you renting for a day or a week or a month or whatever? How does it work?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so we have a day rate. So some studios, they do like an hourly thing. Since you kind of have to travel here, it makes most sense to do most of the stuff by day. And then we also do quite a bit of editing and mixing where the artist doesn't have to be present. So we do that stuff, some of it by the hour. Okay. And yeah. But I like to mention that... When we opened in 2009, we actually got a lot of the gear, like the previous console we had, came out of a studio called Mayfair in London, which had just closed. So it was a period where a lot of the big studios were closing down.
Speaker #0
all around the globe really yeah yeah due to the the i mean the music industry was changing at this time you know it was the the beginning of the you know the i wouldn't say internet but streaming stuff mp3 yes and and was a all new way of you know producing and listening to music yeah and some of the previous recording studios were
Speaker #1
pretty massive and big and luxurious and very expensive to run on a like day-to-day business now yeah day-to-day basis yeah yeah yeah so uh what we tried to do here was it shouldn't be too small and we we have we have four bedrooms like just upstairs in studio where most of the artists state They are super simple with just two beds and that's pretty much it. So everything in there looks good and has an okay standard, but it's not like over the top luxurious thing. So I think that was a little bit of the key of the success here. that that was pretty much what we needed but it wasn't like excessive over the top super expensive to run so that was maybe the problem of the studios that closed down and they had a lot of stuff and we tried to keep the organization pretty pretty slim yeah yeah stuff like that So that was also important for the business model too.
Speaker #0
Because when you set up the project, the business model, you actually said that you have four rooms. Four bedrooms. Four bedrooms, which is different. So you've got four bedrooms. Did you actually target a kind of bend to make sure that you could... you know they could fit in the studio and and i mean a band wouldn't even if you know it's an orchestra but it won't be like you know 15 or 20 people but did you actually manage to target the kind of band you wanted at ocean sound to build the place and make sure that you could you know it could look like the the the targets yeah
Speaker #1
but this kind of surprising thing was It's built a little bit with the recording rooms as well. It's very suitable for live bands that want to do some live stuff with several musicians and jazz projects. But because of the location and the closeness to the ocean and nature here, a lot of artists who basically do everything on a laptop want to come as well, just because they find it inspiring, and they don't necessarily need all the drums and guitar amps and recording rooms we have, but they're just... there's something about the atmosphere that helps them, even though they can sit at home or a hotel room with their laptop.
Speaker #0
find new ways to write music when they are here.
Speaker #1
Do you have hotels and stuff like around the place? Like to you know if you want to gather more people or stuff like that?
Speaker #0
Yeah so we have a pretty simple hotel like the airport hotel. It's just five minutes from here and then in Olsund there's like there's all there's super boutique uh super nice hotel and yeah and cheaper ones so so if if an artist wants like the comfort of having the room made every morning and stuff and proper breakfast they can live
Speaker #1
in the city yeah how do you how do you manage to you know that that's some very operational question but like how do you manage like the
Speaker #0
the food and stuff like do you have people around that can help you out or how do you do it by yourself or i don't know yeah so so it's a little bit diy i think most most of the artists here they actually go shopping and just fill the fridge and make make their own food And some bands or artists have like a friend who is into cooking that joins them and helps them out with those kind of practical things so they can focus on the music. And then also we sometimes hire a chef or like a proper, yeah, do like a proper thing. the wages here in for chefs in norway are pretty high so yeah so uh not everyone can afford that but uh yeah we are pretty flexible with that but most uh most of the artists just cook themselves or if they're four in the band plus plus a photographer or something then they might do like one dinner each or
Speaker #1
stuff like that so yeah because that's a bit different you know from a from i would say a normal music studio you know like artists are gonna stay there uh they're gonna spend like as you said like they're not here for an hour or two or six or seven they're here for a days or few days um yeah so you have to actually build an experience also around the place and also around the main the main job that you do guys is actually recording music so that's you you're all doing the same uh i mean do you have people like uh are you working on the on the uh the planning stuff and are you managing like all the the as you said it's a diy stuff but do you do you manage
Speaker #0
all of it or do you have more people that are taking care of the of the agenda you know and the daily yeah we have uh yeah so we are three guys that uh have this as a full-time job so taria which is the studio manager he does most of the planning for but it kind of depends a little bit on the artist if if it's an artist i've worked a lot with i usually deal with that or Also, since we're such a small organization, it's pretty fluid who's doing what. But Tari does most of the planning, and we also have meetings to discuss who's doing what. Are you open yearly? like all like no season especially you you open all the year yeah we actually used used to have closed between uh new uh christmas eve and new year okay but
Speaker #1
so no no no seasonal business i mean it's not just during summer or during winter oh no no no and that's kind of uh uh
Speaker #0
I would actually say that the worst time to record here is in like July or like the high summer when when it's hot and it's right next to a beach. And the beach is a public place, so I have lots of kids and people have barbecuing with sausages and the studio smells of barbecued sausage. So even though it's nice in the summer, it's not the best studio season. the studio can actually be pretty nice to work in studio when it's cloudy and a bit rainy outside because yeah then you kind of want to stay in there yeah and you get the atmosphere also like yeah yeah so so i i know some bands if they want to make a little bit darker music they might come in november and uh record because there's less light uh we have shorter days here so yeah yeah what do you have any uh any
