While most people know Sweetwater is the premier retailer of professional audio and musical instrument gear in America, our campus is also home to Sweetwater Studios, a 3-room facility designed to accommodate a wide range of projects and clients.
When the current Sweetwater Studios facility was built in 2008, it was primarily focused on corporate clients, including the creation of commercial music and voice-overs for local and national companies. When award-winning producer/engineer Mark Hornsby joined Sweetwater Studios in 2012 as Director of Music Production and Artist Relations, he wanted to expand the services available through Sweetwater Studios. “When I came on board, the mission was to extend the Sweetwater experience to the studios by making it a destination for artists and musicians across all genres of music.”
When the Russ Berger-designed rooms that are home to Sweetwater Studios opened in 2008 as part of Sweetwater’s new headquarters, Studio A had a Digidesign (now Avid D-Control) in Studio A. The D-control was replaced with a setup designed not only to accommodate “all the needs of recording artists,” but also to suit the preferred workflows of the studio staff. Hornsby explains, “Everybody has different preferences. I grew up working on consoles and still have an affinity for that. Some younger members of our team have grown up just using Pro Tools and pieces of analog outboard gear — if you want this sound on the kick, use a tube preamp here or a FET compressor there. That’s a different preference. Some people like mixing in the analog domain. Some people like just working completely in Pro Tools. That’s also true of our retail customers. So when the new Avid S6 control surface came out, we talked about how to incorporate the new technology into a room that can fit the preferences of 90% of the people that walk into it.”
The result of those conversations is Studio A’s custom hybrid console. Housed in a 15-foot-long Sterling desk is an Avid S6 control surface, two Rupert Neve Designs 5059 Satellite summing mixers, and a Portico II Master Bus Processor, as well as 36 channels of Rupert Neve Designs Shelford series modules – 27 Shelford 5052 mic pre/EQs and nine Shelford 5051 EQ/Compressors. The Shelford series uses circuits from Rupert Neve’s classic modules as well as the best of his current designs. “The Shelfords are wonderful preamps with a broad range of flexible features,” says Hornsby. “In Studio A, they’re wired to be used either as a front end to Pro Tools or as 36 channels of processing.” In other words, the Rupert Neve Designs modules fulfill the role of an analog console’s channel strip when both tracking and mixing. “If you want to mix in Pro Tools and use the 36 channels of Neve EQs as inserts, you can do that,” says Hornsby, “or put the EQs of the Neves on the inserts of the summing — take your pick.”
The console’s analog processing is a combination of high-end tube and solid-state gear: an API 500V and Purple Audio Sweet Ten 500 series racks are filled with two API 512c mic preamps, two API 527 compressor/limiters, two API 550A 3-band EQs, two API 525 compressors, two Solid State Logic 611EQs, two Chandler TG2-500s, two Millennia HV-35 preamps, two Focusrite One preamps, two Shadow Hills Gama preamps, and a Shadow Hills Dual Vandergraph stereo compressor. A Manley ELOP+, a Massive Passive, and Variable Mu processors are also in the racks.
More processing is housed in two detachable sidecars that allow the gear in them to be used in our other studios; the left sidecar contains nine of the Shelford 5051 EQ/Compressors, plus a pair of UA 1176LNs, a UA LA-2A, an API 2500 bus compressor, and an SSL XLogic G Series Compressor. The right sidecar contains nine of the Shelford 5052 mic pre/EQs, a pair of Daking Mic Pre/EQs, a Focusrite ISA430 MkII Producer Pack, a Universal Audio 4-710d with four channels of preamps, and two PreSonus ADL700 channel strips.
Avid’s S6 control surface bridges the gap between engineers who are most comfortable working with faders and those who are happiest with a mouse or a trackball. “The S6 is a very powerful, very fun-to-use work surface, all the way down to the meters where you see the waveforms moving in real time. It also banks extremely fast, making navigation of large sessions a breeze.” The customizable S6 control surface spec’d for Studio A sports 24 faders, nine rotary knobs per channel strip, and the touchscreen master section.
Monitor control in Studio A — and all the rooms in the Sweetwater Studios — is handled with a Dangerous Monitor ST controller that feeds a 2.1 ATC 150 array for the main monitors. “I’ve always been a huge ATC fan,” Hornsby stated. “The midrange is phenomenal. With the sub, we have it dialed in to be a full-range monitoring system.” The Dangerous Monitor ST also feeds a pair of Focal SM9s.
The Sweetwater Studios serve a role beyond that of a typical for-hire studio. “In the studios, we do everything,” says Hornsby. “We work with everyone from Grammy Award–winning artists to local singer/songwriters,” but since the main business of Sweetwater Sound is sales, the studios also serve as a resource for Sweetwater’s Sales Engineers. “Our Sales Engineers have the opportunity to come into our studios to ask questions about gear and to see the gear in use,” says Hornsby. “In that situation, we are educating our sales team, who in turn are educating customers.” Studio A can even be used as part of Sweetwater’s twice-a-week sales meetings, since live sessions in the studio can be piped into Sweetwater’s Performance Theatre as part of a presentation. Because the theatre and Studio A are interconnected, the theatre can be used as a recording space for ensembles too large to fit in Studio A’s tracking room.
Studio A also hosts regular workshops for Sweetwater customers — including master recording classes, Pro Tools classes, and songwriting classes — in addition to its recording sessions. Hornsby notes, “We actively seek out educational opportunities for our customers, so it’s a win-win for everyone. We can share our knowledge, and the workshop attendees can improve the quality of their productions.”
If you’d like to know more about Sweetwater Studios or book time to record your next project, call us at (800) 386-6434.
Read more about Sweetwater Studios here.