Trivium’s Matt Heafy gives video tour of band’s airplane hangar studio

Five years ago, Florida-based metal band Trivium took profits from a livestreamed concert and made an unusual investment: purchasing a decommissioned airplane hangar. This Orlando facility now serves as the band’s headquarters, providing space for recording, rehearsing, and equipment storage.

Trivium guitarist and vocalist Matt Heafy recently gave Fishman Music a comprehensive tour of the hangar, showcasing how the band has transformed the space into their creative home base.

When asked in a 2020 Rock Sound interview about how one acquires an airplane hangar, Heafy explained:

“We’ve been renting at a pretty sketchy place. Most bands, I think, are in the kind of position that we are that you rehearse somewhere that you don’t love; it’s kind of crappy; you’re paying rent to someone else. Just thinking to ourselves, we don’t wanna be paying rent — we wanna be investing in ourselves and our future, and we’ve always wanted a headquarters where we could do everything. And we’ve talked about the idea of a place where we can rehearse and also store but eventually make records in. And then when we started seeing how much we love livestreaming, it’s a place that we can stream every single thing from — we can stream our tour rehearsals or do special little sets there that are still free on our channels.”

Heafy continued, “I contacted our real estate agent, who helped my wife and I get our house way back, who just helped Paolo [Gregoletto, bass] move. Paolo actually lives nine minutes away from me now, which is amazing — he just left Chicago during the pandemic; he got in a car and he was, like, ‘I’m outta here. I’m [moving] by you guys.’ So we contacted her and we were looking at commercial real estate. I saw a bunch of different places.”

The acquisition turned out to have a family connection.

“I mentioned it to my mother-in-law just in passing, and she was, like, ‘You know who owns one of those?’ Ashley’s uncle,” Heafy explained, referring to his wife. “So I contacted Ashley’s uncle and his son, and I’ve been dealing with his son now. They happen to own multiple of these extra hangars. So it’s buying from my family, which is even better.”

Heafy clarified the size of their facility: “It’s not the size of a commercial plane — it’s not the Iron Maiden-size hangar like that; it’s more modest than that. But it’s good that we’re able to keep it all in the family; we’re actually able to support our family, so Trivium can buy from them.”