Elevation Studios Breaks Ground On Massive Production, Rehearsal Campus In Nashville

Elevation Studios
Courtesy Elevation Studios – Elevation Studios
An artists rendering of Elevation Studios

Elevation Studios is breaking ground on a $100 million tour production campus just outside of Nashville that will provide soundstages, workshops, rehearsal studios and creative spaces and more, designed to accommodate an expected boom of opportunities in the post-pandemic live entertainment world.

The 26-acre campus will include rehearsal spaces, office and conference rooms, and fabrication workshops all equipped with everything from HD broadcast fiber connectivity to luxury amenities. 
“The endeavor’s ambition reflects the scale of the opportunities coming with the next wave of live performance growth,” Elevation Studios states. “The industry is poised for a boom generated by pent-up demand.”
Elevation Studios’ multipurpose, creative campus will deliver large-scale facilities and support services for creators of live entertainment, touring productions, broadcasting and new media content including livestreaming. It is to be a one-stop campus for touring productions to rehearse, test and establish redundancy protocols for sound, lighting and video systems as well as to establish engineering and safety procedures for tours from 50 to 150 crew members.
In addition to production support, there’s room for tours to rehearse while systems that might be flying thousands of pounds of equipment over audiences are thoroughly tested.
Eric Elwell, Elevation Studios founder and CEO, and his team have worked with artists including  Kanye West, One Republic, Guns N’ Roses, Backstreet Boys, Prince, Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Sugarland, Sara Bareilles, Vince Gill and Amy Grant. Elevation has also worked with Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits festivals as well as the CMA Awards, among others. 
“Artists are earning the majority of their revenue from concert touring,” Elwell explains. “The cadence of these tours has broken away from album release cycles, as many musicians and creators put out new material constantly. Meanwhile, the design, complexity, and expense have dramatically increased. 
Eric Elwell
Courtesy Elevation Studios – Eric Elwell
Founder and CEO of Elevation Studios
“You need the time you need, if you’re going to push the envelope of creativity,” Elwell adds “If your artist will be flying in a harness 100 feet in the air, you need a place to work this out with safety protocols for the artist, their team, and, equally important, their fans. Custom-design elements are the norm, and must be made safe and reliable before being subjected to ‘zero-fail’ conditions. Elevation will be that testing ground. Creative visionaries pushing the boundaries of art and science need a creative sandbox.” 
Alan K. Floyd, who tour-managed the “OTR II” tour with Beyoncé and Jay-Z, agrees that the need for top-level tour rehearsal space is critical. 
“In my 20+ year history of touring with Beyonce´ as well as other top entertainment clients, the execution of pre-tour rehearsals was one of the largest challenges we faced due to the limited availability of large-scale facilities,” Floyd says in a statement. “Elevation Studios will provide the scale and needed support, all in a private retreat-like setting. This is a long-overdue solution to the creative needs of hundreds of touring artists.” 
As livestreaming came into its own as a viable revenue source in 2020 and is likely to be incorporated going forward as an ancillary stream to live concerts, Elevation Studios is poised to capture that market as well.
With multiple large-scale soundstages and a natural, green campus, Elevation’s proximity to Nashville and its team of skilled music professionals as well as state of the art equipment, Elevation Studios is expected to provide not just the technical wizardry but creative production spectacle for high-end livestreaming and support for the rebirth of live events.