LemonTree Studios

Perfect Sound Demands Perfect Architecture
When pioneering sound engineer Erik ‘Nils’ Nilson “browsed” the record stores along with his father as a boy, he’d spend hours flipping through the albums imagining what the music behind each cover might sound like. He’s turned that curiosity of how the visual and sonic interact into an obsession of how sound and visual impact space and design influencing the creative process.

In 2019, Nils opened his second and flagship recording studio complex in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. His love of album art continued to inspire scouring L.A.'s dwindling record stores, flea markets, and yard sales for the 1600 hand-selected album covers that make up another iconic LemonTree record floor. (The original record floor was created in 2007 for the original DTLA location.)

LemonTree Highland Park is a playground of synesthesia where architecture and design dance with sonic and visual creativity for an award-winning music community of historical importance in the L.A. music scene.

At LemonTree, the room is in the band. The room is an instrument, a contributor to the song. LemonTree always serves the song.
The recent advent of Immersive sound for film and television exploded into music with Dolby Atmos, Sony 360, and Apple Spatial giving architecture to musical sound recordings. No longer is recorded music played back like a live show in front of us. New music and sound being made at LemonTree Studios invites the listener inside the music, into the biggest change in our experience of music since stereo. You feel like you are there. The song is all around you. The listener is cradled in a world created by the artists involved. And the Dolby Atmos room at LemonTree Studios empowers the artist to design this world any way they imagine. Further, live performance venues, like “Sphere” in Las Vegas, are repositioning the live sound experience to match the immersive experience. The “sound coming at you model” is being jettisoned.

Sound You Dwell In
The process of creating sonic architectures requires precision in the music-making process, delivered by the architecture of LemonTree’s building and studios. Designed and constructed by world-class sound engineers, the architecture of LemonTree’s studios for recording and mixing music, whether played live or heard in Dolby Atmos, the listening and live spaces were made with the precision of history’s best hand-made craftsmen. Just as a Stradivari violin has no peer, LemonTree has created a space that uses the latest in sound design technology for the highest quality known to science. Every material, angle and outlet down to the door handle was selected to create a cathedral of perfect sound for world-class musicians, producers, mixers, and sound artists.

Every studio at LemonTree is also a control room with 24 channels of live recording from the 400 sq. Ft. live room. Their Focusrite Rednet system provides a Dante digital network that replaces copper analog wiring with Ethernet cables and perfect digital fidelity. The Dolby Atmos room, where you can mix and quality check Atmos mixes, features a 240-degree immersive visual projections that marry the sonic and the visual. The 24 different selections of animated backgrounds meld the architectures of the visual and the sonic.
You have to hear it for yourself.

Today’s architectural music is being created at LemonTree Studios. Still, it is not easy to explain the difference between the experience of sound you are currently getting in your headphones and what it is like to be developed in sound created at Lemon Tree.