John Storyk’s career began with one of the most legendary commissions in music history: at age 22, fresh out of Princeton, he was hired to design Electric Lady Studios for Jimi Hendrix. More than five decades and 3,500 studio designs later, Storyk remains the world’s preeminent acoustic architect — and his connection to Upstate New York runs deeper than most realize.
Electric Lady
In 1968, Hendrix’s management hired the young Storyk to convert a Greenwich Village nightclub into what would become the first artist-owned professional recording studio in the world. Storyk’s design for Electric Lady Studios — completed in 1970, with its curved walls, dramatic lighting, and rejection of the sterile institutional aesthetic that dominated studio design — was revolutionary. It felt like a club, not a laboratory. Hendrix died just weeks after the studio opened, but Electric Lady endured, becoming the recording home for artists from Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder to Adele and Daft Punk.
WSDG and Global Reach
Storyk co-founded the Walters-Storyk Design Group (WSDG) in 1987 with his wife Beth Walters. The firm has designed over 3,500 audio and video facilities worldwide, with offices in 13 cities including New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Beijing. Notable projects include Alicia Keys’s Jungle City Studios (a TEC Award winner), The Church Studios renovation for Paul Epworth in London, and facilities at Berklee College of Music, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and MGM Music Hall at Fenway. Private studios for Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen, Jay-Z, and Bob Marley bear WSDG’s imprint.
Upstate Connection
Storyk’s ties to Upstate New York run long and wide: the legendary Allaire Studios in Shokan, recording facilities at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, past service as chair of the Walkway Over the Hudson board, and his design of The Mark screening room at Upstate Films’ Orpheum Theater in Saugerties — the latter completed 54 years after Electric Lady. In 2024, he appeared at the venue for a screening of the documentary Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision, alongside original Hendrix engineer Eddie Kramer. Storyk’s influence on how music sounds — the rooms it’s made in, the spaces it’s performed in — is global, but his roots in the Hudson Valley give Upstate New York a quiet claim to one of the most important figures in recording history.