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Steve Tyler is Founder and Chief Engineer of the new Silverbirch Studios at 7787 Huguenard Rd.
Since collaborating as California newlyweds about 20 years ago and forming the Mimi Burns Band, Steve Tyler and his wife, Mimi Burns, have craved a holistic recording studio experience.
They wanted a studio that not only provided them with excellent audio, but also quality video—a studio that not only helped them reach global audiences, but also helped them be vulnerable as artists and tap into the healing power of songs.
So when the couple came into wealth through Tyler’s work as an entrepreneur (founding and selling the company Extension Healthcare), they invested their earnings into an innovative passion project in Fort Wayne, known as Silverbirch Studios.
Nestled in acres of woods and trails at 7787 Huguenard Rd., Silverbirch Studios is a world-class video and audio recording experience immersed in nature, flooded with natural light, and designed by and for artists in nearly every way, from its acoustic honeycomb ceilings to its earthy floors.
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Warm, earthy tones and textures give Silverbirch Studios a grounded, organic feel.
But along with its creative appeal, it’s also intended to meet the changing needs of artists as the global music industry evolves with digitization and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It used to be that the musician, the artist, was the product of a record label,” Tyler says. “The artist, in effect, was a commodity.”
Now, for studios like Silverbirch, the artist is the client. As more musicians operate independently and become increasingly connected with their audiences on platforms, like social media, Silverbirch Studios is catering to musicians themselves with efficient, effective, and engaging new ways to share their work.
We sat down with Tyler, as the Co-Founder and Chief Engineer of Silverbirch Studios, to learn more about his company’s mission, the catalytic role it’s playing in the music industry at-large, and its plan to put Fort Wayne’s music talent on the map.
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Steve Tyler is Founder and Chief Engineer of the new Silverbirch Studios at 7787 Huguenard Rd.
IFW: Tell us about yourself. What brought you to Fort Wayne?
ST: I’m from England originally. I moved to California well north of 20 years ago, and I was all set to move back to England after that. Then when I had about one month left in the U.S., I met my wife, Mimi Burns, so while I did briefly return to England, I turned right back around and came back to the U.S. And Mimi and I got married about nine months later.
Mimi is originally from Illinois, so about 19 years ago, when our first son was born, she said, “Let’s go to the Midwest.” I said: “What’s the Midwest?” But we had read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle that said Fort Wayne was among the Top 10 places in the U.S. to raise a child, so we moved here, and we’ve been here ever since.
Fort Wayne has worked out really well for us. We like it, and it’s evolved a lot in the time we’ve been here. It’s a great community, with a lot of talented artists in the local music scene, and I’m grateful we’ve been able to contribute here, as the Mimi Burns Band, and now with Silverbirch Studios.
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Silverbirch Studio Manager Austin Hogan and Chief Engineer Steve Tyler.
IFW: Tell us about your personal music.
ST: Mimi and I have been writing music together for as long as we’ve been together. We’ve always been drawn toward Celtic-influenced music. With Mimi’s family being of Irish descent and me being English, Celtic music is where we meet up. We’re fascinated by music that tells a story— music that’s expansive and emotional, with the ebb and flow of a journey.
Our band is the Mimi Burns Band, and we’ve performed around Fort Wayne quite a bit, as well as on the West Coast and even in Europe. We have three children now, so being a musician with children makes life quite interesting. But that’s another reason we’re glad to be working on Silverbirch Studios. We’re excited to use our experience as musicians to help other artists make their work known.
IFW: As an artist, how would you describe Fort Wayne’s music scene?
ST: Fort Wayne’s music scene is very strong. Leaders like Sweetwater are doing amazing things in the community and bringing so many talented musicians and producers and engineers to Fort Wayne. There’s a tremendous amount of talent here. That was one of the reasons we felt confident Silverbirch Studios was a great investment to make in Fort Wayne—because there’s a tremendous number of music lovers here. We’re proud and grateful we get to contribute to that.
We called our studio “Silverbirch” because, in Celtic culture, the silver birch tree represents new beginnings. For us, this is a new beginning of investing in growth in our community through music.
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Silverbirch Studios is immersed in nature and surrounded by woods.
IFW: As someone leading change in the local music scene, what do you think could take Fort Wayne’s music scene to the next level?
ST: I’ll answer based on what I’ve heard repeatedly from others in the local music scene. Oftentimes, Fort Wayne area musicians say they feel challenged to grow beyond this area.
When I think on a national level, there’s an awareness of Fort Wayne being a contributor to the music industry, in that a lot of people come here to visit Sweetwater, attend its events, or purchase equipment. But less is known about Fort Wayne as a place to discover artists and put them on the national or world stage. So that is the challenge: People don’t typically think about Fort Wayne as a place to discover music talent, and we think there’s room for growth.
