STUDIO A’S OUTBOARD OFFERINGS
STUDIO A ISO BOOTH
Sarah McLachlan and Nickelback, to get some input on tailoring the
space to their needs.
“He was basically trying to talk me out of it,” Owen recalls about
his initial conversation with Potter, laughing. “He said he wasn’t inter-
ested in working on hobby studios, so I asked him how big it needed
to be for him to come onboard.”
Potter flew over to take a look, and shortly after their first meet-
ing, they were digging a massive hole at the far east of the house to
build a dedicated live room. “Every time there was a decision to be
made, we’d basically go and up the ante,” Owen shares.
When it came time to outfit the overhauled house and fresh-
ly-constructed live room with its complement of recording equip-
ment, Owen and his team at the time sourced a slew of gear through
Canadian media technologies reseller Annex Pro and spared little
expense. That included a Digidesign Icon D-Control as the focal point
of Studio A’s control room.
OCL Studios officially opened for business in 2012 and made
quite an impact on the recording scene in Alberta and, really, the
western half of the country. Owen had hired two full-time staffers – a
studio manager and engineer – as permanent fixtures while he over-
saw operations from a short distance and continued his work in the
asbestos removal business.
Over the next couple of years, OCL would attract its share of
clients – big names and budding talents alike – along with a good
amount of media attention, though Owen admits they were still learn-
ing on the fly and subsequently encountered their share of challenges.
One of those was the realization that the digital console anchor-
ing their main studio wasn’t the ideal solution. As he told a National
Music Centre interviewer back in 2015, “We have this beautifully de-
signed and tuned room. It’s an analog and honest room, and here was
a digital board. I thought, ‘We made a mistake. What should we do?’”
His answer, as it turns out, was to fly down to Nashville with Pot-
ter and purchase an AMS Neve 88R analog console. After the board
arrived at its new home, OCL paused operations for several months in
order to overhaul Studio A’s physical layout and signal flow to accom-
modate its new centrepiece.
That downtime coincided with a staff shuffle, and when OCL
was back to running at full steam in 2014, mixer Spencer Cheyne and
engineer Josh Gwilliam were the new full-timers at the studio and are
still piloting sessions there to this day, with studio manager Megan
Owen rounding out the dedicated staff.
“Looking back, it feels like just a series of happy accidents that
brought us here, and I have no regrets,” Owen says. “I’m really happy with
where we are right now, and things are definitely falling into place.”
In its current iteration, OCL Studios is comprised of two studio spaces,
the larger Studio A and complementary Studio B, along with a large
multi-purpose room simply dubbed “The Hall” that can host every-
thing from rehearsals to live performances to corporate or private
events and even act as an extension of Studio A, with patch bays
and tie lines installed to link the spaces. It’s also where one of the
most prized pieces of Owen’s memorabilia collection is kept: a giant
stained-glass window depicting The Beatles in their Sgt. Pepper garb
that Owen picked up when the Hard Rock Café in Calgary’s Eau Claire
area closed its doors.
Studio A is OCL’s main tracking space with a control room, live
room, and three iso booths – two off of the live room with clear sight-
lines between them and one off of the control room. In addition to
the Neve desk, the Studio A control room boasts a set of custom-
installed ATC SCM200ASL monitors with Bryston amplification and a
complement of sought-after outboard gear.
Studio B was designed to be “plug-and-play” for guest artists
and, more specifically, guest engineers or producers. It features a
separate iso booth to the rear of the main control room. While it for-
merly housed the re-assigned Icon D-Control console, it’s now based
around an Apple Mac Pro with a UAD Apollo interface and some se-
lect physical outboard pieces. Clients taking over the space have full
access to the studio’s monitor and microphone collections, making
it a go-to for vocal tracking and overdubs in addition to songwriting
and production sessions.
Then there are the amenities. OCL Studios has five bedrooms on
its premises for clients to use when recording, along with two kitch-
ens – a smaller kitchenette by the studios and a larger, fully-equipped
one upstairs in the residential area.
The property also has a sizeable backyard with a BBQ on the
deck and, for use in the warmer months, a pool and basketball hoop,
all wrapped in beautiful panoramas.
“It brings back that scenario from the ‘70s and ‘80s where bands
would hole up in the same place for a long time,” Cheyne says about
what he believes to be one of OCL’s biggest draws. “There’s this
unique magic that comes when everyone’s in the same space and
on the same wavelength, rather than everyone coming together for
a few hours at a time or even tracking on their own. That’s a really
special thing that OCL enables, and something I always encourage
people to take advantage of because it makes such a huge difference
to the end product.”
Currently, Owen and company are constructing a new mix room
that will soon be Cheyne’s professional home, anchored by an SSL
PROFESSIONAL SOUND 35