Studio Stories

New York’s Avatar Studios — au revoir, but not goodbye.

Originally named One On One Recording, the studio became very famous from the 1970s to the 1990s, with Studio A in particular gaining a reputation for delivering one of the best drum sounds around LA...

As a large multi-room facility, Larrabee Studios remains in demand both by artists and industry professionals, to the point where they are not only holding their ground but are actually expanding.

Mothballed for over three decades and reopened two years ago, Valentine is a time capsule of awe-inspiring completeness, providing us with a clear window into a great era of record-making.

As well as tackling monitoring issues, this month’s Studio SOS visit sees the team making extensive modifications to a leaky vocal booth.

A reader’s home-studio monitoring suffers from a lack of low end and poor stereo imaging. Can the Studio SOS team track down the cause?

This remarkable French studio lay dormant for over a decade before being reborn...

Possibly the oldest independent studio in the world, Vox was built in 1936, and its layout served as the template for the celebrated Gold Star Studios.

The English county of Wiltshire is home to many sites of historical importance, including the stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury. Less ancient, but of much larger significance to the global recording community, is Real World Studios.

Inspired by Norman Petty and Sam Phillips, studio owner Dean Amos has lovingly built a perfect recreation of a 1950s recording environment — right down to the dimensions of the pegboard!

With a floor space of over 500 square metres, spread across three rooms, Grande Armée is among the largest recording studios in the world, and certainly is one of the most spacious in France.

The Studio SOS team put their DIY skills to the test, constructing a new studio desk and optimising a home studio’s acoustics.

Not many recording studios can boast a history more than a century long. And although Emil Berliner Studios are no longer located in their original site, their story is inseparably linked to some major milestones in the history of recording.

A cosy, friendly atmosphere is considered so important at one German studio that it is named House Of Music and Entertainment — or HOME, for short.

When Sound City Studios closed its doors in 2011, it had been a legendary rock & roll recording venue for over 40 years. Now the premises have been taken over by a producer and sound engineer whose aesthetic is even more retro and analogue-based than Sound City’s.

Running a successful multi-room recording facility is challenging at the best of times, and relocating such a studio to a different continent is in an entirely different league of difficulty! This, however, is what Francesco Cameli has done.

Down at the bottom of the garden, among the birds and the bees, we went to Alex Hutchings’ studio, to eliminate some unpleasant frequencies.

After almost two years of construction, overseen by architect Marcelo Tavares, the studio opened in early 2012 in a purpose-built facility, conceived as a multicultural space where people from all over the world can feel inspired.