As
locations go, ARC
Recording Studio
is a great spot in a
great spot. Wrapped
in the woods just
outside of Hamilton, ON, the studio is
close to the city, the local airport, and all
the necessaries incoming artists could
want.
“We’re about 20 minutes out of the
downtown core on the east side of the
escarpment in the Upper Stoney Creek
Mountain area,” ARC owner/producer Julius
Butty explains about his new space, which
officially opened its doors in August 2018.
Butty has lived in Hamilton his entire
life, and lent his engineering and produc-
tion skills to some landmark Canadian re-
cords over the years. Though he’s perhaps
best known for his collaborations with
heavy music standouts Alexisonfire and
Protest the Hero, the JUNO winner has also
recorded the likes of City and Colour, Hunt-
er Valentine, and many others from a wide
array of styles; however, after closing down
his previous studio, Silo Recording, in 2012,
he stepped away from the industry to focus
on other priorities – namely to provide care
to his ailing mother and to oversee his fam-
ily’s Hamilton-based property management
business.
“My mom was a big influence on me,”
Butty says. “She always encouraged me to
pursue my dreams, which led me into mu-
sic at a pretty early age.”
He initially studied piano through the
Royal Conservatory. At age 12, he started
playing drums, then took up singing and
ultimately ended up touring for about a
decade with his own band, Straight Jakket,
which began as a cover act but was creating
original material in the early 1990s.
ARC
RECORDING
STUDIO
The Best of Both Worlds
By Kevin Young. Photos by Josh Griswold.
26 • PROFESSIONAL SOUND
Although Butty had done some previ-
ous recording, it was working with Gil Moore
and Mark Berry at Mississauga’s Metalworks
Studios with Straight Jakket that gave him
his first taste of recording in a full-on studio
environment, and he was instantly hooked.
“I just started asking questions,” he re-
calls. “It was just, ‘What does this do? How do
you do this?’ I haven’t had any formal training,
so it was that and reading books and just kind
of being around it and experimenting.”
Fast-forward to 2015 and Butty and
his wife, ARC manager Andrea Leslie, de-
cided to get back into the music business.
Their initial plans were relatively modest
and centered around converting a pre-
existing “shed” on their property into a
studio and adding an extension that would
function as a live room.
To be fair, calling the building a shed
is a bit misleading. Given the family’s work