Sunset Sound

Sunset Sound was founded in 1958 by Tutti Camarata, a Disney staff arranger and musician who built the studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood to serve the film studio's recording needs and then expanded it into a commercial facility open to the broader industry. The room developed, over the following decades, a reputation for warmth and depth that made it one of the preferred studios in Los Angeles for artists who wanted their records to sound a certain way — analogue, spatial, rooted in the room rather than the desk.

The Doors recorded several albums at Sunset Sound. The Rolling Stones mixed Exile on Main St here in 1972 after recording the basic tracks at Villa Nellcôte in France. Led Zeppelin used the studio. Paul McCartney has recorded here. But the artist most associated with Sunset Sound in the popular imagination is Prince, who made the studio his primary Los Angeles base through the 1980s and 1990s — recording Purple Rain here in 1983 and returning obsessively across the following years, sometimes booking the studio around the clock for weeks at a time. Prince's relationship with Sunset Sound was one of the more productive artist-room partnerships in the history of the building.

Sunset Sound is still operating at the same Sunset Boulevard address, now consisting of three separate recording rooms that can be booked independently or as a complex. It is one of the oldest continuously operating recording studios in Los Angeles and one of the very few from its era still functioning at anything like the level it was built for. The exterior is modest and easy to miss; the building gives no indication of what it contains or what has been made inside it.