Geijerskolan, a school in Ransäter, Värmlan that offers a variety of music-based education in a setting surrounded by forest, deep in the heart of the Swedish countryside, last year opened a new analog studio with an Audient ASP4816 mixing desk at its heart.
The studio and two rehearsal rooms are housed in an old-fashioned red wooden house typical of the area, with a rustic exterior that belies the technology found within its walls. “It’s important that the students can work with a real analog console. They need to make their own mistakes as well as finding their way around a ‘real’ studio,” says Stefan Deland, one of the teachers at the school. He underlines the school’s ethos of giving students the freedom to evolve in a creative community and “learn by doing.”
The Music Production Program is a mixture 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 producers/songwriters Olivia Lundberg and Jarl Furingsten who are 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 notes.
“It keeps everybody on their toes and on their best game,” Lundberg adds. “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 teaching how to save recordings on the computer, the students learn how to prevent making mistakes when the tracks are recorded. “We are more hands-on when we record,” Furingsten explains. Patching the right cable in the right place, using the console instead of the computer and listening to the tracks, not seeing the tracks 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 ASP4816 console was chosen for its preamps, signal flow and size. “The Audient ASP4816 is a perfect size console for this studio,” Fuingsten concludes. “The old desk we used had 48 tracks and most of the tracks were not in use, but on the ASP4816 all the tracks are in use and sound great.”