Speaker #1
names of bands you can share with us like who came over like the maybe the first to believe in the project at the beginning or i don't know like some some cool bands who came over ocean Yeah.
Speaker #0
There was, like in the beginning, the biggest projects we had was a Scottish band called Travis. If you know them, they were pretty big at some point. And also, do you know Arcade Fire?
Speaker #1
Yeah, definitely. I was listening to the last album, actually.
Speaker #0
So they did like a... I'm not sure if it was the Reflektor album. Like the singer and... Two front persons. I can't remember their names now. They came to just write. Like write the songs for what was to become the Reflektor album, I think. Okay. And I think they ended up winning a Grammy for Artist of the Year or something. Crazy. So those two projects were kind of important for us to establish our name or be taken seriously by the smaller bands, because everyone wants to know what the big... stuff you've worked on so exactly if you have worked on some big stuff it's easier to be considered for like the smaller things i guess and you know to to i'm asking this
Speaker #1
question because i would love to know like how do you end up having hard cut fire coming over like do you have like a like a commercial guy in the team that are gonna make the calls and and you know to make
Speaker #0
to drop the name of the studio in a conversation or i don't know like how do you end up having them over there i i actually not sure if i did i think i actually worked on a record with a norwegian singer a female singer and piano player and she knew like the drummer in arcade fire and there were friends so he wanted to come over and play on her record and i think maybe he just liked it so much so he told like the rest of the guys in the band so i i think that was how that
Speaker #1
came about um and do you have like today is it like just people coming over or do you have to to actually be um in in the How do we say that in English? I don't know. But do you have to be in touch with music labels, stuff like that, to make sure that you are in the list or in the shortlist to have artists coming over? Or is it just friendship, relationship coming over and then it works like that by itself?
Speaker #0
Yeah, I guess we have, of course, we are friendly with some labels and You're asking about how we get people to come?
Speaker #1
Yeah,
Speaker #0
exactly. Yeah, we are friendly with some labels, but it seems like it's a lot of one artist or producer or musician have been here, and he has another project which might be suitable, and they have a friend who has been here, or there's a lot of small connections. And also, since we all... obviously have our own social media channels but we could probably just delete those because the important thing i guess is like the artists social media channels so when they are in studio or have been in the studio posting photos from here like the artists or musician friends see it and they want to come yeah it does the job yeah yeah okay so uh but i i'm at times surprised by like this some of like today there there's a american band coming it's a pretty hardcore music. And we have, I don't think we have any connection to them. They want to come here and stay for 14 days or something. And we have had artists from Russia, which we've never heard. And artists that are massive over there. And same with Swiss artists. Say if I... We have some Norwegian jazz musicians who are pretty renowned in their field because there's kind of a Scandinavian jazz sound. And then we might have a band in Switzerland which is really into that artist. And then they want to come and record in the same studio and stuff like that.
Speaker #1
How long do I have to wait if I want to come over with my band? What's the wait list?
Speaker #0
Usually we say a couple of months, I guess. So it depends on...
Speaker #1
On the project and stuff like that.
Speaker #0
Yeah, but usually it's pretty much booked.
Speaker #1
yeah three four months so i had i guess okay yeah what's the how is the project living right now do you have any any uh uh any project you want to add to ocean sound you want to build another place do you want to you know make the place grow uh yeah what's what's in the they're actually uh
Speaker #0
I'm sitting in the B studio now, which is where we mix. And this is kind of the latest thing we've done. Actually, it's not officially launched yet, but we've upgraded it to something called Dolby Atmos. if you yeah Nobody that's that's like that's a technology that's been available in the cinema for 10-15 years, but It hasn't been used for music so that so that's like a 3d Surround kind of format but last summer Apple music started to stream in Dolby Atmos and then Amazon followed and Tidal followed, Spotify might be working on some solution for it. But yeah, so a lot of like the game music or game sound is in surround or Atmos already. There's no reason... If you make a documentary for Netflix, it will not be accepted unless it has, like, Atmos around it. version of it.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
So the point being that like the music has been lagging behind kind of the technology there so a lot of studios have been upgrading for Atmos and yeah so we can deliver mixes in that format then or create music for
Speaker #1
that format so yeah which which is good especially that now you know people are i mean that was a question i have for you but uh different from from the place you know but what how do you what do you think actually about the the music today and the fact that you know most of the people are listening to the when when we see a studio like like yours and and the way we listen to music today what's what do you think about that you know like the quality of the sound actually you know that's a good news that that streaming platform are gonna use this kind of technology to to come
Speaker #0
back to quality sound yeah but yeah what do you what do you think about the yeah i i think uh yeah there's a lot of people listening on headphones and ear pods and they can sound pretty good and I guess a lot of people listen on a bluetooth speaker and including myself actually just want to listen to a song in the background I guess like the stereo hi-fi systems there are less and less, if you have a wife or girlfriend who's not interested in speakers in the living room, I guess. So, yeah, there are some soundbars that are pretty good and getting better. We actually bought... kind of part for part of teaching like artists about Atmos format we purchased the like big sound bar for a lounge just so people can listen to music while they're cooking and stuff and then and and and it has like a separate microphone so it's calibrated for the room and that sounds very very good So I'm not too pessimistic about or worried that people will not hear or play it back as it sounds in the studio. But yeah, really, I'm sitting in an amazing room. I'm not expecting anyone to hear it.
