We recently connected with David Crafa and have shared our conversation below.
David, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard
One of the most important parts of our business model is developing skilled talent. We recruit interns from the world’s most prestigious universities and trade schools as well as individuals that prove their creative and technical chops through notable achievements and recognition within the field. All of our staff from our General Manager, staff of producers and engineering team positions have been cultivated through our intense internship program. The Cutting Room Studios has been developing talent for 29 years. The Cutting Room has launched the careers of many successful former team members. Those that have chosen to move on have become superstar producers such as Just Blaze who interned at TCR and then became the assistant manger for 2 years while he was honing his craft as a producer for Jay Z, Kanye and many many others. We take pride in helping to give opportunities for talented team members to excel at their craft and dream big. It good for business and our clients appreciate the high professionalism and creative drive that our staff provide, From the start TCR has only hired interns and I think that’s we’re we differ from other players in the industry.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I never planned on opening a commercial recording studio. I planned on being a rockstar when i was 16 that was the path i put myself on. I became the local guitar hero and I had many students that i would teach each month. I was in the coolest local bands growing up….Then things changed. My folks moved from NY to rural Connecticut in my junior year of high school. It was like a death sentence to my rock and roll dream. I told my parent i wasnt moving but of course I didn’t have a choice.
I tried to pick up where I left off but I wasn’t unable to find the musicians. I did my best but I ended up commuting back and forth from Ct to NY to play with my old band. That proved difficult since i was still in high school and had my parents on my back. The band had opened up for Metallica but that was when they were very young. Personalities clashed as they do in bands and I decided to quit and move my sights to the west cost. LA in particular.
Before the big move to LA after high school, I met a girl. Let’s say she changed my perspective and convinced me to audition for Berklee college of music. So instead of living out of a van in LA, i went to Berklee. At Berklee I was a little fish in big pond of monster players. I soon lost my mojo as a guitar player and let my self be intimidated by some of the impossibly talented musicians there. But something else was happening…. The rise of electronic music and the DIY multi track recording movement was just beginning.
I had become very interested in multitrack recording when i was in Ct because there was nobody else to play in a band with, I found that i could record myself multiple time on different tracks and make music that sounded like an entire band was playing. It was like magic. At Berklee I applied for the prestigious Music Production and Engineering Major (MP&E) which only accepted 100 students per year. I was accepted and down the rabbit hole i went.
At Berklee i was introduced to the first apple macintosh computer. It was the first time I could really wrap my head around navigating through all of the software. I was hooked. I realized that the hybridization of music and technology was an art form of its very own. It was very new and exciting and i was in the forefront of a huge paradigm shift. I started to feel more confident in my path. I realized I didn’t have to be the virtuoso guitarist that so many of my fellow students desired to be. I could be me. I learned the first lesson in a series of life lessons in that period of my life which is to put myself on a path with a goal. It doesn’t matter so much what the goal was as long as I’m was on a path. That path allowed me to travel to uncharted territory and with it was new opportunities that I would not have seen if I was just waiting around for things to fall into my lap.
To make a long story short, I dropped out of Berklee and decided to transfer to NYU which allowed me focus on Computer Science AND music technology. There’s more to the story than that. A lot more. The most important takeaways were that i realized that as i got older I didn’t have to give up my dreams. I just had to recalibrate them slightly. Sometimes people take a 180 degree turn when their dreams dont happen as they planned for when all they really needed to do was turn 10 or 15 degrees.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
By 2006 The Cutting Room had been in business for 11 years. (The story of how The Cutting room came to be is legend but outside the scope of this interview) I had saved enough pennies to buy commercial real estate in the form of 2 large commercial condos in the old Tower Records building on Broadway. I had been renting for the previous 15 years. I built out a beautiful multi room facility with a top acoustical architect and began operations in 2007. Our first clients were John Legend and Kanye West. It was about this time that online piracy was starting to really take a bite out of records sales. For the next several years the trend got worse and worse. The major labels fired a huge percentage of their staff. The future looked bleak for the recorded music sector. At the same time i was saddled with debt more than any other time in my life. Newley married and terrified by Great Recession that had just kicked into high gear. At this point I had to think hard about what comes next.
I was a big fan of internet radio. Specifically KEXP in Seattle. One day I reached out to the program director and said I have this incredible resource here in New York City. Why doing you just use it for free. I figured if I was going to go out of business I wanted to do something cool that I enjoyed for a while before we bled out and had to sell the assets. KEXP Acepted my offer and we set up a serious of Live in studio sessions with some of the worlds best know Indy bands. It was a blast. We hosted about 4 to 8 of these in studios sessions per month for about 8 years. People loved them. they got millions of views on YouTube.
KEXP @ The Cutting Room was a hit! It triggered more opportunities than I could have imagined. Since the radio station was providing us a high speed ISDN session we were able to provide the services to other stations for a much higher rate than we were getting for our traditional music clients. NPR, World Cafe, KCRW all used us for paid in-studio sessions. It was a servoce that we never even thought of that now was helping navigate our way through the perilous aughts.
At the same time we pivoted to post production sessions. Having the high speed ISDN lines installed allowed upon to work with other recording and film studios in real time and yet another revenue source was born. Soon we branched out to audio books and podcasts and we managed to fill the void of the decline in musical recording, We were saved.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
In 2015 the condos that we bought and built our new studios in 2006 were beginning to change zoning. We started to get a lot of noise complaints. We fought tooth and nail to stand up for our rights as a commercial tenet. We won several battles over the a 5 year period but the law suits from the management company and the new residential tenets above us kept stacking up. Even though we were winning the lawsuits we were actually loosing the war because we realized they were going to keep coming after us and that would just keep us paying our lawyers to win the cases. I realized that it wasnt about who was right or wrong anymore. Their strategy was to exhaust us financially so we couldn’t fight anymore.
After all we had gone through in the big pivot to save the studio with new services such as internet radio and post production, This just seemed depressing and hopeless situation. Not to mentioned we owned the property and after 15 years the management company was trying to ice us out and force us to sell. Will it ever end? The answer is No. It will never end. So you have to come up with new ideas. And the new idea was just around the corner.
In 2021 during the heat of the pandemic, the bottom dropped out on commercial real estate. Because of the price drop on commercial rentals we started to entertain the idea of building a new facility. It was a big risk. However we had secured an SBA loan so we started to look at possible locations just to educate ourselves on what might be avaible
What happened next was a bit of a miracle but miracles can happen in New York if you are open to them and you can recognize them for what they are. Anther studio owner who was retiring approached me about buying the rights to his business. this business was about 70% post and 30% music. Which was ironic because we were the opposite which was why we were nervous about building another music studio and using the old studio as a post production facility. But this company would actually fit perfectly within our 2 facilities giving us a boost for post prod clients. It was a short cut to being able to carry the cost and justify building a second facility and dedicating the original to post production. So we settled the lawsuits with the management company and agreed to move our louder music sessions to the new facility where they could go as loud as they liked. So we killed 2 birds with that stone.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Www.thecuttingroom.com
- Instagram: Thecuttingroomstudios
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