Studio Feature – Spark1 Studios

Sunshine Coast – Queensland

Mark ‘Sparky’ Paltridge isn’t someone fortunate enough to own his own home, but lucky enough to own his own studio. Mark managed this feat by building a complete recording studio within an old refrigerated 20-foot shipping container about four years ago, with the interior being designed by acoustics luminary, John Sayers. He primarily built it within a container, not only because he needed a space that inspired musicians and allow him to capture great sounds to hard drive, but also so he could pick it up and land it at the next house he rented – priorities prevail!

Mark now has a number of albums under his belt, primarily by Sunshine Coast artists, with nearly all clients recording their following albums and projects with him for the second time around.

Recently Mark enlisted Mr. Sayers to design a dedicated tracking room, again within a shipping container. Construction was completed a couple of months ago, with extremely encouraging results; one of the reasons behind the success being John’s slot resonator designs (basically Helmholtz resonators). These correct most of the low-mid problems one tends to find within a square room, or indeed most untreated rooms. The resonators are specifically designed for the room’s dimensions, and every resonator has been built and routed to particular specifications.

Now that tracking takes place in the new room, (via a multicore and video link), Mark finds he’s no longer using the original container’s vocal booth. He’s now in the initial stages of designing a dedicated control room, (again through John and within another hi-cube container), with the intention of selling his original container. The complete studio container is up for sale with all the tie-lines intact (no gear), and the entire air conditioning system. Mark reckons, maybe one day he may even get a house for himself, within which he might just build a permanent studio. Now there’s a concept!

Contact Mark via www.spark1studios.com or 0416 262 319

Studio Feature – Mudhut Studios

Gold Coast, Queensland

Astra Merchant, owner of Mudhut Studios on the Gold Coast, has a background in multimedia and film production, but for now she’s kept the stunning, fledgling studio solely focused on music. Merchant commissioned Greg Hooke to design the studio to be flexible. The roof of the main recording room houses baffles wired to a manual pulley system. Each baffle can be rotated on axis to change the acoustic characteristics of the room. So if you’ve set up the drum kit and find the sound just isn’t right, a few tugs on some pulleys may give you what you’re after. “All the baffles are individually wound and we can either give the room a live or a dead sound. There aren’t very many studios that allow you to change the roof baffles. Ours is more personalised and can be unique to the specific sound the client is trying to chase,” explains Merchant. As to the basic sound of the room, she says it’s pretty dead: “There’s a lot of kiln-dried sand in the walls. We also investigated the green glue and other techniques like putting wheat in the wall. We preferred the sand because it’s a lot denser and you can get a deader sound from the room. There’s also a lot of acoustic treatment behind the fabric on the walls to deaden the sound. We just wanted to make a really dead room that would record drums well.” As with most studios nowadays, there’s a mix of digital and analogue gear, centred on a Digidesign D Command console and ProTools HD3 system with an AMS Neve 8816 for 16-channel analogue summing. On the way in, there are eight channels of AMS Neve 1073 preamps and eight 1084s, as well as a total of 32 Focusrite pres. There’s also a bunch of Crane Song compressors if you can’t find something suitable in the Waves Diamond plug-in pack. Microphones include AKG 414s and a Neumann U87. There are three sets of monitors including a pair of Focal SM11s (with matching sub), a pair of Dynaudio BM6As and a surround setup of Adam P11As and the S10 sub, suggesting Merchant may be planning to get back to her roots at some stage.

www.mudhutstudio.com

Studio Feature – Alchemix

Woolloongabba, Queensland

The original Alchemix Studios kicked off proceedings in 1998 before decamping to Woolloongabba, QLD in July 2004. Since that time the studio has accommodated a number of creative styles, all under the steady hand of Marly Lüske. The studio also acts as an art gallery, which then doubles as a boutique live recording space for underground experimental artists, jazz groups, and classical ensembles.

The studio is made up of two main control rooms, connected to no less than five unique recording environments. The studio runs a Digidesign HD2 Accel ProTools system with 32 channels of Lynx I/O, and also houses a very useful variety of analogue equipment including compression, EQ and preamps. Finally, to augment the ProTools HD environment, Alchemix also runs Universal Audio UAD2 cards along with an external SSL Duende plug-in rack. Custom gear and mods are built in-house by Joe Malone of JLM Audio – who also happens to share a section of the same complex – nice for some!

Alchemix gear highlights include three 1176 compressors and a large amount of JLM gear in the main studio: including TG, 99v and Neve Dual preamps. There’s also a JLM lunchbox in Studio B. The main console is a modified Yamaha PM2000, and yes, you guessed it, Joe Malone did the mods. The desk also includes a few different op amp designs for its bus section, which outputs to two-track tape for projects that suit the traditional console mixdown. An SSL JLM mod rack also helps glue final mixes together before being dispatched to mastering engineer, Dave Neil.

The slanted four- to six-metre high ceiling in the live room leaves plenty of air around the baby grand piano, and there are options galore in the vintage amp and synth departments. There’s also a purpose-built, heavily insulated drum room that is used in different ways depending on the project. Using the live room as a reverb chamber with random mics running through 1176 compression (all buttons in) is also a favourite pastime of the in-house producers, Matt Whitehouse and Tim Baker.  Brad Watts.