Speaker #1
Like you do.
Speaker #0
I don't know. There are some core systems now I think are really, really good. So, yeah. I'm not too pessimistic.
Speaker #1
Which is good. I mean, you know, especially as it's getting better and better. As you said, like back in 2009 or 2012. You know, 12. Where the streaming was just compressed, super compressed.
Speaker #0
And you have also the high quality settings. For example, you have Tidal Hi-Fi, I guess. And high quality settings in Spotify and YouTube. I guess a lot of people are actually listening on YouTube, which used to sound horrible. but they also changed something so i think youtube actually sounds pretty good now okay so yeah that was my uh my question about the the the internet where you are guys like how do you do you have the fiber do you have this satellite or like how does it work over there yeah we have fiber so yeah even though if you're on island i think like just a fiber cable runs by the bridge or something into the mainland
Speaker #1
That's pretty cool because we don't have it over there. Okay. So it's satellites are... Okay. Oh, that's it. Okay. And would you... How is the local community today with the project? Is it fine that they actually handle the project and it's now part of the city?
Speaker #0
Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. And it's stuff like... Like the same guys who started Ocean Sound, we did a Green Day concert in the football stadium in Ålesund last week on Thursday with 18,000 in the audience. Crazy. Yeah, I think the community has really embraced what they are doing. And for the studio, I think we have a pretty good connection now with the neighbors. And also, it's a different... Do you know, like... the kiting scene, kiting and windsurfing. You did regular surfing?
Speaker #1
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker #0
It also seems like kiting and windsurfing has gained popularity in like the recent years or something, so the area around the studio has become very popular for that.
Speaker #1
Okay, cool.
Speaker #0
So we have, there's a lot of wind here, so there's a lot of people doing that. And yeah, we're very open with, we don't have any no parking signs or anything of that sort. So they're free to come and set up their equipment on our space and stuff like that.
Speaker #1
and yeah that's pretty cool all right yeah and uh we're gonna yeah we're gonna reach the end of of the interview and uh do you have any uh what can we follow actually ocean sound like do you have a you guys have social network what can we just if you can give them to you know listeners whatever i actually have to
Speaker #0
Because we used to call ourselves Ocean Sound Recordings, but it was so long, so we tried to say Ocean Sound now. I guess it's just... Yeah, on Instagram we're Ocean Sound Recordings, and on Facebook I think we're... Oh shit. Ocean Sound. Yeah, we're just Ocean Sound. And we also have a website called oceansound.no.
Speaker #1
Okay. I will put all the links in the description of the episode.
Speaker #0
That's cool.
Speaker #1
Also sharing a few pictures, and then people can just understand the particularity of this spot. Do you have any... I mean, you're probably the only one closest to the ocean. The closest one to the ocean, actually. I don't know any other studio, music studio.
Speaker #0
No, I don't. It is a really special place and location. And what was important to us is that we... That's all. kind of well and good but it's important to us that like the equipment and the acoustics and like the workflows in the studios or like on a really high level so that we don't want to kind of rest on we have a cool spot but none of the gear works or we don't know what the hell we're doing. So we want it to be a proper working... environment and deliver like a really high quality service and keep it clean and stuff like that which a lot of studios you go into are dirty and not cleaned and messy and cables everywhere so yeah so It's important to have a whole,
Speaker #1
complete experience, which is not just providing music, but also having a good environment.
Speaker #0
And just a little funny thing, we installed a jacuzzi last year.
Speaker #1
Oh yeah,
Speaker #0
I saw that. Not last year, but a couple of years ago. And that was kind of cost a little bit of money and we wasn't sure if we should buy some microphones or...
Speaker #1
Or jacuzzi.
Speaker #0
Or jacuzzi. And we ended up buying the jacuzzi. And that's just to kind of add to the experience so you can kind of sit in the jacuzzi and watch the sunset or... Because it can actually be a problem for some musicians, they work so long hours, they get so into it, that it's good to have something other than sitting with your instrument or in front of a screen, so we can get out and... yeah sit and step back yeah take a break take a break and then also there are lots of opportunities to go sightseeing and hiking or skiing or yeah pretty much everything around yeah yeah super cool i will share like all the the pictures then you know people can realize how it looks like and that's that's super cool and uh all right thank you very much henning that was uh i mean it's really fun and uh it's good to meet your like-minded uh
Speaker #1
yeah and especially you know now you will have to come explore brittany and uh yeah and see if you've got a piece of land where you can just set up like a new music studio but i'm pretty sure that you know friends needs it so we will keep in touch definitely and uh super cool and uh thank you for your time i was super glad to have you on the show and um actually you know learn a little bit more about uh ocean sound if people want to you know ask you question or get in touch the best to to to get in touch with with you or uh ocean sound is the website you know the the Yep. That would be the best one? Okay, cool.
Speaker #0
Awesome.
Speaker #1
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Speaker #0
Thanks for having me.
Speaker #1
And talk to you soon. Thank you very much for listening to me until the end. Don't hesitate to send me your feedback. I love receiving your comments. And if you liked this episode, don't forget to share it around you, to subscribe to your favorite platform. And if you have a little time in front of you, leave a 5-star note and a little comment. It will help me to get into the rankings. No Small Plans is produced by The Crafted Hospitality Garage, a professional platform dedicated to those who create places out of the ordinary. A space to exchange, form, share and get answers to these questions. You can find the platform on no-smallplans.com and I'll see you in 15 days for a new episode. Thank you very much and see you soon.

