Walk inside Bridge Studios NY’s Black Rock space and you are immediately confronted with the fact that, despite it’s scant looking exterior, its interior is all business.
TV screens and speakers adorn most walls. A large vinyl collection sits against another wall next to two turntables and engineers hustle about the space.
Inside a smaller room that serves as the command center for the isolation booth for recordings sits Brennon Hall, aka Beats Anonymous.
“I want you to initially walk in and just be inspired,” he said of the studio’s vibe. “So, when you come off the street I want you to literally transfer your body into a whole new place.”
Hall has made a name for himself locally, nationally and internationally not only as a hip-hop producer and engineer but as a curator of artists.
It’s at Bridge Studios NY where Hall dispenses not only his musical wisdom but also the business of music.
Moving back to Buffalo from Brooklyn in 2019, Hall realized the area’s need for recording spaces for music artists looking to make a name for themselves who maybe couldn’t afford to pay for the time at a larger studio.
“There's also the need for the professional setting for certain clients,” he said. “You can't just bring everybody to your house and record them in your closet. So, when I came back to Buffalo I knew there was a lot of people still doing that and I just kind of took that drive from Brooklyn and was like, You know what, I'm going to take some of these things that I saw back in Brooklyn and bring them to Buffalo and transfer that model into a smaller cities so kind of like the big city model into a smaller city.”
That model has worked well for Hall who counts Griselda members Benny the Butcher and Conway the Machine as well as Jay-Z protégé’s Beanie Siegel and Freeway as having recorded at Bridge Studios.
“Amazing time,” he said of recording with Siegel and Freeway, two legendary Philadelphia emcees. “They spent like two days here. Beanie Siegel literally didn't leave for 36 hours. That was one of the most incredible experiences.”
But it’s not just studio time Hall is concerned with. It’s the business of the music business he is trying to get artists to understand. Which is why he created the Beat Auction, a place for music producers to shop their wares and for aspiring emcees or singers to buy beats on the cheap.
Hall said it’s important for artists of all walks to have ownership over what they create.
“I've noticed over the last 10 years or so that music producers are kind of losing their foothold on music scene,” he said. “Whereas YouTube is becoming more of a popular source for local artists to get the music.”
During Memorial Day weekend Hall hosted an auction at a bar in North Buffalo.
“So, what we do here at the Beat Auction is get as many people as we can involved,” he said. “At average right now, we're doing about eight producers every event that brings three beats each, they each have a chance to play their beats and let artists in the field hear them. From there, they can bid and purchase the beats and actually own them rather than just downloading them from YouTube and then having to figure out after they make a song. Oh, wow, I don't own the song.”
It's the ownership aspect Hall wants to impart on the artists and producers he works with.
“As a studio owner I often have people come in who record all their music off of YouTube,” he said. “They'll say ‘hey can you take this beat off of YouTube because I don't have any beats that I legally own I don't know how to put out music that I legally own.’”
Bryant Toney A.K.A. Toney Boi is a producer, engineer, DJ and rapper and a person to know in Buffalo’s hip hop scene.
Hall was the first person to get in touch with Toney Boi after the latter moved back to Buffalo from Florida where he was studying audio engineering.
As a multifaceted artist Toney Boi has a keen sense of the music business and why the Beat Auction is important for producers to get their name out.
“We need to have respect as producers,” he said. “Producers always get pushed under the rug you know, so now it’s showing respect to producers.”
What’s it like helping an artist achieve their creative vision?
“It's more stress than you would think,” he said of the creative process. “It gets more stressful with the higher-level artists you're working with because you're working with deadlines you're working with managers you're working with labels-- like who's paying us.”
The business of the business.
Cee Gee is another local producer who has worked with Griselda member Westside Gunn.
A self-described work-a-holic Cee Gee estimates he works on 20 to 30 songs a day.
“I'm on computer almost every day,” he said. “I just listen to sounds and you know, once I'm hearing it I'm going to my beat machine which is the MPC and once I'm on I'm on my computer I'm in my zone.”
With jack-of-all-trades talents like Cee Gee and Toney Boi plus a group of young engineers putting their time into Bridge Studios Hall is fostering a unique culture inside the studio with him leading by example.
“We have people who've been doing this for 15 years plus and guys that are just doing it for their first year, two years now,” Hall said. “And we just kind of like blend these guys together so they can kind of learn off of each other and oh, you know what Toney Boi is really good at his mixes and mastering his masters are amazing. These are going to be radio quality masters. Let's make the new guy, Adam Graf, let's put him with him for the day so he can learn some of his processes.”
But Hall doesn’t want to just stop here. He has ambitions on creating a bigger space for all artists.
“Really a big thing that's missing in Buffalo right now is like a collective creative space,” he said. “In this place we kind of want to have it where you walk out and you see, ‘oh, look, there's a photographer,’ and then you go wherever you're headed and then run into somebody else and what are they doing? Oh, I'm down the hall designing clothes,’ so almost like a creative collective place in a sense.”
Until then Hall will keep nurturing artists but musically and in a business sense at the Bride Studios NY and creating lanes for producers to get their music out via the Beat Auction.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Hall came back to Buffalo from Brooklyn in 2015. The correct year was 2019.
