VINTAGE
KING'S
Tucked into the hills of Sun Valley, Just For The Record is more than just a studio. It’s a creative sanctuary where audio creators and music makers can dive deep into their craft. With five purpose-built rooms, this world-class facility supports everything from songwriting and recording to full-blown Dolby Atmos mixes, all within a warm and welcoming environment that feels a world away from the hustle and bustle of the city.
With the exception of the Atmos space, each room at Just For The Record is equipped with identical gear, making it effortless to move between spaces while working on projects. At the heart of these rooms are Universal Audio’s Apollo X Gen 1 interfaces, with Studios A, B, C, and D all featuring Apollo x8P and x16 units. More recently, the team has been test driving the new Apollo X Gen 2 models.
Vintage King sat down with studio owner, producer, and engineer Moritz Braun to talk about the vision behind Just For The Record, the community it fosters, and the creative work taking shape within its walls. The conversation also explored his approach to gear, including the role Universal Audio’s Apollo X interfaces play in the studio’s workflow.
Tell us your origin story and how the studio came to be.
So, a little bit about myself, I'm from Germany, as you might be able to tell. I came to the States to study music. I studied in Boston and then moved to California after completing my studies. Before that, I lived in Munich and was working in a five-star hotel, restaurants, and bars while making music.
I started out making music for advertisements in Germany, but I really wanted to study music production and music theory to feel more confident about scoring for advertisements. Then, when I moved out here, I really got into engineering and producing and studied that as my major. I moved out to Los Angeles after that to just work as a freelance producer. I was working out of all kinds of different studios- big legacy studios, small home studios, and everything in between.
While doing that, I felt there was a market gap to build a studio that's a little bit more focused on the hybrid production approach, meaning merging digital and analog. So I wrote a business plan for the studio, which took quite some time, and there were many iterations of it until I found funding to execute the business plan.
After I secured funding, we started planning and construction. That was starting in 2018, and then we opened in September of 2021. It was about a three-year process of planning, construction, and permits. Unfortunately, COVID started halfway through the process, so there were significant slowdowns and hurdles to overcome. The opening was an event that we did with PMC speakers. That was the launch of their new speaker series. They invited a lot of different producers, engineers, and artists, which was the perfect way to open a studio, I think.
Yeah, that sounds fantastic! There are a lot of different services that your studio offers. Can you walk us through some of your most unique offerings?
Like most recording studios, we offer recording, so you can book a session here. We have a team of amazing engineers who can record any project. We also offer Dolby Atmos mixing and have a partnership with Dolby. Studio E is our Dolby Atmos room, which is also being used as a Dolby showroom. They bring by labels, producers, and artists who want to experience Dolby Atmos in a room. This room often gets referenced by Dolby as a “best practice,” so to say.
Other things we offer: most of the team members that we have are amazing musicians, producers, or mixers in their own right. We don't actively offer this through our website, but people usually end up working with our team members in different capacities after they book here.
What's a typical Atmos session like at your studio, and what key pieces of gear does your studio have for this?
The key pieces I would say are really the speakers, which are all PMC. We have the twotwo.8s in the Dolby Atmos room, and then we have the ci65 surround speakers. It's a 9.1.4 setup, which means we have four speakers in the ceiling, we have the LCR speakers, and six surround speakers.
A typical session would be that someone comes with a song, or with the files for a song, and we mix it into Atmos. It's similar to the stereo mixing process with the only difference being that it's immersive and that it's a room-based format and not a speaker-based format. So it's scalable down from a car into a movie theater if it's done correctly.
Let’s talk a bit about your interface selection. There are Universal Audio Apollo x8p and x16 Gen 1 interfaces in four out of five rooms here at Just For The Record. What made you choose them?
We have the Universal Audio Apollos because of my background as a producer working out of different studios, and wanting to have a clean way for producers to plug in. Most studios just offer an aux cable, and I wanted to do it in a digital way that makes sense with most producers’ setups. Most already have UA. I believe we're the only commercial studio in Los Angeles that has UA in every room.
The reason is, again, the hybrid approach. A lot of people like to work in the box, depending on the genre. We wanted to make sure people can tap in, in a digital way, and not have any loss with A to D, D to A conversion. Additionally, the Unison preamps are super versatile, and we like using them in addition to our outboard gear.
What are some of your favorite features about the Apollo X interfaces?
Honestly, the plug and play. It’s just easy to set up. Anyone who comes in here who has UAD Console installed, we can set them up within five minutes, and they’re connected to the whole room, including the patch bay, and every piece of gear that’s in there. It’s super intuitive after it’s set up.
How have Apollos changed your workflow and what do the new interfaces bring to the table?
I’ve used UA interfaces pretty much since I started making music, so my workflow has always been intertwined with the Apollo. The MK II models feel like an upgraded version of what I’d have in my home studio, but in a professional, studio-grade environment built with producers and engineers in mind.
What do you think of the new MKII interface features?
I really like the new interfaces. It’s kind of nerdy, but I’m genuinely impressed with the conversion. The preamps feel like they have more headroom, and overall, it just sounds fantastic. The new MKIIs keep all the same functionality but add to the features and deliver noticeably improved sonics.
You have house engineers who can handle all aspects from recording to mixing in Atmos, which must be beneficial for creating cohesion on projects. How does Just For The Record foster that process?
