Production Collective

Remember that office building that used to be a dance hall back in the 50s that I was blogging about acquiring? Well I have recently collaborated with the Exchange District based business Music First to develop a section of this building that was formerly Absurd Machine's production studio and turn it into a collective studio space.

We are currently drafting up a membership plan to serve about 25 members of film makers and musicians. This space is incredibly modular and acoustically modified to capture great recordings and is a great set for visual artists. There is an office section below where the Music First company will claim as their home base to construct cutting edge events that promote community solidarity and myself and Dj Tubescreamer will be the studio managers on the upper level.

The challenge will be filling the empty studio with gear that will maximize the capabilities of the space while still being on budget! The 4 keys members (including myself) that are fronting this project have quite a bit of studio gear already between us, but the major unit that we will need to puchase is a studio mixing board or several preamp channel strips for processing.

We have a couple ideas for the mixing board we will use for the studio:

The main question that all new studio owners face is, "Do we go digital or analog?"

Here are some of the digital products we had in mind:

SSL Nucleus - Is a DAW control interface which has automated fader controls and full parametric sweeping EQ.

Avid C24 - 24 channel mixer with analog inputs optimized for ProTools.

Here are some analog mixer products:

Toft Audio ATB16 - A great vintage analog sounding mix board.

SSL AWS 16 channel mixing board.

We will be pooling our resources in the next month to find the perfect configuration for our new studio. I will keep this blog updated on how the project is rolling out and studio rates when we are up and running. Cheers!