Evergreen Enterprise Experience has opened Studio One at its expansive music production and postproduction campus in Burbank, California. Now the studio’s flagship production room at the revitalised Enterprise Studios, it features a 72-channel Solid State Logic Duality Fuse SuperAnalogue mixing console.
The move follows Evergreen Studios earlier installation of the first Duality Fuse in the world in Studio A, when it opened in 2021.
‘Everyone knows what an SSL sounds like and what a G Series Bus Compressor sounds like,’ says Chief Engineer Laurence Anslow, who worked on the strings session. ‘But the number one thing for me about the Duality Fuse console is the reliability. In all the time that we’ve had it, nothing has ever gone wrong with it. We haven’t had a channel fail; we haven’t had a fader go bad. It sits there and it just works.’
Enterprise’s Studio One will principally serve as a home base for songwriter and producer Freddy Wexler – whose songs have been recorded by artists including Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and Lil Wayne – but will also be available for commercial bookings. Most recently, Billy Joel’s first new song in more than 30 years included recording string overdubs through the Duality Fuse at Evergreen Studios.
The new Studio One control room is huge, says Neil Portnow, partner at Evergreen Enterprise Experience: ‘It was previously a production room and is three or four times the size of the control room at Evergreen. The live room is spectacular, too, with really high ceilings and a great iso booth.’
Acoustician George Augspurger consulted on the new Studio One build: ‘We found out that he had been involved in the original design and acoustics for both Evergreen and Enterprise,’ Portnow says. ‘He gave us a blueprint for the room design work that he thought we should do, which we followed.’
In addition to Studio One, the Enterprise complex offers a half dozen other production rooms, many of them rented to third-party producers, together with writing rooms, a viewing theatre, offices, kitchens and lounges. The complex, in addition to Studio A and the Evergreen Stage, a 3,000sq-ft scoring stage/live room with three iso booths, encompasses a Dolby Atmos-certified TV and film dub stage, editing suites/postproduction rooms plus additional studios and writing rooms, as well as conference rooms, kitchens and lounges. There is a large outdoor courtyard and parking space for 50 vehicles.
The new company name reflects the four-decade-plus history of the two iconic studio complexes: ‘Those names are very significant to a large population,’ Portnow says. ‘We have a full block on the Evergreen side and half a block on the Enterprise side that we’re devoting to all of this. When I started thinking about studio names, I thought, “We should all be so lucky as to have an enterprise that is evergreen”, but it’s also an experience – so it became the Evergreen Enterprise Experience.’
Portnow, who was president of the Recording Academy for four years beginning in 2002 before being appointed only the second president/CEO in the organisation’s history (Harvey Mason Jr. is currently CEO of the Recording Academy), took inspiration from his time as a record label executive when developing the wide range of services and organisations on the campus. He built out a similar menu of services when he was senior vice president, West Coast operations, for the Zomba Group of companies during the 1990s.
Enterprise Studios was founded in the 1980s by Craig Huxley, who also owned the Evergreen Stages building for a period, operating it as Enterprise 2. Over the decades some of the greatest names in musical history, from Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra and Plácido Domingo to Michael Jackson, Dr Dre and Paul McCartney, worked at the facilities. The studios also hosted scoring sessions for a long list of film and TV projects, including Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Back to the Future and When Harry Met Sally.
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