Built within and around a 17th century barn on the UK Essex/Suffolk border, School Farm Studios is a new recording facility founded by Andrew Sunnucks with sound and mix engineer, composer, orchestrator, and musician Stefano Civetta A recording engineer at Abbey Road Studios for six years, Sunnucks has an impressive CV of work across albums and cinema scores. Together the pair worked to build a space ‘where musicians feel welcome, in a very homey setting, but also have the best technology, microphones, and outboard available’.
Now complete, the facility has a main studio that can comfortably host 26 musicians, with two booths adjoining, and two further large booths in adjacent buildings. ‘We are lucky enough to work on all sorts of genres, from orchestras for films to intimate acoustic sets, and jazz ensembles to big bands,’ Civetta says.
‘The big main room and the spacious booths allow us to isolate every single element, giving us and the client absolute control on each component.’
The facility is a blend of new and old, including and SSL Duality Delta surface and Avid Pro Tools S1 networked with EuCon, and 7.1.4 ATC monitoring. Sunnucks works by committing all analogue outboard and processing while recording. Seeking to incorporate the latest technology into the original build of the studio, the facility can produce work in Dolby Atmos. To do this, Civetta and Sunnucks enlisted the help of HHB Communications. Rather than relying solely on the Dolby Atmos Production Suite, they choose a Dolby RMU (rendering mastering unit).
‘We knew that we would have to run large sessions that would include tons of tracks, and plug-ins. With the RMU we are able to offload everything concerning the Dolby Atmos aspects of a session was a good choice. This allows us to not run the Product Suite on the main rig and keep things working smoothly,’ Civetta says.
When recording an orchestra, the main room can host up 28 strings, with four musicians in the large booth, a soloist in the small booth, with the neighbouring annexes accommodating additional players. When working on a typical pop session, the drums are placed in the large booth, leaving the large barn for the studio’s Steinway Model D piano or Hammond C3, while guitar and bass are recorded in any of the external booths, and the small booth used for vocals.
Another flexible solution seen at the studio is how they manage recording classical music with an orchestra. The studio uses two different video systems. One is fully digital, through SDI cameras/lines, the other completely analogue. This allows a conductor to conduct the orchestra via video stream with almost zero latency. Another example of this is when a soloist must be recorded separately, when the recording is via the analogue feed through a BlackMagic Ultra Studio 3G, which introduces close to no latency.
‘It was a pleasure to work with such a unique studio, we were happy to share our knowledge and experience with Andrew and Stef,’ adds HHB’s Matthew Fletcher.
