Torreón Terlingua is the new home of award-winning record producer/engineer Bill Palmer.
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Torreón Studio is my home. It’s comfortable and unassuming. There are no clocks on the walls. Musical instruments are everywhere throughout the house. World class microphones hang on stands, and the doors and windows are thrown open most of the year. This is not a sterile, clinical environment where real art goes to die, rather a welcoming, vibey space for digging in deep.
Torreón is an old, historic neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico. Torreón literally translates as ‘tower’. It was a sort of watch station or checkpoint on El Camino Real (the royal road) coming into Santa Fe. People grew corn and raised sheep along the banks of the river. With its adobe and stucco walls, the neighborhood appears lost in time, an otherworldly tribute to centuries past. Perfect place for me!
At the earliest age I can remember, I was recording my voice into one of those old flip-top cassette recorders. I would sing the Star Wars theme song into it, and then I’d play my version back in the room while I acted out the role of Luke Skywalker. My own soundtrack! It was a revelation that forever left an imprint. In early high school, I acquired a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder and pretty soon learned how to multitrack and mix together the sounds that were swirling around in my head. In my 20’s, I found myself recording in professional studios for this and that. A band I was in, The Sharecroppers, recorded our first demos in a rickety old church near Luling, TX, in the middle of the night. We had brought in ace young engineers Ethan Allen and Jim Watts to helm the session. The sounds were rich and unusual, a unique exception to the predictable studio tones I had experienced. It was at my friend Mark McKinney’s house in Austin, TX, where my band Hundred Year Flood would make our first recordings. They were spectacular. Amps in the bathroom, vocals in the bedroom, drums in the living room. Mark was thrilled to be producing us, and everything ran perfectly smooth. It was a new power, I thought, outside of the expensive and stuffy confines of soundproof studios. Someone would be cooking dinner in the kitchen while we tracked guitar solos. Dogs would be passing through. The house itself was an instrument. I loved it, and I still do...
Fast forward to Santa Fe, circa 2003. I had been approached by a fan about making a new Hundred Year Flood record, and I was told that it would be fully funded. “Where should we do it?” I thought about the studios in town, and my immediate response was, “Let’s do it in your house”... “Do you know how to engineer a record?”... “Not really, but I’ll learn!”... A ramshackle, feisty little record was made among the couches, kitchen and stairwell of a dusty old house, and the local radio station picked up on it. Pretty soon, I was making records for all kinds of artists! Frogville Studio was born. And so, I spent 16 years turning that living room into a world class studio. All kinds of awards were won, and hundreds of records were made. In 2018, I left Frogville to pursue my own business ideas and decided to return to my original inspiration of being versatile, spontaneous and mobile.
