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.

Mudhut Studio: www.mudhutstudio.com