About LOBBY Talks - For hospitality builders

Des lieux de vie dans lesquels séjourner, travailler, partager des moments.

Des lieux construits sur l’expérience, souvent imaginé par des passionnés.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

About LOBBY Talks - For hospitality builders

Des lieux de vie dans lesquels séjourner, travailler, partager des moments.

Des lieux construits sur l’expérience, souvent imaginé par des passionnés.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Description

If it helps your roadmap, share the episode of Ocean Sound (ocean-view studio), subscribe, and drop a 5★ review—so more builders find it.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Hi everyone, I'm Kevin Le Goff, founder of Coastline Creative Club, and today I'm presenting you a podcast that aims to explore and talk about the hospitality universe, to understand how to develop your personal project, while talking about those who invent places out of the ordinary. Welcome everyone, you're listening to No Small Plans. I'm very happy to see you again for this new episode. 4 weeks of break have passed since the last release and it's the opportunity for me to take a little time and height on the different projects but also the opportunity to move and discover new addresses, new concepts here and elsewhere. The independent hotel at Porte de Lisbon, with hybrid concepts of places niched on the heights of Colares. And for this new episode, a little particular because it marks the launch of the English exchange, not necessarily obvious. We tried to do our best with foreign personalities It's important for me to show you places I've been to Ocean Sound, founded by Henning, is one of the projects that has really impressed me Jönsand is a recording studio in Norway, in a village of 4000 inhabitants positioned on a piece of rock surrounded by water and it was a bit of a crazy bet for the founders and today it's a success when you see the artists who were able to pass to record and in this episode we will dig into the way they built this project how they managed to build such an atypical project on such a remote territory and talk about the difficulties, the model, the vision of the founders and we will spend an hour with Enig in English So it's been a lot of fun, I have a few questions that I couldn't do again but we left the episode like that. But anyway, I wish you a very good listening and don't hesitate to give us feedback after the episode. Thank you very much, good listening to everyone. And how did you end up building a cool place like Ocean Sound? And maybe you can start just by introducing yourself for the people that don't know you yet.
Speaker #1
Yes, I'm Henning Svoren and I live in a town called Ålesund in northwestern Norway. And I am a producer and engineer and also run a part of a crew that's running Ocean Sound, our recording studio here. Yeah, I've been working with music pretty much all my life. I never had a real job. And I started out playing in bands. kind of got into studio and recording side of things through that and and also i've been kind of like what's it called uh an entrepreneur or i've been running my own kind of business from right after i left high school actually started like an indie like a independent yeah contractor i guess so yes but that's kind of to to achieve my dream which is to make a living from music that's that side of things is important to enable yeah yeah
Speaker #0
that uh yeah did you so so you you've been working on it as an indie like mainly all your life and uh what were you like like a a member of a band uh how did you end up like getting into the production part like which is you know we will maybe explain a little bit for the people that don't know the the difference between being a musician and also producer but what's what's the job uh
Speaker #1
Yeah, so I was playing in lots of bands and we had shows and in churches and country festivals. I played pretty much every kind of music, hard rock, country, pop, you name it. And so I guess I went to a studio when I was like a teenager and I just really loved... that part of music and how you can develop a song like in the studio and was really interesting to me so I got the opportunity to come and hang out in like local studio where I in the town where I grew up and just hanging out by the engineer who were mixing and looking at what he was doing. And also with my own bands and our own music, we kind of wanted to have some stuff back in those days, I guess to put up on MySpace. But yeah, so I started to collect some recording equipment. And I actually built a little studio in a defunct school, like a school that was abandoned. Oh, yeah? Where was that? That was actually a couple of hours from Giske, where I'm now, into this fjord here in Norway. So just like a tiny place. And so all the money I earned, I kind of spent on recording equipment. And I also got into the live sound for concerts and stuff, because that's a little bit easier to make money from. So the money I earned on doing concerts and stuff, I used on like... recording gear and stuff and did that for a few years and then in 2009 they started building ocean sound and i heard uh yeah they might need some help help with that and so i i knew the guys who built it a little bit from from my bands and that I want. the music scene i guess and so call them up and ask yeah i heard you might need some extra help here and yeah sure come come monday on 10 o'clock and so uh yeah but i i think they they knew a little bit about me and since I had both some playing experience studio experience and I had actually in high school I did like electrical engineering or so and some and some electronics so I could actually help soldering up like the all the connections and cables when they when we were installing the studio so yeah I had um I could help them in some various capacities.
Speaker #0
Because the studio was born actually back in 2005. There is a story about a boat or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker #1
so there are kind of two... versions of Ocean Sound. The first one started way back in 2005 when and it was in an actual boathouse where we just used to store a boat and for fishing and yeah I don't know. So there was this band called the Margarets from this island Giske. They did kind of... pop music which had like 60s aesthetics like really vintage retro kind of sound so and they did pretty well around that time so they had our record deal and they had done some records they traveled to sweden and it was mixed in new york and some of the Yeah. bigger Norwegian studio so they had kind of traveled around and worked here and there and experienced like the big city way of doing things and yeah and for their next record they asked the record label to instead of having money to Spaniel Studios, they want to buy their own gear, like analog gear, tape machines and old microphones, stuff like that, and do it in this boathouse on Iske. And it turned out really good, and it was a really creative place to make music and work. And since they kind of had this set up with the tape machines and stuff, other bands and artists in that kind of scene also wanted to come to Giske to record and try that. And they kind of soon realized that the tiny boathouse was way too small. So then kind of the plan to build Oceansound 0.20.
