Having survived COVID-19, the Long Island Recording Studio Complex (LIRCo) is providing some new services to Lexington.
Beginning April 14, the studio will open its new Gallery at Long Island Studio at 5 p.m. on the first Friday of every month through the summer. The monthly open houses will allow guests to mix and mingle and see the inner workings of the Long Island Recording Studio complex.
Featuring music from Tee Dee Young and pianist Kory Caudill, in separate spaces, the evenings will open up the complex to the public to show off all of its programs and new additions, like art. A new art gallery will feature the Samara Angelae Collection of abstract and Healing Hands paintings and Robin Hamon’s unique sculptures. LIRCo founder Wil Freebody said the gallery will provide one more element to the audio/visual production and education facility.
“We added the art gallery to add a little more culture to the facility,” Freebody said. “We haven’t even opened officially, and we sold half a dozen paintings last fall.”
Long Island Recording Studio offers video and production services, as well as instruction. The studio recently installed an art gallery and recording history museum, and hosts monthly open houses.
Another part of LIRCo is the Lexington School for Recording Arts (LRSA), which provides education for those interested in audio/ visual engineering and an artist development program for performers. The complex also houses a Museum of Sight and Sound, with displays of various equipment used in visual and audio recording arts over the years.
“We open the museum up to school groups,” Freebody said. “We show them how much the equipment has changed and how much the cost has changed. This microphone may have cost $29.54 in the 1930s, but if you didn’t have that 54 cents, they wouldn’t give you the microphone. Fifty-four cents was a lot of money back then!”
Freebody said the new programs — the art gallery, the artist development program and the first Friday programs — are new revenue streams to help replace the ones he lost during COVID.
For the past 40 years, he said, the recording studio has provided videography work, recording work and other audio-visual work for businesses across the state and region. Its location allows people in and out of the region to access big city-level talent and production quality at Kentucky prices.
“We charge about a third of what we’d charge if we were in Cincinnati and about a tenth of what we’d charge if we were in New York,” he said. “The trade-off is my kids got to grow up in Kentucky.”
The studio’s location and the quality of its production facilities make it a draw for companies all over the country.
Another part of the business, he said, is its school — the Lexington School for Recording Arts (LSRA).
The only licensed audio/video propriety education facility in the state, LSRA teaches students how to succeed in the industry through hands-on experience in real-life situations making the products the studio puts out. The two-year program only accepts 35 students per year, he said, and so far has graduated more than 1,000 students since the school’s inception.
“We do commercials for people. We do audiobooks for Amazon. We do commercial work,” he said. “But we also teach in here. They’re not learning in the classrooms; they’re learning in a place that makes commercials and videos.”
The school also works on teaching the students, he said, instead of teaching a subject.
“We teach them how to think,” he said. “We teach them how to be the best version of themselves.”
When the pandemic lockdowns hit, Freebody said, the business was hit hard.
“We’re a school, but this is a business,” he said. “Our biggest revenue stream was that we used to visit schools. In 2021, they shut that down. We were devastated.”
The pandemic closures forced the company to pivot, he said.
Part of those new revenue streams was reviving the artist development program, a pet project he’d shelved four years earlier. Now, he’s opened it up again to help area artists who pass the audition phase move forward with their careers and learn not only elements of performance but also how the music business works.
With the school and the new galleries, LIRCo will continue to provide excellence in audio/visual services to the Lexington community and beyond, Freebody said.
“This entire facility is based on excellence,” he said. “Vince Lombardi once said, ‘Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.’”