John Paulsen: “Storage is crucial to our business.”

In a nondescript building in downtown San Francisco, musicians and producers fine-tune their projects, using the latest in recording equipment along witih digital storage from Seagate®.

Welcome to Talking House, a three-year-old production company and independent record label specializing in fresh new music, much of it discovered in San Francisco’s burgeoning club scene. In addition to its work with up-and-coming Bay Area musicians, Talking House produces original music for independent films and works with ad agencies that need high-quality music for commercials.

Don’t let the bland exterior of Talking House’s building fool you; inside is a sleek recording campus packed with state-of-the-art tracking and mixing gear, a video link and monitoring equipment for scoring films and videos, a full suite of instruments for making music, and a lot more—including several terabytes worth of hard-drive storage.

John Paulsen, the president and a producer at Talking House, says digital storage is “crucial” to his business.

“Our music is both made and stored on hard drives—right up until the point where we’re ready to sell it to consumers, either as a download or a CD,” he says.

Recording music has always required storage in some form. In the old days, music was stored on a cylinder, tape or vinyl disk. Today, most music-production work is captured on hard drives.

Creativity Unleashed

“Hard drives have made the whole process amazingly streamlined,” says Paulsen, 44, “which allows for more creativity in a much shorter timeframe.”

When a band records its music at Talking House, for example, producers can capture every guitar riff, drum track or vocal in real time, play it back, and easily sort through multiple takes in seconds.

”Hard drives give us instant access to every idea that comes up in the studio.”

--P.C. Muñoz, Talking House producer

“Hard drives give us instant access to every idea that comes up in the studio,” says P.C. Muñoz, a producer at Talking House. “The artists don’t have to wait until the tape rewinds and our production team doesn’t have to worry about running out of storage room, as they would with tape.”

Muñoz recently finished one project, for example, that had some 160 different music tracks for one 5-minute song. Each of those tracks, whether a guitar, piano or violin line, was individually recorded on a hard drive as a digital WAV file. “That’s a lot of storage,” Muñoz says. “Hard drives give us the ultimate in flexibility.”

Along with a dozen Seagate 750-GB Pushbutton Backup External Hard Drives for backing up and duplicating music files between the studio’s recording computers and a producer’s laptop system, Talking House also uses many internal Seagate 3.5-inch SATA drives—two for each individual recording project.

“It’s really easy to swap from one project to another project with Seagate hard drives,” says Paulsen, “and it’s much easier to backup those projects and make sure the data stays safe—much easier than doing the same thing on tape.”

Talking House recently installed a new system in which producers can record all their music projects using an array of 750-GB Seagate SATA drives, located in a server room that’s kept several degrees cooler than the rest of the recording complex.

Plug-and-Play Storage

“When I come into a control room and an artist is ready to go, all I have to do is take that internal drive, plug it into the storage bay and the project comes right up in the studio,” explains Paulsen. “The data-transfer speeds are fantastic. And when I need to secure the work at the end of the day, I just click and drag that project from one drive onto its backup drive.”

“The technology we use here really enhances the workflow from the artists’ perspective, because they can be creative without any down time,” Muñoz adds. “And it gives us time to help develop artists the way music labels used to do.”

Ben Flanagan, a member of indie-pop band The Trophy Fire, says Talking House provides the kind of collaborative environment he needs to maximize his creativity. The Trophy Fire is working on an album for release later this year.

“The equipment here is by far the best we’ve ever worked with, and the engineers are all very skilled,” says Flanagan. “We’ve been given a lot of freedom to record the kind of record we want to make, without feeling rushed or ‘on the meter.’ It’s all about the love of music here, and making the best possible album we can make. ”