Orion Sound Studios began life with a different name.  The original section of the studio, which includes the live showcase room and nine rehearsal rooms, was built by Jon Clymer in 1993 and was called Sanctuary Studios.  I bought the studio from Jon in October of 1994 and renamed it Orion Sound Studios. 

    Since its inception it has always been primarily a rehearsal studio.  The recording studio was set up next to the showcase room and was originally equipped with a Studiomaster mixing console and two 1/2-inch reel-to-reel 8-track Tascam analogue recorders.  I had been recording my own band, Averted Vision, on a Tascam 8-track "portastudio", for a about a year, so  the studio setup was definitely a large improvement.   I started using the studio to record other bands, initially for free, in early 1995.  The studio's shortcomings were many.  The two reel-to-reel decks were connected by a synchronizer that never quite worked, so many takes were lost when one of the machines would loose lock and drift for a second or two, then catch back up.  The room was not isolated from the rest of the complex, so if another band showed up to rehearse it meant the end of recording until they were finished.  We had no real isolation rooms which made it hard to keep tracks isolated.  To improve things a bit we would put the guitarist's cabinet in an entryway, record the bass tracks direct, and have everyone monitor through headphones, leading to lots of "More Me" wars.  Finally, the shape of the showcase room itself is a bit of an acoustic nightmare, being almost square with a ceiling that is almost exactly 1/2 of the width and length.   When you add to all that the fact that I was ugly green at the whole art of recording and mixing music its a wonder that anything useful ever came out of there.  Still, some good recordings did get made, and since recording was definitely not a major part of the business any plans to improve the situation were put on hold.

    In 1996 we began to host the Baltimore Progressive Rock Showcase Series in the showcase room.  In fall of that year we presented our first really major show, featuring Deus ex Machina (from Italy), Ars Nova (from Japan) and Mastermind (from New Jersey - exit 4 or so).  We'd been using the setup, described above, to record all of the showcases, but clearly needed to upgrade.  Just before that show I secured a small loan to acquire a new console (32-channel Mackie 8-bus) and digital tape recorders (one Tascam DA88 and two DA38s). 

Here's a shot of Averted Vision in the original studio.  Shown here are yours truly (with long DARK hair, no less!), keyboardist Jay Trotta and bassist Gary Curtis.

    The new gear made an immediate positive impact on the quality of the recordings and allowed me to begin charging a bit more for recording time.  We reinvested all of that income from recordings into new equipment and slowly assembled the pieces for that "real" studio we'd always wanted to build.  Still, it was a damn good thing I had a day job as, over all, we weren't making any money. 

Another early picture showing the Averted Vision drum setup in the showcase room.  And yes, the gong was mic'd!

    In July of 2002 a small warehouse space became available in the building across the parking lot form the showcase room.  We signed a lease for the space and began clearing it out to build the recording studio.  The pace of construction was pretty leisurely until October, which is when I was laid off of my job of 20 years at the Space Telescope Science Institute.