Toronto’s renowned Massey Hall recently completed a refurbishment that included the construction of the adjoining seven-storey Allied Music Centre, housing new performance and production spaces including the Deane Cameron Recording Studio.
The new building expands Massey Hall’s talent support services, including rehearsal rooms and artist dressing rooms. New public spaces include a lobby, lounge and new performance venues, including the 500-capacity TD Music Hall and the 100-seat 6th Floor Theatre. Opened in September 2023, the Deane Cameron studio is equipped with a 64-fader Solid State Logic System T S500 console and ATC monitoring.
Doug McKendrick is Vice President, Production & Technology at The Corporation of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall, the not-for-profit charitable organisation that operates the concert halls. ‘My role was to oversee all technical aspects of the entire project and to connect all of these spaces so that we could record audio and video in a high-quality way from anywhere at any time,’ he says.
McKendrick and his staff had a shortlist of requirements for the console to be installed in the main control room of the new seventh-floor studio complex – which is named in honour of Massey Hall’s late CEO, Deane Cameron. It needed to accommodate fast-paced events in Massey Hall as well as switching freely between live shows in the Allied Music Centre’s various venues and recording projects in the new production facility. ‘We needed a digital console, and we needed to be able to recall fast,’ McKendrick says.
Veteran producer and engineer Eddie Kramer (Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin) lives in the Toronto area and consulted on the studio project, recommending the SSL System T platform. ‘Eddie has been a real friend of the project and a real mentor to me,’ McKendrick says.
‘System T is so clever, so slick and so flexible – and it does sound bloody marvellous,’ Kramer explains. ‘It has a certain logic that anybody who has sat behind a console will get fairly quickly.’
Kramer became involved in the project while the studio was still in the design stage, and pushed for the control room to be as large as possible. ‘I said, “You have to have Dolby Atmos, and if you’re going to do Dolby Atmos, you can’t have a small room”. It was a joy working with Doug and the team. My hat’s off to the whole tech team; they did a terrific job.’
McKendrick and the studio staff wanted to be able to work in Dolby Atmos on both recording and live projects in the new studio, which uses 9.1.4 ATC monitoring. ‘We’re looking to push the envelope in audio as much as we can in all facets,’ he says. ‘System T was the best choice. The console is really a great, great device.’
System T’s onboard processing offers almost everything needed for a session, McKendrick says: ‘The de-esser is amazing. All the reverbs and delays sound pristine and clean. The EQs are accurate. The Bus Compressor sounds like an SSL Bus Compressor – you can put it on anything and everything and it’s really great. We’ve got a rack of outboard gear, but people aren’t really touching it that much, especially for the live shows. ‘The stem group set-up is very powerful and easily routable,’ he continues. ‘Plus, because System T can control Dante routing, you can just do everything right at the console. You don’t have to get up and go to a different room or open a laptop.’
For live shows, engineers have been taking advantage of System T’s snapshot capabilities. One of the first events mixed through the System T was the Polaris Music Prize awards gala, which included performances from seven of the nominees. ‘The snapshots are intuitive so we’re not finding that there’s a giant learning curve for people coming in and using the console. In fact, we’ve been giving people an afternoon orientation on it and the next day they’re in here mixing 90 or 100 tracks, live.
‘The way that we’ve got snapshots set up to switch back and forth between playback and recording is the fastest that I’ve seen on any console. So we’re able to work very, very effectively with the System T.’
The Deane Cameron Recording Studio’s main control room features a live space that doubles as a classroom and offers an iso booth. There are also some small writing rooms. ‘We’re a not-for-profit corporation and we help develop Canadian talent,’ McKendrick explains. ‘That extends to engineers and producers. We want to put real tools at their disposal. That includes Atmos – it’s a new thing to a lot of people, so we’re providing local engineers with an opportunity to come and try it.’
See also:
Toronto’s Massey Hall adds Dolby Atmos suite (monitoring)
