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Boated recording studio of the year in 2024 and 25
by the Madison Area Music Awards,
Megaton Studios is a professional recording studio
located at Mount Horubb and is owned and operated by producer
engineering guitarist Paul Schluter.
And you may remember Paul as the guitarist and
legendary bands like Glasscrack,
Magic Seven, Mosey Locked-In, which we just heard from
in current bands like 90s cover band Fufu Dolls
or shredding solos with his wife's band,
the Elizabeth Mary band.
Paul has some Megaton Studio news and some new music,
Paul Schluter. Welcome to MagSync Radio.
Thank you. It's good to be back here.
I've got my voice this time.
Yeah.
The worst case scenario was like,
my voice was fried when I came in last time
and it slowly died as we interviewed.
So I'm full on tonight.
Oh, well, it's so good to hear you.
Paul, it's glad to have you back.
You and I have done a lot of radio together,
including Iceland.
We were on a show in Iceland when we were on tour with Glasscrack.
Tell us something you remember about touring Iceland.
That includes me, the rocker.
Oh, man. Well, I mean, the first thing I guess comes to mind is
the blue lagoon, which is this like natural hot springs.
It's like blue water. It's steaming.
It's like a giant outdoor hot tub.
And then we were putting all that like pumice on our faces.
Oh, the salt, the silty salt from the bottom of the lagoon.
It's supposed to be like an exfoliant or something.
Right. Right. And then I was taking lava rocks
and sticking my head like I was like,
they were horns and stuff.
We're like posing.
And then you were like, wait, I'm going to go get my camera.
Yeah, that's right.
Those pictures made it into national geographic
world magazine.
We couldn't say that probably until now.
Yeah, we had to sign all these agreements, right?
We got to see those pictures.
Oh my gosh.
It was a picture of the guys on the blue lagoon up to their
necks with all this white sand all over their face.
Couldn't even tell who it was and lava rocks.
And it ended up becoming a double truck ad in national
geography graphic for inside front cover.
Yeah, for a hill in the hotels.
Yeah, that was fun.
Oh my gosh.
Oh, and well, and then besides that in Iceland,
the eating the sheep's head, which is a must do, right?
You had to bring up the sheep's head.
Oh my god, and the shark was so horrible.
I remember the opening band guy, the drummer was like,
sometimes my girlfriend just brings home shark.
And I just have that for dinner.
And I was like thinking that's so gross.
It tasted like pee, but literally,
yep, you did for a minted shark.
Kind of like an ammonia tasting.
Yes, very much.
But served with a little toothpick Icelandic flag.
Well, in the black death vodka too, right?
So oh my gosh, we did so much over there.
Paul Megaton Studios, it started in the space
where the legendary and prolific sleepless night studio
on once existed.
Tell us about starting up your own legendary recording studio.
And what was it like in the beginning?
Well, it was funny.
It was very bare bones.
And I was working at sleepless nights.
I had five albums going at the time.
And then John Mocknick, my guru, the guy that got me into this,
like I would have never expected.
I would be a studio guy and he pulled me in.
And so I had these five albums going.
And he was like, yes, on October, we're shutting down.
And I was like, what?
How we can't do that?
I'm in the middle of these albums.
I was like, yeah, we just got to show it down.
And I was like, wow, can I take over the space?
So I hit up Scott Ties, a drummer
from the Weisenheimer's at the time,
who was a studio manager.
And I was like, do you want to do this space with me?
We pulled in like three other guys.
And every month that we had to pay rent.
I lost the partner.
So I started with five partners.
And then after five months, I lost every guy.
Literally every month we had to pay rent.
Somebody be like, I can't do it anymore.
And we were working on originally in a Walmart computer,
like the cheapest computer we could buy.
Just to get rolling and just do it.
And, you know, so anyway, we thanks the Darren Soder home.
He, I went to him and I said, we're going to lose this place.
Muzzy Lutton, my band was practicing there.
And I said, we're going to lose this if you don't become my partner.
And get in on this with me.
What an ultimatum.
And he signed on March 2007 as when we started.
And we lasted 17 years at that location.
Wow, that's incredible.
How did you survive in the land of home studios?
Well, this is funny.
So around right like the year 2000, I remember John,
my guru, the old owner of sleepless,
he was like, get ready.
Everybody's going to have their own computer.
They're going to do all this at home.
And there was some of that.
And that was definitely a legit fear on his part.