We want to put local artists on a more visible stage beyond Fort Wayne, using world-class audio, video, and broadcast services combined. We feel that we have the capability to highlight these artists and help them make their work known beyond the local market.
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Natural light pours into Silverbirch Studios.
IFW: It’s cool that you’re applying your experience as an artist to help others at Silverbirch Studios. Tell us more about what led you to create this new approach to a recording studio.
ST: I’ve always been a musician, working in studios and largely recording my own music. A lot of that experience was the inspiration for why Mimi and I built Silverbirch Studios.
In our own journeys as musicians and as people, we feel there’s a vital role for music and for artist to play in our society, particularly in challenging times, like we experienced in 2020. Music can be a way through the trauma we face as individuals and a community. So often, it’s music that makes it easier to process what we’re feeling or get connected to our emotions.
That was our starting point for creating Silverbirch Studios: The idea that there’s a responsibly that goes along with being a musician and an artist performing—that we play a vital role in society to help people get connected to what they’re feeling.
In my experience, it’s challenging to be an artist—to find ways to be supported and to be heard. There were so many times when I almost felt like being an artist was an inconvenience, but then there were also so many times when people got connected to what we were saying and what we had written—how emotional it was.
Mimi and I intimately know that it is really hard for artists to get out there, writing and performing original music. So we wanted to create a recording studio that would not only help artists reach global audiences, but also nurture them in the process of creating this intensely emotional work.
Over the years, we have collaborated with a lot of great people and recorded in some great studios in Fort Wayne. But the general trend is that the recording studio is either not in a great part of town, or it’s some windowless void built with lots of concrete, and there’s a folding chair next to a microwave, sitting outside the bathroom.
As artists, we wanted the recording studio to be a place where artists could feel inspired and supported. So the first thing we did was found a property for Silverbirch Studios with lots of trees and space. We have acres of woods here, and we’ve made trails for our employees and clients to use on the property.
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Silverbirch Studios was designed in collaboration with Wes Lachot.
That’s surrounding the studio. Then inside the studio itself, we’ve used lots of organic materials, and we have lots of windows, so there’s natural light, and you see nature all around you while you’re working.
That was the environment we wanted to record in, and we like to think that environment helps artists get to the place where they’re inspired to tell stories and to share the emotional material they’ve created. It helps them feel safe and grounded.
IFW: How long have you been working on this project, and how has it been impacted by COVID-19?
ST: We’ve been working on the concept for Silverbirch Studios for the last three years, from deciding to move forward with it, to finding a designer, to finding a general contractor and a sub-contractor, and finding the land. There are so many moving pieces.
As of really the last handful of weeks in February, all of the remaining construction has been completed, and it's a fully functional facility as of March. The various contributors, producers, engineers, camera people, and video editors—we’re all getting a grip on what we have here, and we’ve started to produce some recordings.
We’re pretty excited about what we have going on. It’s taken a while to get it all together, and COVID did make things challenging. But luckily, our construction schedule wasn’t impacted much, and we found a way through.
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For the ancient Celts, silver birch trees represented new beginnings.
IFW: Tell us about your services for musicians at Silverbirch Studios.
ST: We have essentially two paths of services for musicians.
On the first path, we’re providing services for musicians to record their music and to film them doing it, so they have access to world-class video and audio content, essentially giving them a one-stop way to share their music with global audiences and streamline the production process for them.
The other path of what we offer is a broadcasting platform where we plan to share a wide range of music with anyone who enjoys music or wants to discover new music they haven’t come across before. So we’re inviting a series of artists from lots of different genres—from classical to rap to folk and pop—you name it. And we’re creating a broadcast channel to share their work on our website under the “concerts” tab. You can also access the concerts on our YouTube, Dailymotion, or Facebook pages.
Over time, we’ll also have subscriber-specific content for those who want to support the show and enable us to bring more artists and greater production quality to our broadcasts. But we’re really excited about the potential of this project—especially during COVID-19 when so many live music venues are closed.
IFW: What genres of music will you broadcast in these virtual concerts?
ST: We’re being deliberately diverse in our music selections for the broadcasts so we showcase not only musicians in various genres, but also the producers and the engineers. We have a very talented staff of about eight folks who are deliberately from different backgrounds and enjoy different genres of music. I have my own experience in certain areas of the music world, but it wouldn’t be right for me to apply my focused skillsets to every genre of music we’re working with. So we’ve gathered an impressive group of producers and engineers from across the spectrum of the audio and video landscape, and we want to share their work with the world, too.
