About Peak Recording

Peak Recording was established in 1981 in a rented house in Bozeman, Montana.
Since then, we’ve grown up and moved into our own place, designed and built as a professional studio.

We’re a “one-room” facility, which means that when you’re recording at Peak, the studio is all yours, and your privacy is assured.

Peak features, in addition to the main studio, an isolation room, and the control room is designed to accommodate a musician or two to serve as a second “iso” space.  Our lounge is also wired to be capable of housing an instrument amp, in effect turning it into a third “iso” space.

We’ve recorded classical, jazz, rock, country, blue-grass, hip-hop, you name it! And, of course, plenty of voice recording, including numerous audio books and podcasts.

Although when we started out we were all-analog, Peak is now primarily digitally-based.  Like most studios these days, we record to software on the computer. This allows us tremendous editing capabilities, as well as the ability to interface easily with other studios.  And while we do many productions entirely “in the box”, generally we utilize a hybrid approach to mixing music.  While the recording is digital, we’ll come out of the computer and into our Neve summing mixer, and mix in the analog domain. There’s something about analog mixing that can “glue” a mix together nicely, and Neve is one of the top names in analog.  The Neve mixer also allows us to effortlessly recall mixes, making it fast and easy to do the inevitable little “tweaks” that most great mixes eventually entail. We also do voice recording and have phone patch and Zoom capability, which enables us to connect to facilities around the world.  When NPR or National Geographic need to get a local author or scientist recorded, they call Peak.

We do soundtrack editing and mixing for film and video, and we’ve done ADR for TV shows like “NCIS” and “Law & Order SVU”, movies such as “The Giver”, “The Waterboy”, and “A River Runs Through It”, as well as major Hollywood studios like Dreamworks.  We’ve hosted actors such as Peter Fonda, Glenn Close, William Devane, Andie MacDowell, and Melissa McCarthy, among many others, here at Peak.  Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams of NBC News have also done work here.

While Peak is primarily a recording studio, we do get out now and then for a remote recording.  We recorded the Bozeman Symphony, including many world-renowned soloists, live for many years.

In 2020, during the pandemic quarantine, we updated the acoustic treatment in our control room; adding more bass trapping, a new wide-band absorber on the back wall, and a ceiling cloud over the mix position. This turned it from a good mix room to a great mix room. When a mix sounds good on our big EV main monitors, you can trust that it’ll sound good just about everywhere.

Finally, for those musicians who have their own recording gear, there are still ways of working with Peak to make the most of your project.  Some choose to utilize our great mics, preamps, and room to record their drum tracks, take them home for overdubs, and then return to Peak for a more polished mix than they can get at home.  Or, they may come in to take advantage of our beautiful Yamaha grand piano.  And, more than once, we’ve exported tracks from small digital multi-track recorders to mix with our much more capable system and room.  These are only a few of the ways you can use Peak Recording to enhance your project and still keep your costs down by doing some things yourself.

If you need it recorded, if you need it done right the first time, you need Peak!

Gil Stober, Peak’s resident engineer/producer, started the studio in 1981.  He began his professional career as a television engineer, and gravitated toward audio, building and maintaining numerous audio rooms and systems.

As an audio engineer/producer, Gil has received Emmy nominations every time he has submitted his work to the Emmys. He’s recorded, mixed, mastered, or otherwise had a hand in thousands of recordings in almost every genre of music as well as voice recording for TV, film, radio, and other media.

Gil is renowned for his “ear” – the ability to spot a tonal inconsistency, bad note, noise, or anything else that can detract from your recording.  You can’t fix it if you can’t hear it.
Peak Recording clients say that you won’t find a more patient, professional, and honest engineer/producer.  He cares about your project and wants you to succeed.