Why everyone from Beyoncé to Coca-Cola uses Mr. Bronx studio in New York

David Wolfe, sound designer, mixer and owner of Bronx Audio Post – an audio post-production facility located in New York City which has been known as Mr. Bronx since its inception in 2011 – reveals how this boutique studio boasts big star-powered clients (including all of Beyoncé’s musical films since Lemonade, The Bear, Deadpool & Wolverine, Welcome to Wrexham, as well as numerous ad campaigns for Adidas, Coca-Cola, American Express and LG), his favourite project so far, how it all started with a viral Ragu ad, and why Genelec studio monitors were a no brainer for the facility.

What first sparked your interest in music production?

I wish I had a cool, interesting story! Basically, I was a musician growing up. I have played drums since I was eight years old. My next door neighbour was better than me at drums, so they gave me a bass guitar, and I learned that. I went all the way through university studying upright bass after school. You either gig as a musician here in New York City and make no money, or you sit in an orchestra and make a little more money, but not so much. 

I made a little bit of money by sitting in as a studio musician for very mediocre rock bands as a bass player. They would hire me for the day and pay me a couple 100 bucks. I would play for an hour, and then I would sit watching the engineer for the next seven. 

I started to learn Pro Tools and audio production and I realised that it wasn't the music that was the exciting bit to me. It turned out to be the audio component. Once I learned that this was even a job (kind of late, actually, at around 25!), I was off to the races.

What was your first big break in the world of engineering or mixing?

Before I worked as an engineer, I worked for Sony BMG, the record label. I bopped around there for a little bit. I worked in ANR, I worked in business affairs. I never worked in the studios, because I wasn't honestly all that interested in it at the time. I started there when I was probably 19. I started working my way through the music industry, and I got kind of disillusioned. I wanted to make my own art, I didn't necessarily want to promote other people's art.

One day I went to a Jets game with a whole bunch of random people, and I met this woman who asked me about my job, and I was telling her how much I disliked it. She told me she knew somebody was hiring an audio assistant, and I told her I had no experience. she said, ‘It doesn't matter, go meet with them’. I met with them and they gave me a small test. Turns out I knew a bunch of stuff that I didn't even know I knew, and in two weeks, I had a job as an assistant working in a commercial studio. It was amazing.

I always say, luck is just opportunity and preparation coming together, and it was absolutely lucky, but I do very much try to give people those same opportunities, because I was not in a position to actually take that job. I was really, truly lucky that they saw something in me. The people that I interview now are far more talented and far further along in their development than I was at that age. It's unbelievable.

How did you come to own Bronx Audio Post in 2011?

I don't know if it's a character flaw or not, but I have a hard time taking direction from bosses [laughs]. When you're a young commercial mixer, you either need to find the absolute best editorial assistant, agency assistants and somebody on the younger side to give you high end work so you can force it into the studio, or you need to develop your own path. 

The overheads in New York City for these large commercial studios are so high. New York rent in general is high. But then also studios that focus on commercial work, they… how do I put this… they're tending to a certain clientele, and they need to be a certain level of polish, and that's expensive.

So basically, in order to cover the overhead, you have to work on the most expensive stuff possible. Bronx came to be because we had a bunch of really talented friends that wanted to work on all kinds of stuff – everything from documentary films to high end commercial work. We want to be able to work on anything we want to work on. That's how we stay entertained and creative. Bronx started as a product of that.

What was your first engineering project you worked on at the studio?

We have a sister company called Butter Music. They're a brilliant custom music company. They score gorgeous stuff, and they let me in on a couple really big projects early on. It sounds ridiculous that these commercial projects would be so high on my list of things that I've worked on, [laughs], but I will remember forever that we worked on a commercial for Ragu, which is a very mediocre pasta sauce brand here in the States.

It was a custom song that was written with Butter Music, and it was about a day in the life of a child and how childhood's hard, and at the end of the day you need to have some Ragu and feel good about your day. The spot that we did was, you get home from school, you call for your parents. You can't find them anywhere. You go upstairs, you walk into their bedroom, and they are in an embrace. 

It was a very cute song that kind of took off, and we ended up starting with that one and then probably producing – I don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I say – 250 other versions for either other Ragu commercials, for radio spots, but also we wrote them for every late night host. 

50 Cent wanted a version where he was making fun of one of his friends and we got asked by all these celebrities to write their own specific version of it. It was so fun to sit down and record take after take after take. It was just us friends sitting in a studio recording script after script.

What makes the studio special and keeps artists of the calibre you work with and big advertisers coming back?