But ultimately, I think people found out that like,
yes, you can do all that at home.
But are you a recording engineer or are you a musician?
Do you want to learn everything it's going to take
to make it sound pretty good or what?
And there are some people that do that.
And they do a pretty good job.
But I still think that, you know, to get that sort of objective
opinion from someone else, I do this every day.
I really, really am a producer.
I hear stuff. I help.
I add, subtract, whatever.
And just I'm another year and I'm knowledgeable
in how to make it sound good.
So I think that ultimately some of those people
just are like, maybe I'll just go to the studio.
If I want this, this song's really good.
I want to go do a good, you know?
Yeah, for sure.
Elizabeth Mary, she's a big part of the studio now.
Tell us about your business partner,
bandmate and wife, Elizabeth Mary.
Well, the funny thing is, she walked into my studio
with the old sleepless nights thing to record.
She had recorded another place and just had some problems there
and emailed me, emailed her back.
And so she came into record the first day.
And it's funny.
We have footage of our first half hour together.
Wow.
Because she was filming everything on like a tripod.
So it's like, we're seeing all of it.
And it's just crazy.
How did she know to have that for like, right?
She records everything.
But so it's just funny to like see, you know,
my future wife walk in the studio.
And we just clicked so well.
I mean, we spent so many eight to 10 hour days talking,
while we're working on stuff and just collaborating.
And we had a great collaboration on her album.
We call it our first child.
Yeah.
Meet me at Madison as the album we worked on in like 2018.
And we just heard Parking Lock Kiss.
That's some of the newer stuff, which is kind of about you
meeting her, right?
Well, what's funny about that song is that's actually a true story.
And I used to walk her out to the Parking Lock Sleepless
Night's or Megaton was in a, you know, an area that you want to walk
a woman out to the car at dark, you know.
And so I'd always get a hug and then she kissed me on the cheek
and I kissed her on the cheek and then she full on kissed me.
And it was on.
So yeah, it had been really building up to that.
But now she's the greatest partner I've ever had in the studio.
She really, she is such a great person to bounce ideas off of.
We really go back and forth and figure it out.
And really right now with our new location, all these ideas we've
been talking about are all coming true.
And it's really, really cool.
Yeah.
And your son, he's touring right now, Ethan with Power Take Off.
Funny enough, he's touring with Scott Tice, who was the guy that I started out
with at Megaton.
Oh, how fun.
Yeah.
So Scott Tice is now the singer of Power Take Off.
And my son is one of the guitar players.
And they were in Colorado last night.
I guess the club loved them so much.
They paid them double and gave him four pizzas in chicken wings.
So I mean, I can understand getting paid double.
But pizza and chicken wings.
Right, right.
I mean, that's when you're a touring band that speaks volumes, you know?
Wow.
Well, Megaton Studio made a big move from Madison to Mount
Horib not too long ago.
And now there's an even bigger move coming.
Tell us about your upheaval in new beginnings.
Well, what was crazy is we were in that location.
I never knew another studio besides the sleepless nights.
I started there in 96 when John Closer's studio that was like
06 and then we fully fledged open in 07 and then the building was sold.
So we were there quite a few years.
The building sold.
And they said, can you go and I begged and pleaded for a small space in the
basement and did that for about three years.
Then we finally were like, let's just get out of here.
It's too small.
And we found a building in Mount Horib.
It didn't kind of work out.
So we found a second building in Mount Horib that the guy was really great.
And we built it up.
And that's been our studio since May 2024.
Now that building is going to be demolished supposedly.
What a lot.
Yeah.
So we invested a bunch of money in building it up really nice.
But now we're actually back to the original place that we
looked at in Mount Horib.
Wow.
And this is my best studio yet.
I mean, it just I think is going to look beautiful.
It's more compact.
We have our own building.
It's just really like we're doing it better and better every time we have to rebuild.
What's an upgrade?
What's one of the upgrades?
Well, one of the cool things is we are not putting studio windows in to see
through.
You're not going to have glass to look in the drummer.
You could never see what's going on in there.
Anyway, there's so much glare.
So we rigged up an HDMI camera thing with big large screen TVs.
And it's amazing.
We've got it working.
I'm floored that we were it.
It was an idea and it just worked.
Wow.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah.
Well, if I have a song or two and I want to put it out to the world and recorded
Megaton, but I never recorded before.