Speaker #0
yeah grew out of that so um yeah okay so so then you you ended up like uh uh being part of the project back in 2009 and yeah and was uh the margaret's part of it uh still in in 2009 or is it like a different crew that set it up the place how how did it end up yeah so so uh
Speaker #1
It took so long to actually get the permits right and everything in order, and not at least build the studio. So the Margaret's was pretty much not active when the studio opened. So we've done some like small, we did like a 20-year anniversary. re-release of some stuff where they did some choirs and percussion but we have actually not had a real uh the margaret's session in the studio because yeah yeah i kind of moved on but but yeah the guys who were in the band like two of them a guitar player and bass player They are the guys who... still are the owners of Ocean Sound, and they also run several festivals in Norway and have a microbrewery in the city, restaurants in the city. And we have an event company just right outside where I'm sitting now, which does everything from... political conferences, weddings, marine seminars, lots of stuff. But all of those things kind of grew out of the studio. So the studio and then the festival around the studio kind of grew into the region here.
Speaker #0
Okay.
Speaker #1
So that's pretty cool, actually.
Speaker #0
So just to get the timeline, but back in 2009, did you have the place already or were you looking for a place to get the permit and stuff like that? How did you end up building the place where you are now? Is it something that was already in the pipe or did you have to look for a place during a few years? How did it...
Speaker #1
Yeah. Yeah, so the studio now is just a stone's throw from the old boathouse. It's really close. But if they were going to spend that much money and time and effort on building a proper studio, there was this one spot where it kind of had to be, because the location would be everything. So if it was further into the island where you didn't have the ocean view and that... whole thing it wouldn't really make sense so what they did is uh yeah the the spot was owned by i think actually 13 like farmers and it was like a shared shared land yeah okay so they first had to make all 13 of them agree to sell sell the land and Then also start the process of, since it's so close to the coastline, we have, I'm not sure how it's on your side, but here in Norway, the coastline is considered like a free, an area where everyone should have access and do recreational stuff. and walk around. So it's very, very strict with what you can build. So they sent in permits and there were massive protests in the newspaper because the neighbors and people were maybe a little bit scared if this was going to be some alien thing on the beach. with weird hippies and drugs and I don't know. Even the priest was massively against it, even though he's actually been recording. He's a great opera singer. So he's been recording in the studio. So we're all friends now. But yeah, there was... a lot of people were very divided in the beginning.
Speaker #0
That's funny because the first reaction was related to the more about the people going there more than the building actually.
Speaker #1
Yeah yeah I guess.
Speaker #0
People from the music industry you know they're gonna have hippies everywhere.
Speaker #1
Yeah yeah so And then I guess it went first to your municipality kind of thing and then off to the regional authorities. And then this case kind of went all the way up to the cultural department in Norway, where it got its final blessing. So that took some years to get all that stuff. right but um but what we actually did in the beginning we used to have a studio concert where all the neighbors and local citizens could come and have some good artists playing and try to i've had open days where like kids could come in and play some drums or whatever and just try to be open to the local community yeah i think it's very important you know when you especially when you build this kind of creative project into like small cities or like
Speaker #0
like like we do to actually engage you know some people are just coming over and they've got their project that they don't care about the local community and and then they end up like getting a lot of troubles because you know people are not like against the project that just you know they're going to give a piece of their land to someone and you know i think the way back is just to give a piece of the project to the local community and you know make them part of it yeah and would you say that it was a bigger trigger you know to to get them into the into the project to make it work.
Speaker #1
Yeah. Because, like you say, it's a small place, so... Yeah, you have to, everyone wants to have a home, live in harmony and like now, everyone is really happy about studio and I think that the studio is here have contributed a lot to the reputation of Giske and also Ålesund which is a the larger city like 15 minutes from here so so it was an area which was kind of declining like young girls went on out to study and that there was it was a pretty like male dominated work environment with since It's a lot of like ship industry and fishing and marine kind of businesses. So there wasn't a lot of jobs for like typical female careers. And I'm not saying the studio did. change that but it was kind of a part of like little bits of snowball effect where we had the studio which made the area interesting for artists and then like the festivals and concerts came after that and kind of built and then with a restaurant so so now the whole region is in a lot better shape than it was 10 15 years ago not again not because of the studio but i i think uh it's part of it yeah it's a little part of it so yeah yeah definitely i think it's the kind of you know the kind of project that is
Speaker #0
going to i mean you're not changing the the the city you live in but it's uh you know it's actually contributing to the to the to highlight you know the city and and just to to put the light on the spot and make people discover how it is like since years and years. But you actually, you know, just help the city out to, you know, get on the internet, get some visual, make them, you know, not famous, but, you know, I mean,
Speaker #1
highlight. I think... if we have some cool artists that come here then even like citizens themselves think oh yeah if they're coming here it might actually be a cool place yeah definitely because it can be a bit hard when you grow up here and see why it's a beautiful place and what it actually has to offer and stuff
Speaker #0
like that so yeah yeah it's it's very similar to uh to to brittany for example you know like if if you talk to all the kids over there they're gonna tell you ah man i just want to leave the city and go in you know in paris or in london or whatever and then at the same time they see they see like all those creative coming back and they're like why why are those people like liking this place like i've i've been wanting to you know i wanted to leave this this spot for years now people are coming back. But because we're highlighting the spot in a new way, you know? Yeah. And I think that what they used to see is a bit different of what we see of the spot, you know? Especially when you get older, actually. Yeah. You don't need the same amenities, you see? and so To come back to the timeline, when did you actually open the place? When was the studio open?
