The California Jazz Conservatory Audio Production Department in Berkeley, headed by Reto Peter, has opened a new studio that’s equipped with an Audient ASP4816 mixing console.
“The CJC is a small school and while the Audio Production Department has been around for some years, it has been slow to grow and establish itself,” he says. Funding from the Klezmer family and WordPress enabled the conservatory to transform its existing classrooms into the new fully-equipped recording studio for visiting artists, faculty and students.
Primarily used for teaching and school projects, the studio consists of a control room that also serves as an audio lab. There are eight DAW stations, a live room (also used as an ensemble room) and two rehearsal booths that are used as ISO rooms.
The Audient ASP4816 was chosen because of its “compact and inline layout,” with Peter explaining, “To teach the students proper signal flow, we opted for the ASP4816, an analogue console, to take advantage of its professional layout, good sounding preamps and compact design to be our centrepiece. We have another eight outboard preamps to make the studio a 24 input/output configuration. The clear layout of the channel strips helps visualise and demonstrate signal flow and routing much better.”
Peter is a Grammy and TEC Award-winning producer/mixer and has been making records for more than 25 years in Europe, NYC and the San Francisco Bay Area. He is credited on Gold and Platinum albums by Green Day, Modest Mouse, The Counting Crows, Flipsyde and many artists from his native Switzerland.
Using the new studios at CJC, he’s done a VO project for a Planetarium film for the Berkeley Lawrence Lab, as well as recording various student projects outside class. Most recently he’s been working on a student ensemble recording of drums, bass, piano and tenor saxophone. “We will be mixing the recordings next month. I ran all the instruments through the Audient and the tones we got were fantastic.”
The recommendation for the desk came from adjunct faculty member Dan Feiszli and the Women’s Audio Mission. With two ASP8024s now installed at the nearby San Francisco facility (the first way back in 2015) Women’s Audio Mission executive drector Terri Winston says, “Having these two amazing consoles has made WAM’s studio complex in San Francisco a world-class recording destination.”
