STUDIO TOUR
ISLAND CITY
STUDIOS
Tell us about the space
Island City Studios is a multi-room
facility with The Press (Studio A)
being our largest Control Room and
Recording Room.
The Bay (Studio B) is our smaller studio
with a Control Room and a medium
sized Dubbing Room.
Madfingers is our rehearsal space
which is perfect for ensembles of upto
10 people.
I also wanted a good space for
musicians to just come and hang and
interact and the perfect spots for that
are both the balconies and the Cafeteria.
Take us through the process of
setting it up
Setting up a studio starts with defining
what kind of audio work the team will
be doing. For us it was almost anything
related to audio. Hence location became
the next important factor. It was
important for us to be accessible to
all Musicians and Production Houses.
Also the space itself needed to tick a
lot of checkboxes in terms suitability
for a Recording Studio. Which is why I
hired SoundWizard to make sure that
all isolation and acoustic treatment was
done with extreme care and precision.
Simultaneously, one needs to really
consider what equipment will work
best for a wide variety of workflows
since you never know what to expect in
a commercial where you might have a
new client everyday. Finally we needed
to pick a team for the execution of the
project and hence we called on SETHNA
Contructions and Kyrus Sethna for
interior finishing.
What are some of the studio
essentials you would recommend?
Coffee, chilling area, a wide variety of
instruments readily available. A good
team of engineers and assistants that
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know the space and gear well. Well
maintained and carefully selected
recording equipment. And most of all a
good acoustically clean Control Room.
What equipment do you use?
I’ll attach a list. But the A room we have
a fully loaded API 1608 with Quested
q212 as the main speakers.
Pieces of gear you cannot live
without
This is a hard question to answer
purely because everything that we have
right upto the headphone system has
bought and used for at least 60/70%
of our sessions. So almost everything
have, we need to have and hence cannot
live without it. But if I had to choose, I
would say the API console and Questeds
in A.
Describe your work day
Impossible. Since no 2 clients are the
same it’s different everyday.
Philosophy or reasoning behind
gear choices
I have bought stuff that I know I will use
and I that I feel like will give people the
right amount of choices to explore their
sonic palate.
What’s your next buy for the studio?
Amps, synths, mics. Oh no I’m gonna be
broke!!!
Tips to aspiring owners of studios
Make sure that you plan every aspect
of your new studio and really think of
why you want to set it up before hand
so that you make the right choices in
the beginning because the setup is so
intensive that it’s hard to make big
changes later on.
Make sure you understand that takes a
while to break even on the overall cost.