Speaker #1
I think it was October, maybe, 2009. So like autumn 2009, yeah.
Speaker #0
And did you have any idea of the business model at the beginning? Was it... huh I know a little bit about how it works for a music studio. Was it exactly the same way? Are you renting for a day or a week or a month or whatever? How does it work?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so we have a day rate. So some studios, they do like an hourly thing. Since you kind of have to travel here, it makes most sense to do most of the stuff by day. And then we also do quite a bit of editing and mixing where the artist doesn't have to be present. So we do that stuff, some of it by the hour. Okay. And yeah. But I like to mention that... When we opened in 2009, we actually got a lot of the gear, like the previous console we had, came out of a studio called Mayfair in London, which had just closed. So it was a period where a lot of the big studios were closing down.
Speaker #0
all around the globe really yeah yeah due to the the i mean the music industry was changing at this time you know it was the the beginning of the you know the i wouldn't say internet but streaming stuff mp3 yes and and was a all new way of you know producing and listening to music yeah and some of the previous recording studios were
Speaker #1
pretty massive and big and luxurious and very expensive to run on a like day-to-day business now yeah day-to-day basis yeah yeah yeah so uh what we tried to do here was it shouldn't be too small and we we have we have four bedrooms like just upstairs in studio where most of the artists state They are super simple with just two beds and that's pretty much it. So everything in there looks good and has an okay standard, but it's not like over the top luxurious thing. So I think that was a little bit of the key of the success here. that that was pretty much what we needed but it wasn't like excessive over the top super expensive to run so that was maybe the problem of the studios that closed down and they had a lot of stuff and we tried to keep the organization pretty pretty slim yeah yeah stuff like that So that was also important for the business model too.
Speaker #0
Because when you set up the project, the business model, you actually said that you have four rooms. Four bedrooms. Four bedrooms, which is different. So you've got four bedrooms. Did you actually target a kind of bend to make sure that you could... you know they could fit in the studio and and i mean a band wouldn't even if you know it's an orchestra but it won't be like you know 15 or 20 people but did you actually manage to target the kind of band you wanted at ocean sound to build the place and make sure that you could you know it could look like the the the targets yeah
Speaker #1
but this kind of surprising thing was It's built a little bit with the recording rooms as well. It's very suitable for live bands that want to do some live stuff with several musicians and jazz projects. But because of the location and the closeness to the ocean and nature here, a lot of artists who basically do everything on a laptop want to come as well, just because they find it inspiring, and they don't necessarily need all the drums and guitar amps and recording rooms we have, but they're just... there's something about the atmosphere that helps them, even though they can sit at home or a hotel room with their laptop.
Speaker #0
find new ways to write music when they are here.
Speaker #1
Do you have hotels and stuff like around the place? Like to you know if you want to gather more people or stuff like that?
Speaker #0
Yeah so we have a pretty simple hotel like the airport hotel. It's just five minutes from here and then in Olsund there's like there's all there's super boutique uh super nice hotel and yeah and cheaper ones so so if if an artist wants like the comfort of having the room made every morning and stuff and proper breakfast they can live
Speaker #1
in the city yeah how do you how do you manage to you know that that's some very operational question but like how do you manage like the
Speaker #0
the food and stuff like do you have people around that can help you out or how do you do it by yourself or i don't know yeah so so it's a little bit diy i think most most of the artists here they actually go shopping and just fill the fridge and make make their own food And some bands or artists have like a friend who is into cooking that joins them and helps them out with those kind of practical things so they can focus on the music. And then also we sometimes hire a chef or like a proper, yeah, do like a proper thing. the wages here in for chefs in norway are pretty high so yeah so uh not everyone can afford that but uh yeah we are pretty flexible with that but most uh most of the artists just cook themselves or if they're four in the band plus plus a photographer or something then they might do like one dinner each or
Speaker #1
stuff like that so yeah because that's a bit different you know from a from i would say a normal music studio you know like artists are gonna stay there uh they're gonna spend like as you said like they're not here for an hour or two or six or seven they're here for a days or few days um yeah so you have to actually build an experience also around the place and also around the main the main job that you do guys is actually recording music so that's you you're all doing the same uh i mean do you have people like uh are you working on the on the uh the planning stuff and are you managing like all the the as you said it's a diy stuff but do you do you manage
Speaker #0
all of it or do you have more people that are taking care of the of the agenda you know and the daily yeah we have uh yeah so we are three guys that uh have this as a full-time job so taria which is the studio manager he does most of the planning for but it kind of depends a little bit on the artist if if it's an artist i've worked a lot with i usually deal with that or Also, since we're such a small organization, it's pretty fluid who's doing what. But Tari does most of the planning, and we also have meetings to discuss who's doing what. Are you open yearly? like all like no season especially you you open all the year yeah we actually used used to have closed between uh new uh christmas eve and new year okay but
Speaker #1
so no no no seasonal business i mean it's not just during summer or during winter oh no no no and that's kind of uh uh
Speaker #0
I would actually say that the worst time to record here is in like July or like the high summer when when it's hot and it's right next to a beach. And the beach is a public place, so I have lots of kids and people have barbecuing with sausages and the studio smells of barbecued sausage. So even though it's nice in the summer, it's not the best studio season. the studio can actually be pretty nice to work in studio when it's cloudy and a bit rainy outside because yeah then you kind of want to stay in there yeah and you get the atmosphere also like yeah yeah so so i i know some bands if they want to make a little bit darker music they might come in november and uh record because there's less light uh we have shorter days here so yeah yeah what do you have any uh any
