Today we’d like to introduce you to Dan Cardinal.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I was introduced to music by my mother, who is a classical pianist and music teacher. She gave me piano lessons when I was young, but I eventually moved on to other instruments like saxophone and electric guitar. My experiences playing music and recording music sort of evolved together. I was playing in a band in junior high school, and we were always looking for ways to record ourselves. I convinced my high school to let me design a class where I wrote and recorded an album of my own music, so technically I put out my first record in high school (there were only 100 copies, and I still have about 10 of them).
I briefly attended Berklee College of Music in 2000/2001, but I decided that I wanted to pursue my own path in the music industry. I got my undergrad degree in Philosophy from Tufts University in 2005, but most of my time at college was spent working on music in my dorm room where I had a small studio setup. I met some friends at Tufts who were also interested in writing and recording music, and we eventually formed a band together with some friends who were at Harvard. That band was called The Main Drag and we put out 2 full-lengths albums that we wrote and produced entirely ourselves.
We were very much into the DIY aspect of music making. We had an extended tour across the Midwest and into Canada, but for the most part, we played shows in Boston and New York. My bandmates all work in the video game industry and were part of the Rock Band game development process. We had one of our songs, “A Jagged Gorgeous Winter,” placed in the game and that brought us a small bit of notoriety within the video game community primarily.
Besides recording with my friends, I worked as a live sound engineer at the Lizard Lounge club in Cambridge for about 5 years, mixing and meeting hundreds of bands and songwriters in the process. I took a job on the road as a sound engineer for Josh Ritter & The Royal City Band, which I did for another 4-5 years. I also did tours with The Low Anthem and David Wax Museum during that time. I was probably on the road for about 200 days a year, either on a tour bus or a van. When I was off the road, I worked out of a studio called Hi-N-Dry, which was originally the private studio for the band Morphine, but because the go-to place to record for a lot of the Boston folk/Americana community.
Hi-N-Dry relocated from Inman Square in Cambridge into the Somerville Armory building and I continued to work there for a few years until I heard about the space where Dimension is now. I and 2 partners, both of whom also did studio and touring work, came to know about an essentially-vacant space on Centre Street in JP that had been a functioning studio for decades starting in the 1960’s and had not been in use for a while.
It needed a bit of a cosmetic overhaul, but the bones of the space were amazing because a lot of the sound treatment and isolation from city noises had already been done. We put in a few new isolation rooms and brought in (mostly) modern recording equipment and re-opened Dimension Sounds Studios in 2011. After a few years, my partners decided to pursue other kinds of work, and I decided to give up touring, so it’s been pretty much my personal studio for the last 4-5 years.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Pursuing ANY job in the music industry is an arguably bad idea, so I expected it to be difficult.
Boston has a lot of musicians and a lot of recording studios. Certain music scenes will gravitate to certain studios, and sometimes those relationships can go back decades. In opening a new studio, you run the risk of stealing clients from other studios and that is not something I really wanted to do. I had met so many musicians while working at the Lizard Lounge and while touring that I was able to develop my own pool of clients who came to work at my space.
Also, being in the city means that the cost of keeping the studio open is significant, which means that if it’s not booked then it’s eventually going to collapse. I think of my main job as first-and-foremost preventing that collapse, or at least fending it off for a few more months. There’s an ebb-and-flow with booking that I really cannot predict after 8 years in business, so I just try to take as much work as I can personally manage. Then I add a few more sessions to that.
My clients are almost always the musicians themselves, and not record labels, so money is always tight.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Dimension Sound Studios – what should we know?
Dimension Sound Studios is a music production studio, aimed at recording bands and songwriters with an emphasis on recording all (or most) of the musicians playing together at the same time.
I record a lot of Folk, Americana, Indie, and Acoustic music, and all of the various combinations of those things, but I have recorded almost every kind of music I can think of. One of the greatest parts of my job is how much different music and how many creative people I get to collaborate with on a daily basis.
My job is to understand both their artistic perspective and the aesthetic of the kind of music they want to make and make technical decisions about how to translate that vision to the listener. My job is also to create a space where the artists feel as comfortable as possible so that they are able to perform at their best without distraction.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
I am extremely grateful to the musicians who trust me with their babies and their very limited funds. The best compliment I can get is for a band or artist to make a record with me, and then choose to work with me again on their next project. They could go anywhere, but they liked what happened the first time enough to want to do it again. I’ve done at least 2 albums with probably 10-12 bands at this point, which is amazing.
I am also very grateful to my landlord, Jon Hummel, who owns the building that houses Dimension. He knows that he owns a very special and historic space, and has kept it this way instead of turning it into some general commercial space. He and his wife live on the 3 floors above the studio, and thankfully I can make any kind of noise I want at any hour of the day.
Pricing:
- $650/day (10hr) for studio and engineer fees.
- $750/day (10hr) for studio, producer, and engineer fees.
Contact Info:
- Address: 368 Centre St., Jamaica Plain
- Website: www.dimensionsoundstudios.com
- Email: dimensionsound@gmail.com
- Instagram: @daniel.cardinal
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Dimension-Sound-Studios-140521839369836/
Image Credit:
Mike Spencer Photography
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