Contact Marly Lüske at Alchemix on (07) 3391 2814 or www.alchemix.com.au

Studio Feature – The Production Workshop

Melbourne

There must have been thousands of albums recorded, mixed or mastered at the Production Workshop by David Briggs over the last 29 years. Situated not too far from Melbourne’s Victoria Market, David’s setup has always included a host of analogue gear, including several Neumann U47 mics and Neve preamps, a grand piano and cutting-edge digital equipment, all crammed into his Queensberry St terrace house.

David and his studio are inseparable. There would hardly be a recording musician in Melbourne who hasn’t worked with him at some point. He’s one of Australia’s most knowledgeable engineer/producers, with a room full of Gold and Platinum records awarded for everything from production of the iconic Australian Crawl album, Boy’s Light Up, to the platinum-awarded US release of The Little River Band’s, First Under the Wire. This album included the hit, The Lonesome Loser, which David wrote while playing lead guitar in the band. He even earned a Grammy nomination for said hit.

David is always happy to share his knowledge on any audio-related topic no matter how esoteric it might seem. If you want to know something about acoustics, production and mixing techniques, downsampling mathematics, touring in the US, ProTools, plug-ins… you name it, ‘Briggsy’ will have something informed to say about it. From a personal perspective, there has never been a visit to the Production Workshop where I didn’t walk away more enlightened about audio than when I stumbled in.

The Production Workshop remained virtually unchanged for a couple of decades. Things that were seemingly placed randomly in the corner 15 years ago, occupy the exact same space as they always did – until now that is. Finally, after much deliberation, David has completed construction of a new upstairs mastering room that he’s designed himself using his expansive knowledge of acoustics. Behind the raw hessian walls of this modestly proportioned listening room – hey, it’s a terrace house – are several acoustic treatments designed to ‘flatten’ the room response and reveal the ‘truth’ behind the audio. Centred on a ProTools HD3 rig, the new room caters exclusively to mixing and mastering duties, all within the digital domain – Andy Stewart.

Contact David Briggs at The Production Workshop on: (03) 9328 3085 or www.productionworkshop.com.au

Studio Feature – Soundpark Studios

Northcote

The quietly spoken ‘Idge’ (Andrew Hehir) of Soundpark studios in Melbourne has a popular (and remarkably cheap) studio in the leafy suburb of Northcote. Up on the hill looking down over the inner city, Northcote is where many of Melbourne’s musicians fled to in the late ’90s after they’d been chased out of Fitzroy by the latté-sipping, convertible-driving yuppies that complained to Council (the moment they arrived) about the noise from the pub next door. You can’t make 200% profit in 12 months from the purchase of land, you see, if those pesky musicians are still hanging around…

Idge’s Soundpark studios opened for business about seven years ago now, predominantly as a rehearsal space, and it’s been growing in popularity ever since. Constructed inside a saw-toothed warehouse, the main recording space is high (5m at its peak) and brightly lit with skylights. Three booths adjoin the main tracking room, one of which is big enough to house drums and the other two mainly for acoustic guitars and amp isolation.

As Idge describes it: “The place is built out of stuff I grabbed from skips mostly. I did buy some bits and pieces towards the end, like the acoustic insulation for the walls [to protect the recording space from the rehearsal rooms down the hall] but the joint was built on a shoestring. I hire it out about 50% of the time to other engineers these days, but the rest of the tracking is done by me.”

One thing that can’t have been built on a shoestring is Soundpark’s gear list, which is impressive for the $350-a-day asking price (without engineer). Preamps include Neve 1272s and 33115s, as well as Telefunken, API, Ampex and Giles preamps. Mics include a large collection of Coles, Royer and RCA ribbon mics (many of them vintage) as well as a Neumann M149 and U87, AKG 414s, Beyers, and Sennheisers, rounded out with a large collection of Shure dynamics. The whole place is tied together with a Toft console and ProTools HD. – Ed.

Soundpark Studios: (03) 9481 3318.

Studio Feature – Atlas Worx

Surry Hills, Sydney.

Another member of Sydney’s Surry Hills’ studio brethren is Atlas Worx. Established in 1998 and steered by the perpetually steady hand of Mr Ian Gordon, Atlas Worx specialises in multitrack audio production for the exceedingly colourful Sydney Mardi Gras and Sleaze Balls, Fashion Week, Sydney NYE Governor’s Ball, as well as countless corporate functions, night club presentations, and television commercials. In between, Ian tackles remixes and single releases for music monoliths, Virgin EMI, BMG, Warner Bros and Sony.

Ian recently revamped the entire rig, turfing out the ageing dual-G4 Macs and replacing them with an eight-core MacPro running ProTools 8, and a 2.3GHz G5 running ProTools 7.4 – both systems utilise Digidesign 002R interfaces. Ian’s been quite gob-smacked by how much quieter the new machines are, and attests that it took him about a week in Target Mode to transfer all his sound libraries over to serial ATA drives (21 of them in all). His most active equipment includes a Mackie LM3204 line mixer, Behringer B Control surface, two Samsung 22-inch monitors and a central Samsung 37-inch HD monitor, various synths and modules by Roland, Kurzweil and Yamaha. Monitoring is via Tannoy, JBL, and domestic Technics speakers, and a custom DIY ‘artillery array’ for that ‘PA experience’. Mics in use include Behringer, Shure, and Sennheiser.

As you’ll see from the picture, Ian’s favoured colour scheme is black, underpinned with black highlights and accented with further shades of black – spend any amount of time in the Atlas Works arena and you’ll quickly forget what time it is in the outside world.

Atlas Worx: (02) 9280 1424