Throughout his 25-year career in music, Brian Tarquin—guitarist, recording artist, Emmy Award–winning TV music composer, label owner and book author—has depended upon his recording/mixing facility, Jungle Room Studios, as his base of operations. He first built Jungle Room in Los Angeles, and then moved to Nyack, N.Y., in 2003. In 2011, Tarquin moved his studio and family into a 200-year-old farmhouse in The Catskills that was once owned by his parents. Then, in late October 2012, came Hurricane Sandy.
“It was odd because we were a hundred miles from the shore,” Tarquin remembers. “All of the electrical went down, and it was getting cold there.” On Halloween night 2012, Tarquin turned on an old Ben Franklin stove in the living room, took his family out to eat, and then returned to a fire that had destroyed the second floor. “Luckily, the side where the studio was wasn’t touched,” he says. “We had to live in an RV for a month and try to figure out what was going on.”
Recently, Tarquin moved his studio into a mobile recording trailer. “It was custom made in Anaheim, California, with 10-foot ceilings and with two separate rooms inside, live and control room,” he says. “I’ve also moved to using the RADAR recording system, because of the sheer superiority of its converters. So I use an Otari MTR-90 analog tape machine for basic tracks and bounce down to the [iZ Technology] Otari RADAR II, the best of both worlds without compromising on sound quality.”
He is currently working on a followup to his 2014 album release, Guitars for Wounded Warriors; the new project is called Brian Tarquin & Heavy Friends REDUX. “Growing up I was used to seeing all these veterans from Vietnam just not be treated right. I wanted to give back.”
