By Chris Raimondi, Sports Editor
Behind the front door of the Hill household lies not a foyer decorated with chandeliers and end tables, but rather a control room, housing a monitor displaying volume levels that overlooks a soundboard complete with switches and knobs. Aaron Hill fine-tunes tone while his wife, Nancy, sits to his immediate right at a Macintosh computer with headphones on, surveying wavelengths.
The Green House Atlanta, an in-house recording studio, was established in the spring of 2014 by Aaron and Nancy Kaye Hill. Aaron, a musician and former electrician, and Nancy, a trained vocalist and ex-record label artist, never had ambitions to transform their home into a full-fledged recording studio.
“We weren’t trying to make it a ‘studio-for-hire’ type of thing,” Aaron said. “We were keeping it in house and opportunities started coming our way. We’re still coming to grips with that even means. It wasn’t really the plan, it just kind of happened.”
The couple is part of a local county-rock group, The Law Band, where Nancy sings and Aaron plays guitar. After a lifetime of saved up equipment, countless Law Band recording sessions and endless fortunes thrown to the recording industry, the Hills have immersed themselves into the underground culture that is in-home recording studios.
“The home studio has definitely put a thorn in the side of the record industry,” Nancy said. “It’s giving people a lot more of an opportunity to create what they want and be who they want to be.”
After each working in professional studios during their music careers, the Hills headed home to look for inspiration. “I never really got the results I was super excited about,’ Aaron said. “I got sick of giving other people my money; I’d rather spend it on myself. It probably would have been cheaper if I had paid for studio time, but if you’re not getting the results you want, the logical next step is to start doing it yourself at your house, in your own comfort where you’re feeling inspired.”
The living room wallpaper of Green House is masked by hundreds of abstract pictures ripped from various art magazines to inspire creativeness for visiting musicians. Dozens of guitars rest behind furniture in every room while an assortment of different amplifiers and speakers line the walls of their recording room, a sun-room transformed into a sound-spawning sanctuary.
“The element of the randomness is what keeps studios interesting and fun,” Aaron explained. “I did something by accident this weekend, and it ended up being the best thing that I could have done to make my bass sound a lot better. I was like ‘oh man I did that on accident’.” Happy accidents, as they are known in the Green House.
Happy accidents are the norm in most in-home recording studios, offering artists infinite possibilities when searching for that perfect sound. The Hills recording room comprises angled ceilings, framed by large wooden beams and glass windows enclosing the mass heap of music equipment. The blueprints of a house are so far from those of an upscale recording studio, the Hills love it.
“Studios are constructed to sound a certain way and have certain sonic characteristics,” Aaron said. “In a house, it is interesting and fun to try and deal with what you got.” Aaron has rigged his house to combat sound issues using shutters, furniture, curtains, soundproof foam and even a large two-sided baffle, one side that reflects sound, the other that absorbs it, all to experiment with tone. “We’re constantly experimenting with the different things to try out on our clients,” Nancy said. “If you were just working in a normal studio, you wouldn’t have that insight.”
Nancy alluded to her time working in Los Angeles under a record label as a comparison to the organic, stress-free recording experience she believes in-home recording offers. “I’ve recorded in a lot of really nice, high-end studios and there’s a lot of stress,” she said. “You only have a certain amount of time and a certain budget to create what you want to create.”
Combining the experimental elements and the easy-going nature of the setting, the Green House has given the Hills the career they always yearned for, even though it remains just that: a job. “I treat it as work,” Aaron said. “In some capacity, I try to work 10 hours a day. Whether it’s about learning new things or building or soundproofing or whatever, I try to work 10 hours a day.”
And while visitors can still expect a professional overhead, they can also enjoy the farm-to-table service provided by the Green House. “While he is doing all of his reading, I am gardening,” Nancy said. “We have tons of fresh produce that comes out of here and we are both pretty skilled cooks. We provide food, for an extra charge, to our clients and that is part of the reason we are called The Green House. It’s how we provide a more healthy environment for creation.”
The equipment, of course, comes at a high price when demanding the quality of a professional studio. However, advanced technology has offered home-studio owners loopholes when recording on a budget. The sound board sitting in the Hills front living room cost upwards of $30,000, but they found it on EBay for $1,000. As for everything else in the house, it was amassed over a lifetime of collecting music equipment.
While the Law Band was at the roots of the Green House’s existence, hard country rock isn’t all that echoes through the walls of the Hill household. Pop records, rap artists, electronic dance albums and heavy metal bands have all been recorded at Green House. “If someone is in here, I don’t want to change what they do; I want to enhance it,” Aaron said. “If they need help or have specific things, I try to put a different set of ears on it and usually ends up working out pretty well.”
In the end, Aaron and Nancy believe those who belong in the big studios will remain there. “It’s a job for them,” Nancy said. “For us, it’s a lifestyle. We would be doing this anyways. The truth is we really don’t want to leave our house, ever, so we’re really happy that people want to come here. We’re comfortable here, so we can give them a lot more energy and a lot more happiness.”