That's something I’m very excited about, that we are able to deliver everything from writing, recording, record production, mixing, and Atmos mixing. The only thing we don't do here is mastering. I really like it when there's projects coming out of here that are fully done here. It's a one-stop shop for all of that. It makes it easy that we have five rooms here that can be used simultaneously, even for the same project. People can jump between rooms, working on the same songs.
We worked on one project that was really fun with Marsha Ambrosius, who is a living legend. She’s a former member of Floetry, and now she's working on her solo album. A friend of mine, David Phelps, was executive producing the album, and that was a really fun process. At times, had three rooms booked at the same time, and he'd just be jumping between the rooms. They recorded brass in one room, strings in another, and the third one was vocals. It was just fun to see all that moving simultaneously, and so seamlessly, because everything was so close together here.
Is that why you have nearly the same setup in every studio?
Yes, it’s exactly for those kinds of scenarios and for cameras as well. The philosophy here is that if you know one room, you know them all. The beauty is you don’t really have to spend much time getting to know these rooms because they translate extremely well. It's built around transparency. When you start working out of one of these rooms and you feel something sounds right, you can take it out of the studio to listen in a car, and it translates super well. There's no discrepancy in the low end, the imaging, or any of that stuff.
That's the same with all the rooms. They're all tuned by the same guy, a mastering engineer named Rory O’Flaherty. He's a great guy who formerly worked at PMC and is now fully mastering records. He just did the Kendrick Lamar album and many other amazing albums. He came to tune these rooms and make sure that everything translates within the rooms and to the outside.
Some of the gear in these spaces include the BAE 1073, Universal Audio 1176 LN, API 3124, and Tube Tech CL 1B. What attracted you to those pieces of outboard gear specifically?
The BAE 1073 and Tube-Tech CL 1B are staples for vocal chains, especially when paired with microphones like the Telefunken 251, and the Sony C800, which our clients love. We are also big fans of Soyuz Microphones. The Universal Audio 1176 is a fantastic compressor that adds character and detail. It’s also a great tool to really crunch a signal. The API 3124 has a distinct, punchy sound with a small footprint, making it versatile for various sources.
Tell us a little bit about the events that your studio hosts.
We love throwing events here. We love doing writing camps. We've done a lot of camps and events with different organizations, labels, and artists.
Just to name a few, we've done some with She Is The Music. We've done some events with Push-Up Bra, which is a female-forward non-profit that started out as an event series. I think they're also moving into the camp space now. We did some stuff with Willis Wonderland writing camps for Columbia Records. We did some stuff for Danja, who's a producer from Florida. He has a new platform called Realm, and we did a camp with them and BMG.
The fun part is, for us at least, the last day of a camp when everyone gets to play the music they made. There's usually some sort of a party or get-together on the last day of these camps. That's always a great way for people to connect and to have a good time at the studio outside of making music, just enjoying each other's company.
We are also venturing into collaborations in different art mediums. We just had an event with a local artist. Her name is Gabi Lamb, and she did an exhibit here, exhibiting her first collection of photographs, mainly around music. I thought that was a cool way to collaborate with different artists who are not in music but doing other stuff. In the future, we want to do stuff like fashion shows, more art exhibits, maybe art installations, things like that.
What’s one of the most exciting events that you can tell us about?
I mean, that last one was really exciting. Although it wasn't really music adjacent, it was really fun to see a creative hub like this being utilized by creatives in a different medium.
Another event we did that was really fun was a product launch for the Hazelrigg Brothers. They're known for their tube preamps and other tube-based gear. The VLC preamp is a piece of equipment that a lot of people are using. They launched their 500 Series modules, and we did a showcase and try-out session here.
They are actually a jazz trio that jams in the morning through the equipment they built the day before, and then goes back into the shop to tweak the equipment they built, and we kind of did the same thing here. There was an upright piano, drum kit, and upright bass, and they just performed a couple of songs, which we recorded here in the lounge. Then people could go through the rooms and mess with them through the outboard gear. So that was fun.
Can you talk a little bit about what the writing camps are like? Do you guys set up that structure, or is that set by whoever is running the camp?
It goes both ways. We do host our own writing camps. We did a K-pop camp in collaboration with No Expiry, and that was one that we organized ourselves, meaning we invited different producers and songwriters to participate. That was just a three-day camp, and all the songs were for specific briefs from Korean labels that were looking for songs for their artists. The songs were written and produced here, and then shopped to the labels that sent the briefs.
Then there are other scenarios, for example, a sync camp for a company. They could book the studio to host their own camp with their briefs. There was one from Ric House recently—they had a similar idea to record labels, but they get their briefs from music supervisors, ad agencies, movie studios, and TV production houses. That was fascinating to see. They had all these creatives in here. Every morning, there would be Zoom calls in the different rooms from different agencies to say what they're looking for, and then they would be in the room trying to make music for these briefs.
Just For The Record is such an organized and efficient studio, down to the small details like bathroom soap and tea selection. How central are organization, cleanliness, and attentiveness to the experience you’re trying to create?
This is one of the most important aspects for us, right alongside acoustics, equipment, and speakers. We want the creative process to be seamless, with no distractions or clutter, so artists can dive right into their work and feel completely at ease.
What’s next for Just For The Record?
We’re focusing even more on the guest experience, which includes expanding our gear and instruments and hosting more community events. And who knows, if the right opportunity arises, we might even look at expanding beyond Los Angeles.