Our goal is to have a resource—a virtual venue—as something the community can get behind to appreciate music and to see it in a new light. To get an idea of what we have in mind, check out a sneak preview of our broadcast with local musician Jonah Baker (in the video above). We’ll be releasing the details of our broadcast schedule soon, so stay tuned to our website and social media. Over the next month or two, we’re going to be filming, editing, and making everything happen.
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Honeycomb ceiling tiles add to the acoustic environment.
IFW: Providing digital services for local artists and music lovers seems like such a timely project during COVID-19. Was the film aspect of your work a result of the pandemic?
ST: Actually, broadcasting the performances of local artists is something we wanted to invest in even before the pandemic. We just had the realization that, oftentimes, audiences don’t discover new music without there being video involved. In the digital age, we see music as much as we hear music, and having been through the process as an artist of trying to figure out how to make a recording and produce a quality video, we knew the challenges involved. It’s expensive and time-consuming for artists to make their work known, so we wanted to address those challenges from a business perspective.
Typically, when an artist is producing an album, video is an afterthought—if it’s a thought at all. But we figured: There has to be a better way to do it, and we designed our workflow, focusing on video, just as much as audio, so the process is seamless for creatives. It all works together. As we’re making the album, we’re gathering the video content in such a way that it’s really going to elevate the perception of artists—particularly local artists—which was our objective in the first place.
It’s essentially leveling the playing field for local artists to produce world-class content, so their music can be shared.
IFW: Along with music, what other services does Silverbirch Studios offer the Fort Wayne community?
ST: We’re diversifying our revenue streams, doing some podcasting, as well as video work and sound design for businesses.
Many businesses need a video presence for the same reasons that artists do, so we’re interested in working with local businesses to make that happen. We’re able to do interviews, live broadcasts on social media, or edit and produce videos with professional sound design, composition, and music.
We see ourselves as collaborators and third-party resources for local ad agencies and marketing firms to create world-class video and audio material for their clients. Overall, we want people to know that we have a one-of-a-kind approach to recording, and we have a world-class facility. There have already been a lot of people coming in from out of town to utilize the equipment and services we have here at Silverbirch because it really is unique—not just to Fort Wayne, but to the recording industry, as a whole.
Hopefully, as we grow, we’ll attract more out of towners to see what Fort Wayne has to offer. But our mission really is to support our local community and our local artists, first and foremost. We know firsthand that there are so many talented artists here, and we have mindfully made sure that, even though we will have artists coming from out of town to participate in broadcasts and to do shows with us, many of our artists will remain local.
We’re committed to supporting Fort Wayne’s music scene.
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A recording studio at Silverbirch Studios.
IFW: Anything else we should know about your work?
ST: We talked a little bit about the importance of music as a vital element of our lives. But underlying our philosophy, there is a sense of how music and the arts, in general, are a powerful source of healing and emotional health. So we’re supporting projects like, Lighthouse Affects, which Mimi runs. It's a program that offers courses and interactive workshops to help people ability safely express their emotions using the platforms of music and art.
Neurology has shown us that music can help us process challenging situations with the feelings and emotions in our hearts as opposed to our minds, so we think music is a powerful and important tool for our community to utilize in trying times, like we experienced in 2020—and all the time.
We’ve done a couple of workshops related to this philosophy already, and as we come out on the other side of the pandemic, we plan to host more events related to emotional health centered on music. That’s a big part of our philosophy and how we hope to contribute to the Fort Wayne community—how we can grow and enrich ourselves, not just as musicians, but as people who enjoy music.
Many of us tend to think about improving our emotional health by going to therapy, and while therapy certainly is important, there’s also evidence that music can be a helpful way to connect some of those dots internally and to improve our emotional health.
I look forward to figuring out how we can innovate in that regard and keep expanding on the underlying philosophy of what we’ve built here.
IFW: What do you see as the future of the music industry?
ST: The emotional health element of music is so important to recognize because we believe the future of music is found in the relationship between the artist and those who enjoy the artist’s music. Notice, I didn’t use the word “fan” here because “fan” is short for “fanatic,” and we’re talking more about anyone who might enjoy the artist’s work even if they are unfamiliar with it.
As a result of the way the world is evolving, due to digitization and most recently, the pandemic, we’re looking to our screens more and more for emotional enrichment, so I think the onus is on the music industry to find ways to enable us to have that enrichment. That’s what we endeavor to accomplish at Silverbirch Studios, and we believe this is an area where we will see further growth in our society.
Learn more
To experience Silverbirch Studios as an artist or music lover, visit their website, follow them on social media @silverbirchstudiosllc, or email Steve Tyler at [email protected] for more information.