The studio was started to allow us to flex our creative muscles. A lot of the bigger shops, they're not as flexible. When people come here, they know that they're getting a wonderfully comfortable experience. When we're working on films, the directors come in and they're shocked, because we do look like a commercial studio, even though we're working on films; that's always a fun surprise for them. 

We want to make wonderful things happen. Our overheads are a bit lower than some of the bigger shops, so it allows us to invest in super high end gear. It allows us to take the time to really craft something, and not just rush it through the door. 

We're kind of smack in the middle of Manhattan, and we do have a boutique studio, but it is gorgeous, and we worked really hard at building it, and it's exactly what we set out to build. We've only had this space for about a year and a half now, but we took about a year and a half to design, build and test it and do everything, and we have it up and running.

Of all the projects you’ve worked on, what is a personal highlight of yours?

Honestly, the most shocking thing to me is that, as I became a business owner, the highlights of my career haven't actually been my projects. It's the people that work at the studio that have created something shocking and amazing. So the ones that I'll bring up actually aren't even mine. 

Last year, one of our mixers got to mix our first Atmos film here, and did the North American release of The Boy and the Heron, which is a Studio Ghibli film that won an Oscar last year. That was incredible to witness. I got to sit in the room, and it just flowed. We got to use every piece of gear that we had, and it went out to the world and everybody loved it. It's incredible.

The other one I actually did work on it a little bit, was a show called Random Acts of Flyness on HBO, created by a man named Terence Nance, who is incredibly, otherworldly creative. It's a little bit of a variety show; it's funny, it's sad, it's about the black experience in America and all this wonderful stuff, and we had a chance to work on it and go along for the ride. 

It ended up winning a Peabody Award, and it started conversations in my family that I never thought we would talk about. So that is one of the highlights, and I'll finish my career remembering that one.

Spanning an impressive 12,500 square feet, the facility boasts state-of-the-art 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos rooms with Genelec Active Monitors, a striking 160-inch projection screen and a spacious 145-square-foot ADR stage, all connected via Dante. Why did you invest in Genelec monitors for the facility’s three rooms?

I went from working in music studios that did not use Genelecs, to a commercial and film production place with seven or eight rooms, and each one had its own set of speakers for each engineer, because it was an old school way of thinking. They built a room for them, and that person lived there for however long, until they fired them, basically, or they left. And that meant that they got to pick out their own keyboards, their own speakers, their own monitors, their everything. So no room was alike, and I ended up gravitating towards this one very specific room that had the Genelecs in it.

When I was first starting out, I didn't know how to mix properly, so everybody just kept saying, ‘Check your mixes against other monitors. Check your mixes. Check your mixes’. It was the old trick of going out to your car to listen to a record after you've mixed it in the studio. So I would go from room to room to room after hours. 

So 10 o'clock at night, no lights are on in the entire building, and 22 year old me is walking from room to room, loading up my mixes on every single rig and pressing play and walking between all of them. In the end, the only one that I could hear clearly in was the room that had the Genelecs, and they became a part of my workflow. 

I bought a pair for home. I thought they were the coolest things. They were just expensive enough to make me feel like I was making a real serious investment into my career, which made me feel like I was doubling down and really getting involved in the industry. It all was a big confluence. Genelec has become a really important part of my career.

Did you immediately notice how well Genelecs are suited to ADR and dialogue work?

That's the real crux of it: everybody has their preferences. Genelecs are bright, clean and clear. I cut dialogue better on them. I've tried a lot of other speakers, and I always come back to the Genelecs. 

When we were building the space, it was a no-brainer that we wanted to accomplish two things: One is to have the best monitors possible so we can do the best work possible, and the other was to have parity in the rooms so we're able to go back and forth and slide seamlessly between our rigs.

How much Atmos work is the studio working on these days?

Basically any film we do that goes to the streaming services gets an Atmos mix. Sadly, at the moment, a lot of the commercial work doesn't ask for it, unless it's being produced for Apple TV. So we do some of that stuff, which is lovely. We're convincing people, and every once in a while, we will allow people to come in and do their music mixes on our Atmos systems, just because we want them used.

The interesting bit that I planned for, but didn't realise how applicable it was going to be, was we're using the Atmos channels as multi mono, and we do some sound design for rides and video games and that kind of stuff. Then we're able to kick out any format we want, and we can take those multi-mono files, go on site (if we're building a ride), and map those channels bespoke on set or on site. So the Atmos channels have come into our workflow in other ways, organically, which is kind of amazing.