Is Megaton this place for me or do I need to be a rock star?
I really think that Megaton is a great place for somebody who's never recorded.
I love showing people like,
hey, this is what you could do.
And sometimes it's singer songwriters that'll come in and we'll be,
you know, we have a host drummer, Zach Brassington and be like,
hey, I could get Zach in the drum on this.
I play bass on a lot of stuff.
I play guitar.
We can kind of just help for somebody who's never recorded before,
even if they just sing and play acoustic.
We can turn that into a full production.
But definitely, I think I love working with the bands more
that have things to learn and like haven't recorded a lot before.
If somebody comes in and they're really set and planned,
it's great, but it's just not as fun to develop that with them.
Paul, thanks so much for coming into our studio tonight to chat.
We really appreciate it.
And we have a song from when you're a current artist,
but they're legends themselves making come back.
Madison's veteran hard rockers, Bad Wolf,
talk about this song and working on their album.
It's really funny.
Charles approached me.
Charles Thomas, the guitar player from Bad Wolf and main songwriter and everything.
He approached me at Target one day.
We were at Target West in Madison and he said,
hey, Greg White, the sound man said,
you might be the perfect guy to record my album and we started talking.
And it's like, I've known Charles since like literally the late 80s,
you know, just on a real casual basis.
And we've just became buds in the studio and we definitely see very eye to eye.
So it's like two really picky hardcore producers just making a great.
And so this, this stuff is great.
The writing is really excellent.
And the recording has been really scrutinized and crafted.
So their album is going to be incredible.
Well, let's check it out.
You know, we're going to hear the Butcher's Kid in a couple of minutes.
Say something about the Butcher's Kid.
Oh my gosh.
I love that album.
I feel like that is I always tell them it's a great listening album.
That's an album you can just put on at home and just chill too.
It's like just relaxed Americana acoustic.
Really great tunes.
We really had a lot of fun.
Again, really crafting like melodic guitar solos.
He rewrote a bunch of his vocals and basically made everything better again.
So like, wow, it's a great album.
All these albums we put quite a bit of time in,
but they're world class.
Well, very cool.
Well, we're going to hear, we're going to hear the Butcher's Kid in just a minute
because they'll be playing in Rockdale Bar and Grill 1024.
But right now, let's listen to Bad Wolf.
This might be the radio debut of their first song off of their new album, man.
Well, what's he called?
Bounce back.
Bounce back.
Bounce back.
Bad Wolf, brand new Maxing Radio.
We are local music.
The Butcher's Kid.
Wow, that's pretty cool, Paul.
We still got Paul Schluter.
Thank you.
I got to mention one thing too.
Dan Koch, I'm my master and guy, really came through on both of these.
Yeah, you were mentioning it sounds good on the radio.
It sounds great on the radio.
Yeah, we put him through the ringer on these,
but he really came through for us.
Wow, that is pretty cool.
Brand new music.
We're going to hear some next week from some other bands that you sent in
because you're doing a ton of different bands.
But you know, I did have one more question for you.
I want to ask a throwback question.
Paul, your band last crack.
They played at the bar called the Black Bear Lounge.
And it's the inspiration for the song Blood Brothers of the Big Black Bear.
And it had a reputation.
Tell us about playing that legendary bar at the location
where Doddy Dumplings dowry now resides.
Yeah, we did play there a couple of times, a couple of new years.
And I mean, that was the heavy metal bar of Madison.
It's where all the metalheads went.
And so we were down there.
It was very near our practice place, too.
So we would go there and drink after practice.
And I was always a pretty good time.
It was a wild bar.
It could be rough.
But it was more of a music bar, I think, than a rough bar.
One of my greatest memories is that the night our video played
on headbangers ball on MTV last crack, Energy Mind.
I remember I was telling people all night.
They're going to play our video on MTV.
They're like, really?
And we'll put it on it.
And I mean, like up until bar time, people, I thought your video was going to play.
We were the last video on headbangers ball the first time it got played.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, right.
And I remember I punched a hole in the ceiling because I was just like, yeah.
You know, and yeah, thank God they played it that night.
Or I would look like an idiot, but that's jukebox in town, too.
Well, I remember actually going to the Black Bear
and listening to Blood Brothers of the Black Bear on the jukebox.
That's crazy.
The first local band that you really ever heard.
That was written about an adventure down there.
Yeah.
And yeah, that was a wild night.
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We are local music.
