Connersville, Indiana: the Foundation Recording Studio era

Connersville's place in Indiana

Connersville sits in Fayette County, Eastern Indiana, about 70 miles east of Indianapolis on the way to Cincinnati. For the broader state-level music history (Hoagy Carmichael, the Jackson 5, John Mellencamp, the modern-metalcore tracking lineage), see the Indiana state location page.

The Foundation Recording Studio

Connersville's place in modern metal sits inside one address: The Foundation Recording Studio, the residential-converted studio Joey Sturgis ran from roughly 2007 through 2014. Bands flew or drove into Indianapolis (about 70 miles away), continued out to Connersville, rented a house in town, and tracked records for two-to-six-week stretches. The remoteness was the point: no day-job pull, no label-rep drop-ins, no LA or Nashville studio politics. Just the band, Sturgis, and the room.

The catalog that came out of The Foundation in those years is the spine of 2008–2014 metalcore: Asking Alexandria's Stand Up and Scream (2009) and Reckless & Relentless (2011), Of Mice & Men's self-titled debut (2010), We Came as Romans's Understanding What We've Grown to Be (2011), The Devil Wears Prada's Dead Throne (2011), Born of Osiris's The Discovery (2011) and Tomorrow We Die ∆live (2013). Sturgis's production identity, hyper-clean drum samples (the seed of the Joey Sturgis Tones / GetGood Drums catalog), tight quad-tracked rhythm guitars, vocal-forward mixes, became the defining 2010s metalcore sound, and the Foundation room is where most of it was tracked.

Why Connersville (and why it ended)

Sturgis's choice of Connersville was practical and ideological. Practical: lower overhead than Nashville or LA, longer session blocks possible at lower budgets, and rural Indiana is full of old industrial buildings convertible to studios. Ideological: the metalcore generation Sturgis was producing didn't want the major-label studio polish; they wanted records that sounded like their own demos but better, and Connersville's distance from the industry mainstream supported that posture.

The Foundation's run wound down in the mid-2010s as Sturgis's commercial focus shifted to plug-ins (Joey Sturgis Tones founded 2012) and software (GetGood Drums co-founded with Adam "Nolly" Getgood). His record-making lane continued from a smaller home studio rather than the Connersville room.

Why this matters to the gear story

The Foundation-era gear lane is well-documented in our Joey Sturgis profile: 7-string Schecter and Music Man guitars (Mark Holcomb, Misha Mansoor lane), Ernie Ball Cobalt 7-string strings, ENGL Powerball amps, Mesa rectifier-family backups, and the proprietary drum-sample chain Sturgis built into Joey Sturgis Tones. For producers chasing the Sturgis 2010-era rhythm-guitar sound: the gauge target is .010-.062 7-string Cobalt at Drop A or Drop G#, quad-tracked, into amp-sim or mic'd Mesa, low-cut around 80 Hz, modest 2-4 kHz boost on the rhythm bus. The Sturgis production identity is in the mix decisions; the room itself was almost incidental.

Beyond The Foundation

Connersville doesn't have a deep music-venue scene; the city's broader cultural identity sits in automotive manufacturing history (Cord, Auburn, McFarlan automobiles in the 1910s-1930s) rather than music. The Sturgis era is the city's contemporary music chapter, and that chapter is essentially a one-studio story.

For producer-adjacent reading: see our profiles on Eyal Levi (Audiohammer Studios, Sanford FL — a parallel rural metal studio of the same era), Adam "Nolly" Getgood (Sturgis's GetGood Drums co-founder), and V. Santura (Bavarian extreme metal lane, Triptykon producer).