Tyler Costantino (TyCo, to friends and colleagues) and his PNDA Studios in Haddonfield, New Jersey, are emblematic of how music production has evolved with the rise of social media. The Full Sail University graduate and partner Kate Nece, who does video editing, have ‘traditional music clients’, including several successful singer-songwriters, but much of PNDA’s success is based around TyCo’s understanding of how music and social media intertwine.
He produces and also manages several high-profile influencers – creatives whose talents are often less traditional but no less impactful on a digital landscape. They include Mark Thomas, aka Duhitzmark, who boasts millions of followers and was one of the first and biggest stars on the social media app Musical.ly (later merged with the wildly popular app TikTok), Nashville country/pop artist Dalton Mauldin, and JJ Hannon, whose Instagram account has 1.3m followers. Tyco, knowing the influencer space on all social media platforms, has also used TikTok to market artists for major record labels. Collectively, PNDA’s network of influencers has over 500m followers and has millions of fans on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
TyCo’s studio is appropriately unconventional. A console was kept in place for a while after it was opened nearly five years ago, mainly as a reference point for new clients who might have been expecting a more typical studio environment. But the facility’s design aesthetic and its spare, modernistic vibe reflect how music production has moved into an almost post-technological, software-driven space – the console wasn’t being used, so it was an easy decision to sell it to a more conventional studio space that would put it to great use. But beneath its minimalistic sheen, PNDA Studios is built to let creativity flourish, to let those who work there hear what needs to be heard, just as the best classic studios of the last century were able to. So the console may be gone, but one traditional element of elite studios cannot be sacrificed: reference monitoring.
TyCo first heard Genelec 1031s as a student at Full Sail. ‘I fell in love with them immediately,’ he recalls. ‘When it came time for my first studio, which was more traditional, I went with the 8050s. I stayed with those for eight years.’ For the latest iteration of his workspace, TyCo continued with Genelec, but this time moved on to the 8361A Coaxial Smart Active Studio Monitors – the largest system in Genelec’s The Ones series. And while they offered him the same accuracy and authenticity that Genelec is revered for (as well as Genelec’s Smart Active Monitoring technology and GLM calibration software that adapts itself to the room), this generation of Genelec also satisfied his design-aesthetic needs, with a stark white-and-black motif that perfectly matches the rest of the studio. ‘I literally built this studio around these speakers, both in terms of monitoring and in terms of the look,’ he says. ‘The 8361s give me the sound, the low end, that I need to mix pop and R&B records without the need for a sub. I can turn them up and not lose the sound quality. They’re the perfect speakers for what I do. And they look great.’
More: www.genelec.com
