Tucked away in a sheltered nook behind the Canary Hotel hides the newest addition to Santa Barbara’s recording-studio scene: Hidden City Studios. Founded last year by UCSB grad Elliott Lanam, the musical enclave serves as an affordable space for music-makers of all kinds to record and realize their creative dreams.
Lanam, 25, opened Hidden City when he sensed a lack of affordably priced professional recording and engineering studios in Santa Barbara. Area musicians, he said, had only high-end options to choose from, with studios asking for upward of $150 an hour. An hour at Hidden City goes for $50, engineer included. Lanam said he hopes “to give musicians a place that doesn't break the bank, but with the same professionalism and pleasure” as other S.B. studios.
Lanam cut his teeth into some of the city’s top studios. He got his start interning at Santa Barbara Sound Design while a student at SBCC. In his spare time, he experimented with looping and recording with a synth sequencer at home and taught himself compositional principles. He advanced onto UCSB to study ethnomusicology, where he juggled his studies with a bartending job and a position at Playback Recording Studio as a producer and engineer.