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Even after seeing the small sign for Suma Recording Studio on Vrooman Road in Leroy Township, you’re still not completely convinced you’re in the right spot as you roll up a long, unpaved drive toward what appears to be a country manor.
But, yes, just a couple of minutes off Interstate 90 in eastern Lake County lies what one employee calls “a hidden gem,” a place that over the years has served as a serene environment for musicians, many of them from Northeast Ohio, to foster and capture their creativity.
“I’ve got 14 acres in the woods, and we’ve got a Metropark right next door,” says Suma owner Michael Seifert, referring to Lake Metroparks’ Indian Point Park. “It’s definitely a really different environment than being in the city, which is where my studios have always been in the past and the studios I’ve worked at have been, too.”
A composer, producer and audio engineer, Seifert for the last few years has owned Suma — the history of which dates back decades, to the original name Cleveland Recording Company and to a couple of locations before this longtime home — which on this night in late April is hosting an unusual musical experience.
He grew up in a place like it, Great Tracks, the studio his dad, Bruce Seifert, built in the late 1970s east of downtown Cleveland.
“I was sitting behind the console by the time I was in preschool and kindergarten,” the younger Seifert says.
And if you’re wondering, his dad didn’t exactly have to drag him to work with him.
“Oh, no,” says Seifert, who lives in Willoughby. “You couldn’t keep me out of the studio.”
He was raised around notable Northeast Ohio musical names such as Trent Reznor, who worked as a session musician in his pre-Nine Inch Nails days, Gerald Levert, the guys from the Cleveland band Beau Coup and longtime Kiss drummer Eric Singer.
“That’s my education,” says Seifert, who briefly attended Cleveland State University.
(He says he also explored going to a New York college to enroll in a program tailored to this line of work, but his entrance interview suggested he needn’t bother. “The guy asked me if I had any previous experience. I told him what I was doing, and he literally leaned over the desk and said, ‘Why are you going to school for this?’ Seifert recalls with a laugh.)
He’s spent years in the business, traveling out of town when necessary but also running his own studios in Cleveland, the previous one being Ante Up Audio.’ He’s worked multiple times with the nationally known Cleveland hip-hop act Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, as evidenced by the plaques connected to the group’s recordings that are among the many mementos and knick-knacks found around Suma.
Not long after moving that studio to a new location in 2016, he learned that, to help cover the medical expenses of since-deceased Suma owner Paul Hamann — whose late father, Ken, had purchased the business many years earlier from original owner Frederick C. Wolf — the family was looking to sell off some of Suma’s assets, including its gorgeous Steinway grand piano. This didn’t sit well with Seifert, even if he’d been out to Suma only a handful of times — including with a client who loved said piano, he says.
“I just kind of said, ‘Is there any way to maybe, like, talk to them and have them hit pause long enough to see if something could be done?’” he says. “This is kind of a crazy place — stuck in time. And I had heard stories about the place, and my dad had been out here over the years.
“I didn’t have a lot of history with it, but I knew it was an important place.”
He was able to sell Ante Up and buy Suma in the late 2010s and set about renovating and remodeling what, he says, was built as a summer home in the 1920s, much of the work taking place during the pandemic.
“Knew it would be a huge undertaking,” he says. “It’s been even bigger.”
Work included waterproofing and woodworking, with a desire to maintain a vintage feel.
“We weathered it ourselves,” he says of “battered” examples of fresh woodwork, “and, you know, had people hitting it with axes and chains and wire brushes.”
It all seems designed to make musicians feel at home, with a lounge area complete with an upright piano and, perhaps more importantly, a small kitchen and three bedrooms. If you choose to travel to Suma to make your music, the option of staying is part of the contract.
“Everybody keeps saying, ‘You’ve got to charge something,’” Seifert says. “But right now … we’re trying to keep the budget low enough that people can actually make records. People can’t sell records like you used to. Obviously, there’s vinyl, but sales (overall) are minuscule compared to what they were.”
The costs involved with the making of music are front of mind for Seifert and help to explain the event series “Suma Sessions,” a new spin on crowdfunding that takes place during actual recording time.
“We’re funding recording projects by having an audience come into the studio,” he says. “It’s, like, 50 or 75 bucks for a ticket, but it’s funding the actual recording project — not just the night of the capture, but it funds the editing and the mixing and the mastering, as long as (an artist) doesn’t want to do a bunch of overdubs or something.”
Most recently, just 10 days earlier, the studio hosted a Suma Session featuring Alex Bevan, a singer-songwriter and a longtime figure in Northeast Ohio’s music scene.
The event on this night, the Northeast Ohio Pro Jam, is not part of the series. However, the mechanics of this jazzy jam night featuring alumni of the Berklee College of Music is logistically similar. Even though the audience is seated just a few feet from musicians including keyboardist Mars Quiroz on the Steinway, attendees use over-the-ear headphones — complete with individual volume controls — to hear all the musicians, including drummer Jim Wall and vocalist Sara Remington each of whom is isolated in a room to either side of the remaining ensemble.
It does sound full and rich, the second song of the evening boosted by the addition of Remington’s voice.
While Seifert serves as the master of ceremonies, introducing the show and helping an audience member with his headphones, his “right-hand guy,” producer and engineer David Alan Shaw, works the knobs and sliders in the control room.
“It’s happening right in front of you, like a show, but it sounds like a record already because Dave’s in there mixing it,” Seifert says in an interview shortly before the event, as soundchecks and the sounds of guests coming in and out of spaces fills the air.
The next Suma Session is scheduled for July 11, but details are still to come.
“We’re going to be announcing half a dozen or more Suma Sessions events,” Seifert says. “Hopefully, it will start being something where we’re booked, like, a year in advance so we can actually release a calendar of events for the year.”
Given everything he’s done with Suma, it’s hardly surprising to hear him say he and Shaw would rather help musicians find the right tones “on the front end” rather than rely on a “fix-it-in-the-mix” approach.
That said, they’re flexible.
“Obviously, you can do a lot with technology on a laptop these days, and there’s no denying that,” Seifert says. “It’s great technology, and I use that technology and Dave uses that technology, and we work with a lot of clients that do hybrid things.”
It’s all part of a vision for an operation that goes beyond recording and, perhaps, fills a void in the area.
“I was out of town all the time to do the work that my clients wanted to do,” he says. “I wanted a place like that in Cleveland, and I feel like (this is) is kind of one of those places, one of those options now.”
Speaking shortly before sitting at the drums, Wall says he’s been a longtime fan of Suma.
“This room has always had an amazing vibe,” he says. “You know, you go into a room sometimes and you just feel that cool things have happened there.”
Suma Recording Studio is at 5706 Vrooman Road. Learn about upcoming events, visit sumarecording.com/events or facebook.com/sumarecordingstudio.
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