MANCHESTER, NH – Tucked away inside a local storefront along the city’s main downtown drag is a place where beautiful music is captured, and preserved.
Blackheart Sound on 570 Willow St. is owned and managed by Eric Sauter, a studio where different genres can shine while being recorded in a top-notch space. The studio is housed on the second floor of The Music Mill on Elm Street, but you wouldn’t even know it exists, unless you know. It’s those who have found there way who are responsible for spreading the word and solidifying its reputation as one of the top recording studios in the New England region.
I caught up with Sauter recently to talk about how he got into his profession, initially recording in practice spaces, working with a variety of different bands and musicians and what he’s currently working on.
Rob Duguay: How did you initially get into recording, engineering and producing music? Did you start in college or did you learn from somebody who was already in the trade?
Eric Sauter: I actually didn’t go to school for any of this stuff. I did have a handful of mentors along the way, but everything I learned that got me to where I’m at I kind of just learned on my own. Again, you always have mentors and there’s always people I would go to for reference or whatnot, but I started recording my own bands and my own music sometime in 2014 or 2015. I was actually doing multitracking, and as I went on with that, it was one of those things where I realized that I liked doing it. I got more equipment, I started out in a rehearsal space and people started hearing that I had a multitrack setup, so they would hit me up asking if they could do some recordings.
I’d say “Let’s do it, let’s cut a demo.” They’d come by with 20 bucks and we’d just cut demos, they weren’t anything amazing, they were more for practice than anything, but that was kind of the jumping off point. I wanted to start doing this as a service for people, but I had to get good at it first, so I spent the next couple of years after that finding room to do it. I had to get out of practice spaces because they were very noisy, it was really difficult to actually schedule some time with people to record. Suddenly, the band next to us would be practicing for the next two hours and it just wasn’t sustainable for the long run.
I found a bunch of different rooms to record out of and I charged basically nothing back then. As time went on, every record I would do, I would get a little bit better while learning a new mic technique or whatnot. That and just being able to have people that I could use as resources, the New England recording community is so tightly knit and everyone is so friendly. If I ever have a question, I know a couple people I can reach out to so I can ask them how to get a particular sound, what I’m doing wrong or how something is happening. Having some good mentors was definitely a big one for me, but it was a lot of practical application with no formal education whatsoever.
It was a lot of just going at it and hitting the pavement as hard as I could with recording.
RD: Very cool. You have a reputation for working with a bunch of different rock, metal and folk musicians and bands, so when it comes to recording this array of styles, do you have a different approach that depends on which is which?
ES: Basically, what I’m doing is trying to get an idea of what the band is looking for in regards to their sound. A lot of times, a really easy way to figure that out is by asking, “Hey, what are the records you’re listening to that you like and you associate with your sound?” and people often give great answers. There’s so many bands and so many records that people are listening to in so many different genres and they’re all recorded very, very differently, so getting an idea of what the band kind of visualizes for their sound is huge for me. By using that, I can get a reference of what was being done with these records, combine them with my techniques of what I used to get certain sounds whether it’s a full-length or just a single, and just kind of go from there.
I’d say that it’s definitely different for everyone. When I go to record drums or rhythm guitars for rock and metal bands, it’s kind of similar in approach, but everything is different in that regard. Getting an idea of what the band sees for their end product and what they have in mind is a really good way to figure out my approach.
RD: When it comes to networking and getting clients, do you find yourself nowadays having more people reach out to you versus the other way around? I guarantee you were probably hustling for bands and musicians to work with when you were starting out.
ES: Yeah, when I started recording I was very, very active with going to shows and talking to various bands. I still go to plenty of shows, but I was definitely cold calling a lot of people, checking out bands and a lot of it was really just word of mouth. Now I’ve had the facility that I’ve been in for probably five years at this point and it’s definitely gone far beyond just the word of mouth aspect of it. A lot of people will call me up after listening to records that I’ve done and referencing those records, so there’s a lot of that. In the time the studio has been open, I’ve gotten a lot of reviews on Google and a lot of Yellow Pages calls where people call me up.
It’s not really based on any work that I’ve done, but they happened to see that I run a recording studio in Manchester. I’d say those contribute to 15 percent of the business, but a lot of it is either word of mouth or referencing records that I’ve done in the past. When you’ve done enough records, people will find them and seek them out. They sometimes want to know who produced it and if they like it they’ll reach out.
RD: It’s cool how that works out. When someone listens to a record you’ve been involved in, they’re pretty much hearing part of your resume in a sense and what you bring to the table. When it comes to the gear you use at Blackheart, how often do you update it? How often do you either go through magazines and catalogs or search the web for different equipment to work with?
ES: I’m what you’d call a “gearhead.” I’m always looking at websites like Reverb, eBay or Facebook Marketplace to check out cool gear that I could bring into the studio all the time. I definitely have a lot of equipment that I’ve had for a long time and it’s going to stay there forever, but I’m always trying to find cool things. Either expensive items, cheap items or anything in between to make cool sounds with. One of my most recent obsessions has been ‘80s and ‘90s digital effects and finding ways to incorporate them into records that I’m doing.
A lot of metal bands like those ‘80s sort of sounds, so I’m trying to find digital rack effects that are either drum tones, guitar tones or lead tones. That’s what I’ve been on recently and a lot of the stuff stays, but I’ll switch things out here and there. It can be anything from amp gear to guitar effects pedals, I’m always getting new effects pedals and I love effects pedals. Overdrives, delays, reverbs, there’s so much fun stuff to experiment with these days.
RD: Absolutely, you’re totally right. For future projects, what are you working on these days that you’d like to mention?
ES: I have a lot of stuff going on. I’m finishing up a record with a band from Boston called Leon Trout.
RD: Oh, yeah. I know them.
ES: I just saw them at their festival called TroutStock, it was my first time after spending thousands of hours with them in the studio and they’re really, really talented. They have this fantastic mix of those jam adjacent elements of funk and real groovy passages with almost prog-metal guitar lines. Lots of leads, harmonizing guitars and it’s really cool. It’s very high energy and I really like what they’re doing.