Studio B Is the Capricorn Room You Can Actually Get Into

Everyone who makes the Capricorn pilgrimage wants to stand in Studio A. Fair enough: the maroon burlap and cedar shingles have been sitting there since 1972, and the list of records born in that room — Marshall Tucker, Wet Willie, the Charlie Daniels Band, the Allman Brothers Band — is basically the syllabus for Southern rock. But Studio A is a working commercial studio that runs $1,200 a day, and unless you've booked a session, the closest you'll get is a tour rope. The room built for the rest of us is next door.

That's Studio B — officially the Phil Walden Memorial Studio — 1,400 square feet of multi-purpose space at Mercer Music at Capricorn, kitted with movable staging, concert-grade sound and lighting, and projection. On paper it's a rental ($800 a day) for orchestras, choirs and film shoots. In practice it's the flexible live room that lets the most storied address in Macon music host something other than nostalgia: a student showcase, a chamber set, an intimate concert under the name of the man who signed Otis Redding's label and built the whole enterprise.

The point of the restored Capricorn was never to embalm the place. Chief engineer Rob Evans has described Studio A's whole philosophy as chasing feel over polish: "It's built to shine when musicians record together as bands, reacting to one another organically to achieve 'feel' and not necessarily 'perfection.'" That ethos — musicians in a room, reacting to each other — is exactly what a live space like Studio B is for.

It's also why Bragg Jam keeps folding Capricorn into its footprint. This year's concert crawl (July 25) parks an all-female guitar pull inside the complex from 4:45 to 6:15 p.m., putting songwriters Ash Tuesday, CC Witt, Julia Barfield and Sam Stephens in the building where the modern Macon sound was engineered. You could not draw up a tidier handoff between eras: the room that recorded the legends, now amplifying who's next.

There's a business logic under the sentiment. When Capricorn reopened in 2019 after years dark, it came back as a hybrid — a museum and archive up front, functioning studios and a music-business incubator behind, all wrapped into Mercer University. That model only works if the building keeps earning. A memorial live room that can flip from a $75-an-hour podcast session on Tuesday to a concert-grade stage on Saturday is how a heritage building pays its own light bill in 2026 without freezing into a wax museum. The console downstairs still tracks new records — Marcus King, Brent Cobb and Eddie 9V have all cut here lately — while Studio B keeps the doors open to the public. Preservation and paying the bills, in one address.

So here's the move for the curious visitor: do the museum, absolutely — see the console, the burlap, the ghosts. But keep an eye on the calendar for whatever lands in Studio B, because that's where you'll actually hear something, in the room named for the man who bet on Macon and won.

Feel over perfection. Forty-some years later, the building still runs on it.

Sources: Mercer Music at Capricorn — Sound Studios; Bragg Jam Concert Crawl returns to where it began