US indie band Beauty Pill recently teamed up with the Artisphere museum in Arlington, Virginia in what is being described an ‘artistic, musical, and sociological experiment’. The project saw band record an album inside the museum, where they could be watched by the public and ‘providing unprecedented access and insight into the creative process of musicians’.

‘Artisphere initially approached me to ask if I could do something “musical” in the museum’s beautiful space,’ explains founder member and producer/engineer Chad Clark. ‘When they showed me a large room with a window that overlooked it – it reminded me of Abbey Road Studio 2.

The last leg of two-year world tour found Icelandic band Sigur Rós taking advantage of the latest refinements in the Skan PA equipment inventory. ‘We took a d&b audiotechnik system out for Sigur Rós late last year,’ says Skan system designer for the tour, Tom Tunney. ‘A short run, maybe three weeks, the system was based on J-Series with some Q-Series for fill. We drove the whole PA with D80s.’

New D80 amplifiers from d&b have been added since: ‘The most immediate thing we noticed was an indirect benefit of the active power correction, when we applied the ‘pull’ on the service with no gain reduction anywhere on the signal path it just sounded clearer.

Working with the likes of Beyoncé, Frank Ocean and Gungor, live monitor engineer Daniel Gonzales has been finding Waves Audio plug-ins a growing part of his set-up. Currently, he is using the Waves Mercury and SSL 4000 Collection SoundGrid bundles mixing monitors for Beyoncé.

‘The more tools you have in your toolbox, the better equipped you are to handle any job,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t mean you’ll be using every tool every single time, but at least you will have them when you need them. 

‘Built to boldly go where no studio has gone before’, Tape Studio is a new, two-storey recording/mixing facility in Edinburgh. Owned by ‘alternative’ record producer/mixer Stephen A Watkins, the studio’s equipment list and acoustics are on par with facilities in NY, LA and London.

‘We wanted to put together a studio that was completely over-the-top to match my personal recording/mixing style,’ Watkins explains. ‘The set-up features an all-guns-blazing, maxed out patchbay handling a Who’s Who of analogue outboard gear.’

Central to its operation are two Solid State Logic Duality SE consoles…

As part of a complete architectural and electronic renovation, Virginia Arts Recording recently replaced its large-format digital console with a 16-channel API 1608 analogue console with P-Mix fader automation.

The north-central Virginia-based studio has been serving local musicians, labels and radio stations for more than 30 years. Current owners Chris Doermann and Sean Dart are celebrating its history with the new console and a 24-track, 2-inch tape machine. The studio also retains its digital platforms with top-end converters to allow projects to chose from both technologies.