Castle Cove

Tucked away in the leafy northern Sydney suburb of Castle Cove, former Split Enz drummer Mal Green has set up his ideal recording facility, Green Sound Music. The studio not only provides a great space to work in, it also sports a stupendously leafy vista, viewable directly from the control room.

The mainstays of the studio are the Soundcraft 6000 48-channel console, and two sets of Roland V-Drums, a setup Mal reckons provides not only the best drum sound any band could require, but also ensures that the drum sounds can be gained within minutes of setting up. While one kit remains in the main recording space, a second V-kit can be used upstairs if the main studio gets a bit overcrowded.

“As a drummer,” engineer/producer Mal Green explains, “I’ve found the best and the most practical way of recording drums was using Roland’s V-Drums. As you know, acoustic drums are a whole other ball game, but having the V-Drums suddenly means not having to worry about 16 channels of mics and all the cabling and outboard that goes with it. It makes it relatively simple really, only needing a couple of channels because of the MIDI aspect. Then once all the drums are ‘captured’, I record them down into individual audio tracks. I’ve just got the new TDW-1 upgrade for it, which has really improved the sensitivity and the dynamics, and also the sounds themselves.” According to Mal, the new sounds sit a lot better in the track.

Mr Green runs the show using a Mac Pro with Apogee converters, Apogee Symphony 32 card, and Cubase 4. He’s also hugely into his pair of Peach pre-amps – hand crafted by the enigmatic Dave Peach of Coogee. For monitoring, Mal’s happy with the slightly less enigmatic Yamaha NS-10s.

GreenSound Studio: 0434 933 794 or www.greensoundmusic.com.au

Alexandria, Sydney

Located upstairs at Studios 301 in Alexandria, Sydney, The Attic was set up as a partnership between Graham Thompson from Compass Brothers Records and Brent Clark in April this year: the concept being to offer access to quality production and mixdown facilities. Brent’s noticed many a project fall down at the last hurdle during mixing, simply because the artist couldn’t afford to do it in a studio with good monitoring and quality gear, or couldn’t afford the studio time necessary, not to mention hiring someone who could do the job well.

The idea was to combine the best of digital and analogue equipment to ensure a great result with no compromise in quality.

The studio has its own overdub booth next door, which is suitable for vocals and acoustic instruments. Obviously there’s a few perks being located in the same premises as 301: such as quality wiring and hot and cold running technical support. For larger sessions Brent can tie into the bigger rooms downstairs and record utilising those spaces, along with access to instruments like the grand piano and Hammond organ.

The outboard list is adequate to say the least, and includes an SPL 16-channel Mix Dream summing mixer, Focusrite and API preamps, the staple compression options such as three Distressors, a pair of dbx 160xs, and an 1176, all tied into a ProTools 8, HD2 Accel system running a bucketload of choice plug-ins, including an SSL Duende Card.

The Attic: 0417 675937 or brent_clark@netspace.net.au

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

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