Opened at the start of the 2016 academic year, two new music studios at Kingston College’s Creative Industries Centre are equipped with analogue mixing consoles, two iD22 audio interfaces and three ASP880 eight-channel mic preamplifiers from Audient.
Beginning their second term, the facility’s students are making good use of the recent upgrade: ‘They love using both the ASP4816 and progressing to the ASP8024 with Dual Layer Control,’ reports Music Technology instructor and studio technician, Chris Winter. ‘They find them easy to understand and clearly laid out. They love that analogue sound, too.’
While the desks are located in Studios 1 & 2 – the commercial and the primary teaching studio respectively – the outboard gear is predominantly used in the four production rooms that are linked to the rehearsal and live rooms: ‘The students love the way iD22 allows you to assign a mic pre as talkback mic,’ Winter adds. ‘The ASP880s are also really useful when you want to DI an instrument quickly.
‘The iD22s are so easy to use and have great, big console features. The ASP880 are amazing too, and really work well with the iD22s. The idea was that we have the same mic preamps across the facilities so there is continuity in the sound.’
Winter describes the new building that houses the studios as ‘…an amazing space. We are very lucky to have the opportunity to build industry standard studios to such a high specification, and work with great companies like The Studio People on getting wonderful sounding rooms that look fantastic too.’
Comprising a 3D workshop, TV studio, as well as a number of studios and classrooms designed to enhance the learning experience, the Creative Industries Centre is designed to encourage cross collaboration on projects with other courses taught at Kingston College.
‘We teach from Level 2 up to Level 5 courses in Music Technology and Performance,’ Winter explains. ‘The great thing about these Audient desks is that for beginners right up to advanced users, they are easy to understand with no gimmicky features.’
He is clear that teaching signal path to students is fundamental to their training: ‘So many people have tried to teach ‘in the box’, but have reverted to analogue board as a physical piece of equipment that you can touch and see where the signal starts and ends up.
‘Audient has high-quality products that are easy to use and are at a professional level. We wanted our students and users to learn on industry standard equipment, so they can transfer their skills learnt at Kingston College straight through to employment.’
