As head of the California Jazz Conservatory’s Audio Production Department, Reto Peter is constantly inviting more students to ‘catch the recording bug and take recording classes’. A new studio – based around an Audient ASP4816 mixing console and operational since last semester – is now making the invitation still more tempting.

‘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,’ Peter says.

Recently, however,Generous funding from the Klezmer family and WordPress has enabled the conservatory to transform its existing classrooms into a fully-equipped recording studio able to accommodate visiting artists, faculty and students alike.

Primarily used for teaching and school projects, the CJC recording studio comprises 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.

Chosen because of its ‘compact and inline layout’, the ASP4816 has already been working out well for CJC. ‘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,’ Peter explains. ‘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 himself 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, Counting Crows and Flipsyde, as well as chart-topping artists from his native Switzerland.

Using the new studios at CJC he has done a VO project for a planetarium film for the Berkeley Lawrence Lab, and recorded student projects outside class. Most recently he has been working on a student ensemble recording of drums, bass, piano and tenor saxophone. ‘We will be mixing the recordings next month,’ he says. ‘I ran all the instruments through the Audient and the tones we got were fantastic.’

Feedback from the students and other staff since its installation has been positive, and

Peter has big plans for the future: ‘For the fall semester we will continue to integrate the studio offerings into class curriculums to make sure students can take full advantage of our facilities. We hope to record many student projects, arrangements and final projects in the coming semesters.’

Recommendation for the British 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 back in 2015) they too are very pleased with their choice. ‘Having these two amazing consoles has made WAM’s studio complex in San Francisco a world-class recording destination,’ says Executive Director, Terri Winston.

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