Founded by Grammy-nominated producer Maxime Le Guil and business partner Victor Lévy-Lasne in 2010, Mix with the Masters (MWTM) offers live and online workshops hosted by prominent industry names including Chris Lord-Alge, Timbaland and Hans Zimmer. With its programme still expanding after a decade, the MWTM team is opening a new recording facility in Paris as the flagship location for both in-person and remote workshops, as well as providing a Europpean base for the programme’s extended family.
Designed by architectural acoustic consultant WSDG (Walters-Storyk Design Group), the new studio will be located in a multi-storey building within the inner ring of Paris, using two floors to serve production and administration. Its design is influenced by Le Guil and Lévy-Lasne’s love for ‘classic’ American recording studios, an approach that will give it a unique footprint.
‘Our goal with this studio is to ensure that all of our visiting producers and engineers will feel right at home here and be able to showcase their best work,’ explains Le Guil. ‘There’s a real need for a cutting-edge American-style recording studio here, and by connecting it with our offices and video suites in the same building we believe it will be a truly stimulating environment.’
Led by Dirk Noy, Romina Larregina and WSDG co-founder John Storyk, the WSDG Design Team has been tasked with ensuring acoustic excellence across the complex while creating a flexible working environment suitable for both the programme’s in-person workshops and ongoing video content creation needs. The team has already made use of innovative acoustic modelling techniques as part of the process, including Niro, an advanced low frequency analysis tool recently developed by WSDG’s research associate REDIAcoustics.
‘Building a recording studio that also serves as a video production studio without sacrificing the vibe and technical needs of either requires a balance of a lot of different needs,’ says Larregina. ‘In order to do this, we decided to take a fresh approach that will allow them to convert the space for both purposes and have maximum control.’
The ground floor will comprise the main Studio A and Studio B, the 48m2 Studio A serving as the main production room, in addition to being configurable to host video shoots, events and masterclasses seating up to 20 participants. The room will also be set up for Dolby Atmos immersive multichannel audio and video projection. Featuring an innovative elevator-mounted console, Studio A will also be easily convertible into a live room, with absorptive curtains for maximum acoustic flexibility.
Studio B at 19.5m2 will serve as a secondary control room, allowing multiple sessions or classes to be held at once. ‘This is our first time doing such a drastic transition between a live room and a control room and it proves to be a fascinating design challenge,’ says Noy. ‘Its successful implementation means that MWTM will be able to use it for many production configurations without any acoustical compromises.’
The studio will also include a 15m2 Drum Room, a side room for additional instrumentation, a pair of iso booths and a glass-roofed lounge area built into the former outdoor garden space of the building, providing a calming centre to the bustle of production activity in the studio.
All rooms will have flexible connectivity to allow for multiple production set-ups. ‘We’ve been incredibly happy with how quickly WSDG has been integrating all of our ideas for this space,’ says Lévy-Lasne. ‘We believe that with this facility the MWTM format will open up even more avenues to enable the exchange of world-class production approaches and collaborative experience-sharing.’
‘We’ve been following MWTM since their inception through their collaborations with friends of ours like Eddie Kramer, Jack Antonoff and Marcella Araica,’ Storyk says. ‘Working with them on this project has been a natural partnership for us that we believe will result in a truly extraordinary studio.’