Speaker #1
names of bands you can share with us like who came over like the maybe the first to believe in the project at the beginning or i don't know like some some cool bands who came over ocean Yeah.
Speaker #0
There was, like in the beginning, the biggest projects we had was a Scottish band called Travis. If you know them, they were pretty big at some point. And also, do you know Arcade Fire?
Speaker #1
Yeah, definitely. I was listening to the last album, actually.
Speaker #0
So they did like a... I'm not sure if it was the Reflektor album. Like the singer and... Two front persons. I can't remember their names now. They came to just write. Like write the songs for what was to become the Reflektor album, I think. Okay. And I think they ended up winning a Grammy for Artist of the Year or something. Crazy. So those two projects were kind of important for us to establish our name or be taken seriously by the smaller bands, because everyone wants to know what the big... stuff you've worked on so exactly if you have worked on some big stuff it's easier to be considered for like the smaller things i guess and you know to to i'm asking this
Speaker #1
question because i would love to know like how do you end up having hard cut fire coming over like do you have like a like a commercial guy in the team that are gonna make the calls and and you know to make
Speaker #0
to drop the name of the studio in a conversation or i don't know like how do you end up having them over there i i actually not sure if i did i think i actually worked on a record with a norwegian singer a female singer and piano player and she knew like the drummer in arcade fire and there were friends so he wanted to come over and play on her record and i think maybe he just liked it so much so he told like the rest of the guys in the band so i i think that was how that
Speaker #1
came about um and do you have like today is it like just people coming over or do you have to to actually be um in in the How do we say that in English? I don't know. But do you have to be in touch with music labels, stuff like that, to make sure that you are in the list or in the shortlist to have artists coming over? Or is it just friendship, relationship coming over and then it works like that by itself?
Speaker #0
Yeah, I guess we have, of course, we are friendly with some labels and You're asking about how we get people to come?
Speaker #1
Yeah,
Speaker #0
exactly. Yeah, we are friendly with some labels, but it seems like it's a lot of one artist or producer or musician have been here, and he has another project which might be suitable, and they have a friend who has been here, or there's a lot of small connections. And also, since we all... obviously have our own social media channels but we could probably just delete those because the important thing i guess is like the artists social media channels so when they are in studio or have been in the studio posting photos from here like the artists or musician friends see it and they want to come yeah it does the job yeah yeah okay so uh but i i'm at times surprised by like this some of like today there there's a american band coming it's a pretty hardcore music. And we have, I don't think we have any connection to them. They want to come here and stay for 14 days or something. And we have had artists from Russia, which we've never heard. And artists that are massive over there. And same with Swiss artists. Say if I... We have some Norwegian jazz musicians who are pretty renowned in their field because there's kind of a Scandinavian jazz sound. And then we might have a band in Switzerland which is really into that artist. And then they want to come and record in the same studio and stuff like that.
Speaker #1
How long do I have to wait if I want to come over with my band? What's the wait list?
Speaker #0
Usually we say a couple of months, I guess. So it depends on...
Speaker #1
On the project and stuff like that.
Speaker #0
Yeah, but usually it's pretty much booked.
Speaker #1
yeah three four months so i had i guess okay yeah what's the how is the project living right now do you have any any uh uh any project you want to add to ocean sound you want to build another place do you want to you know make the place grow uh yeah what's what's in the they're actually uh
Speaker #0
I'm sitting in the B studio now, which is where we mix. And this is kind of the latest thing we've done. Actually, it's not officially launched yet, but we've upgraded it to something called Dolby Atmos. if you yeah Nobody that's that's like that's a technology that's been available in the cinema for 10-15 years, but It hasn't been used for music so that so that's like a 3d Surround kind of format but last summer Apple music started to stream in Dolby Atmos and then Amazon followed and Tidal followed, Spotify might be working on some solution for it. But yeah, so a lot of like the game music or game sound is in surround or Atmos already. There's no reason... If you make a documentary for Netflix, it will not be accepted unless it has, like, Atmos around it. version of it.
Speaker #1
Okay.
Speaker #0
So the point being that like the music has been lagging behind kind of the technology there so a lot of studios have been upgrading for Atmos and yeah so we can deliver mixes in that format then or create music for
Speaker #1
that format so yeah which which is good especially that now you know people are i mean that was a question i have for you but uh different from from the place you know but what how do you what do you think actually about the the music today and the fact that you know most of the people are listening to the when when we see a studio like like yours and and the way we listen to music today what's what do you think about that you know like the quality of the sound actually you know that's a good news that that streaming platform are gonna use this kind of technology to to come
Speaker #0
back to quality sound yeah but yeah what do you what do you think about the yeah i i think uh yeah there's a lot of people listening on headphones and ear pods and they can sound pretty good and I guess a lot of people listen on a bluetooth speaker and including myself actually just want to listen to a song in the background I guess like the stereo hi-fi systems there are less and less, if you have a wife or girlfriend who's not interested in speakers in the living room, I guess. So, yeah, there are some soundbars that are pretty good and getting better. We actually bought... kind of part for part of teaching like artists about Atmos format we purchased the like big sound bar for a lounge just so people can listen to music while they're cooking and stuff and then and and and it has like a separate microphone so it's calibrated for the room and that sounds very very good So I'm not too pessimistic about or worried that people will not hear or play it back as it sounds in the studio. But yeah, really, I'm sitting in an amazing room. I'm not expecting anyone to hear it.
