The Music Production and Engineering Department (MPED) at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music will add a fourth 32-channel analog API Legacy Plus console to its Studio A in early summer of 2014.
At that time, a John Storyk-led renovation will overhaul the space to create a fourth facility with nearly identical equipment to three existing facilities for the instruction of foundational tracking and mixing courses.
Because the MPED recognizes the importance of giving students abundant hands-on experience with definitive industry tools, it self-limits the number of Berklee students who can earn their degree in the department.
Thus, only half of the Berklee students who apply to the MPED are accepted, which allows the department to maintain a student body of approximately three hundred students. The new API Legacy Plus will help alleviate competition for space and bottlenecks in studio scheduling.
“The API Legacy Plus offers us several advantages,” said Rob Jaczko, chair of the MPED and recording engineer for Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow, James Taylor, and countless others. “First and foremost, its sonics and musicality are an industry benchmark. Just running tracks through it flat is an experience that our students should appreciate.
“Second, the Legacy Plus has a classic in-line analog signal path, which is very useful for teaching signal flow and problem solving. Finally, we’ve enjoyed a great relationship with API. We’ve always been happy with API’s outboard gear, which is included in seventeen of our studios, and the support we received from the API staff during the purchase and installation of the first three Legacies was great.”
