Our Story

Clear Lake Recording was founded in 1987 by Brian Levi, who had a specific kind of room in mind: a live space where drums and acoustic instruments could sound huge, but flexible enough to handle anything else an artist might bring through the door. To get it right, Levi brought in George Augspurger — the loudspeaker designer and acoustician whose room designs sit behind some of the most respected control rooms in Los Angeles — to design and tune the studio.

The control room was built spacious and accurate. The live room was tuned for ambience. And in the middle of it sat a Trident 80B — chosen, then as now, because it was the console best suited to be the centerpiece of a serious tracking room.

That room is still here. Same console. Same address. Studio A.

Studio B was added in 1992 and Studio C in 2000, both built to accommodate the longer-term projects that started showing up as the studio's reputation grew. Through the '90s and 2000s, Clear Lake quietly became the kind of place that gets recommended without a pitch — a working studio that took care of its rooms, its tape machines, and its clients.

Eric Milos took over Clear Lake in 2012 and immediately put the building through its first full overhaul. Studio D was built from the ground up. Studio A's equipment and aesthetic were reworked top to bottom. Every corner of the campus got attention — new indoor and outdoor lounges, a remodeled kitchen, a re-thought workflow for long sessions.

The brief was simple: keep what made Clear Lake Clear Lake — the Augspurger-designed rooms, the Trident, the analog signal chain — and bring everything around it up to a modern standard.

Studio B had spent years as a long-term lock-out space. In 2015 we converted it back into a fully featured overdub and 5.1 mix room, opening it up to outside booking and giving artists a second purpose-built option on the campus.

Starting in 2016 we made a deliberate push to expand the backline. The thinking was straightforward: artists were arriving with smaller and smaller setups, and they should be able to walk into Clear Lake and record on top-of-the-line instruments and amplifiers without dragging a truck across town. The backline has been growing ever since.

In 2017 we opened Fever Recording as a sister studio designed for higher-end clientele — major labels, A-list artists, sessions where privacy is part of the brief. Fever has its own distinct identity: an SSL Duality console at the center, a deep list of high-end outboard and microphones, Augspurger main monitors with four 18-inch subwoofers, gated parking, private lounges, and multiple production rooms. Fever and Clear Lake are completely separate operations, but they share an owner, a campus, and a standard.

When the pandemic hit, we did what every responsible studio had to do: rewrote our protocols from scratch. Industry-leading sanitation, capacity rules, ventilation, scheduling. We stayed open for the artists who needed to keep working, and we did it without anyone getting sick on our watch.

In 2021 the studio flooded. What could have been the end of a long story turned into a remodel — every public space and every studio got brought up to a modern, high-end finish. The bones stayed, the rooms stayed, the gear stayed. Almost everything else got better.

Coming out of the pandemic, the question wasn't whether immersive audio was a real format — it was how fast we could be ready to deliver it well. In 2023 we rebuilt Studio B as a full Dolby Atmos 9.1.4 mix suite, anchored by an Avid D-Command with Xmon, PMC monitoring, and a signal chain (BAE 1073, Tube-Tech CL1B, Distressor, Allen Smart C2) deep enough to keep purists honest. It is now one of the more capable Atmos rooms in Los Angeles, and it's the lane we expect to keep growing.

The recording industry is in the middle of its biggest re-shape in a generation. AI is reshuffling how songs get made and how they get heard. Every artist has a private studio in their bedroom now. Cheap rooms have multiplied across Los Angeles. Major labels are opening their own facilities. The math that worked for studios for forty years doesn't work the same way anymore.

We have spent the last few years quietly reconfiguring how Clear Lake runs from the inside out. New booking models. A monthly-lease option for Studio B for engineers and producers who want a permanent home in an Atmos room. New service offerings for film, TV, streaming, and game audio. A leaner, sharper team. A revisit of every assumption about how a studio should operate in the 2020s.

What hasn't changed: the room. The Augspurger acoustics. The Trident 80B. The Studer A827. The 40 years of records that have come through this building. The standard our clients have come to expect.

2026 is a starting line for us. The studio has been here since 1987 because every owner who has held the keys has been willing to rethink the parts that needed rethinking and protect the parts that didn't. We're doing the same now. The next forty years of Clear Lake start here.