Speaker #1
Like you do.
Speaker #0
I don't know. There are some core systems now I think are really, really good. So, yeah. I'm not too pessimistic.
Speaker #1
Which is good. I mean, you know, especially as it's getting better and better. As you said, like back in 2009 or 2012. You know, 12. Where the streaming was just compressed, super compressed.
Speaker #0
And you have also the high quality settings. For example, you have Tidal Hi-Fi, I guess. And high quality settings in Spotify and YouTube. I guess a lot of people are actually listening on YouTube, which used to sound horrible. but they also changed something so i think youtube actually sounds pretty good now okay so yeah that was my uh my question about the the the internet where you are guys like how do you do you have the fiber do you have this satellite or like how does it work over there yeah we have fiber so yeah even though if you're on island i think like just a fiber cable runs by the bridge or something into the mainland
Speaker #1
That's pretty cool because we don't have it over there. Okay. So it's satellites are... Okay. Oh, that's it. Okay. And would you... How is the local community today with the project? Is it fine that they actually handle the project and it's now part of the city?
Speaker #0
Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. And it's stuff like... Like the same guys who started Ocean Sound, we did a Green Day concert in the football stadium in Ålesund last week on Thursday with 18,000 in the audience. Crazy. Yeah, I think the community has really embraced what they are doing. And for the studio, I think we have a pretty good connection now with the neighbors. And also, it's a different... Do you know, like... the kiting scene, kiting and windsurfing. You did regular surfing?
Speaker #1
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker #0
It also seems like kiting and windsurfing has gained popularity in like the recent years or something, so the area around the studio has become very popular for that.
Speaker #1
Okay, cool.
Speaker #0
So we have, there's a lot of wind here, so there's a lot of people doing that. And yeah, we're very open with, we don't have any no parking signs or anything of that sort. So they're free to come and set up their equipment on our space and stuff like that.
Speaker #1
and yeah that's pretty cool all right yeah and uh we're gonna yeah we're gonna reach the end of of the interview and uh do you have any uh what can we follow actually ocean sound like do you have a you guys have social network what can we just if you can give them to you know listeners whatever i actually have to
Speaker #0
Because we used to call ourselves Ocean Sound Recordings, but it was so long, so we tried to say Ocean Sound now. I guess it's just... Yeah, on Instagram we're Ocean Sound Recordings, and on Facebook I think we're... Oh shit. Ocean Sound. Yeah, we're just Ocean Sound. And we also have a website called oceansound.no.
Speaker #1
Okay. I will put all the links in the description of the episode.
Speaker #0
That's cool.
Speaker #1
Also sharing a few pictures, and then people can just understand the particularity of this spot. Do you have any... I mean, you're probably the only one closest to the ocean. The closest one to the ocean, actually. I don't know any other studio, music studio.
Speaker #0
No, I don't. It is a really special place and location. And what was important to us is that we... That's all. kind of well and good but it's important to us that like the equipment and the acoustics and like the workflows in the studios or like on a really high level so that we don't want to kind of rest on we have a cool spot but none of the gear works or we don't know what the hell we're doing. So we want it to be a proper working... environment and deliver like a really high quality service and keep it clean and stuff like that which a lot of studios you go into are dirty and not cleaned and messy and cables everywhere so yeah so It's important to have a whole,
Speaker #1
complete experience, which is not just providing music, but also having a good environment.
Speaker #0
And just a little funny thing, we installed a jacuzzi last year.
Speaker #1
Oh yeah,
Speaker #0
I saw that. Not last year, but a couple of years ago. And that was kind of cost a little bit of money and we wasn't sure if we should buy some microphones or...
Speaker #1
Or jacuzzi.
Speaker #0
Or jacuzzi. And we ended up buying the jacuzzi. And that's just to kind of add to the experience so you can kind of sit in the jacuzzi and watch the sunset or... Because it can actually be a problem for some musicians, they work so long hours, they get so into it, that it's good to have something other than sitting with your instrument or in front of a screen, so we can get out and... yeah sit and step back yeah take a break take a break and then also there are lots of opportunities to go sightseeing and hiking or skiing or yeah pretty much everything around yeah yeah super cool i will share like all the the pictures then you know people can realize how it looks like and that's that's super cool and uh all right thank you very much henning that was uh i mean it's really fun and uh it's good to meet your like-minded uh
Speaker #1
yeah and especially you know now you will have to come explore brittany and uh yeah and see if you've got a piece of land where you can just set up like a new music studio but i'm pretty sure that you know friends needs it so we will keep in touch definitely and uh super cool and uh thank you for your time i was super glad to have you on the show and um actually you know learn a little bit more about uh ocean sound if people want to you know ask you question or get in touch the best to to to get in touch with with you or uh ocean sound is the website you know the the Yep. That would be the best one? Okay, cool.
Speaker #0
Awesome.
Speaker #1
Perfect. Thank you very much.
Speaker #0
Thanks for having me.
Speaker #1
And talk to you soon. Thank you very much for listening to me until the end. Don't hesitate to send me your feedback. I love receiving your comments. And if you liked this episode, don't forget to share it around you, to subscribe to your favorite platform. And if you have a little time in front of you, leave a 5-star note and a little comment. It will help me to get into the rankings. No Small Plans is produced by The Crafted Hospitality Garage, a professional platform dedicated to those who create places out of the ordinary. A space to exchange, form, share and get answers to these questions. You can find the platform on no-smallplans.com and I'll see you in 15 days for a new episode. Thank you very much and see you soon.

About LOBBY Talks - For hospitality builders

Des lieux de vie dans lesquels séjourner, travailler, partager des moments.

Des lieux construits sur l’expérience, souvent imaginé par des passionnés.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

About LOBBY Talks - For hospitality builders

Des lieux de vie dans lesquels séjourner, travailler, partager des moments.

Des lieux construits sur l’expérience, souvent imaginé par des passionnés.

Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

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