Offering a wide range of music-based education including Music Production, Sweden’s Geijerskolan has opened a new analogue studio with an Audient ASP4816 mixing desk at its centre.

Surrounded by forest in the heart of the Swedish countryside, the facility’s studio and two rehearsal rooms are housed in a red wooden house typical of the area, whose rustic exterior belies the technology installed within. ’It’s important that the students can work with a real analogue console – they need to make their own mistakes as well as finding their way around a real’ studio,’ says Stefan Deland – one of the school’s teachers – underlining its ethos of giving students the freedom to ‘learn by doing’.

The Music Production programme is a mix of studio production and songwriting, focusing on the commercial aspect of the music business. Students learn to write, record and mix their own music, and are taught by Olivia Lundberg and Jarl Furingsten who are both producers and songwriters in their own right.

‘It’s important that we can work with what we teach to stay up to date and evolve as educators,’ Furingsten says.

Lundberg agrees and adds that switching roles between teaching songwriting and production makes things more interesting for both students and educators: ‘It keeps everybody on their toes and on their best game,’ she says. ’We are proud to be able to give the students something they can’t learn from a YouTube tutorial or from recording directly on to a computer.’

Instead of learning how to save endless iterations of a recording on a computer, students are taight how to avoid making mistakes when the tracks are recorded. ‘We are more hands-on when we record,’ Furingsten says. ‘Patching the right cable in the right place, using the console instead of the computer and listening to the tracks, not seeing them on a screen – these are the things that will get you ready for working in a professional studio.’

Supplied by Musikhuset, a music store in the nearby city of Karlstad, the compact ASP4816 console was chosen for its preamps, signal flow and size. ‘The Audient is a perfect size console for this studio,’ Furingsten says. ‘The old desk we used had 48 channels and most were not in use, but on the ASP4816 all are in use and sound great.’

Not all studios sound good and share the rustic charm of Geijerskolan, with its large windows overlooking green fields and a tranquil lake. Bur the one at Geijerskolan looks to be a great place for Music Production students to begin their creative journeys.