Will Yip Builds His Dream Studio – Part 1

04/08/2026 9

Philadelphia, PA (August 4, 2026)—“To me, Philly is the indie rock music capital of the world,” says Grammy-winning producer and engineer Will Yip. A drummer in the Philadelphia indie scene since age 10, his first professional recording studio experience came just a few years later, and he was immediately hooked. He began recording local bands, got a job then a partnership at the Nicolo brothers’ famed Studio 4, and now Yip has opened his own four-room facility, Memory Music Studios, in South Philadelphia.

Studio 4’s spacious live room houses a Steinway piano plus amplifiers and drums Yip has collected over the years. Photo: A1R Media

Yip pleads his case for Philadelphia’s title: “Mitski, Japanese Breakfast, Lucy Dacus, War on Drugs, Alex G—they all lived in Philly at the same time. And that’s outside the bands I’ve worked with, like the Menzingers, Circa Survives and Tigers Jaw,” he says. Then there are the regional artists with whom he’s collaborated, such as Title Fight, Turnover and Turnstile, with whom he won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album earlier this year for his contributions to their breakthrough full-length, Never Enough.

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When he was 12 or 13, Yip and his bandmate scraped together some money and booked time in a Northeast Philly studio to record two songs. “The second I walked in, I fell in love with the studio,” he says. “I was obsessed with drums, but I was like, ‘No, this is what I want to do. I want to be in the studio; I want to be in the big-picture role.’”

Yip, who says he checks Reverb nightly, has amassed a vast collection of outboard gear, some of it in these racks in Studio 4. Photo: A1R Media

By 14, he was helping run a rehearsal complex. “I would offer to record demos for the bands coming through the rehearsal rooms in my mom’s basement for free; I just wanted the experience,” Yip recalls.

He went to Temple University with a studio career in mind, and because Phil Nicolo of the Butcher Brothers was an adjunct professor there. Phil and his sibling, Joe, producing as The Butcher Brothers, co-owned Studio 4 Recording in Conshohocken and had worked with Cypress Hill, Nine Inch Nails and Anthrax. “I told him, ‘If you ever need a hand with anything, just let me know,’” Yip recalls. “He said, ‘Just show up.’ So I drove up that day, and I didn’t leave Studio 4 for 18 years until I got this studio.”

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Yip started bringing in bands he’d grown up with, including Turnstile, Title Fight and Super Heaven, and in 2013, he bought into the studio. But things started to change.

There are dozens and dozens of electric and acoustic guitars and basses at Memory Music Studios. Photo: A1R Media.

BIRTH OF MEMORY

“In 2016, we did a record for Code Orange, the first time one of our records got nominated for a Grammy,” Yip says. “They signed to a big record deal, and they went on to do their next record at Blackbird [in Nashville]. Studio 4 is the best studio to ever exist in Philly—until now!—but there were no amenities, and bands want to feel special. So even as I was still paying off the loan for Studio 4, I was already dreaming: ‘Man, it would be cool if one day I had a space that was fully mine, customized from the ground up to have everything any rock band that I work with would need, and a place that a band can’t outgrow.’”