Over the past 30 years, 30-plus years in the business, music producer Andrew Sunnucks has been behind thousands of large ensemble orchestral, big band, and choral music recordings for TV, film, advertising and corporate video, a large percentage of them made at Abbey Road Studios in London. He has a longstanding working relationship engineer, composer and orchestrator Stefano Civetta, who left Abbey Road to join Sunnucks in building School Farm Studios on the border between Essex and Sussex in the UK.

The residential facility offers tracking space for up to 30 musicians, and supports Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 mixing. ‘Stef took care of all the technical side and gave me a shopping list of what he wanted,’ Sunnucks says. Recently, this saw the facility install a Solid State Logic 48-Channel Duality Fuse SuperAnalogue mixing console.

In all, there are five studio spaces available for tracking at School Farm, two of them in remote buildings, with the main room accommodating a 28-piece string section. The barn, built in the 1600s, was dilapidated and collapsing, but the original half-timbered interior has been retained. Once the resident horse and ducks had been relocated, an elaborate build process began. ‘We wanted to keep the inside of the original barn to create the acoustic properties that we wanted – so we basically built another barn over the whole thing,’ Sunnucks says.

The control room is equipped for Dolby Atmos work with an ATC 7.1.4 monitoring system and conforms to Dolby Labs’ specifications. Four DPA microphones are permanently installed in the rafters above the main tracking space to capture height information for immersive recording projects.

‘We have a lot of composers in Los Angeles and do quite a few remote sessions, putting strings on their projects for them,’ Sunnucks says. This involves using Audiomovers and Zoom for real-time audio and video collaboration.

‘I have always loved the EQ, dynamics and compression of SSL consoles,’ says Civetta, who was the Pope’s organist at St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City for seven years, and recording engineer at Abbey Road Studios for six. ‘The classic SSL Buss Compressor is quite a thing. I just love it, and I know what to expect from it. I was lucky enough to work in Studio 3 at Abbey Road on the SSL 9000 J. There was also a Duality in one of the other rooms at Abbey Road, which offered a lot of flexibility. So that’s why I decided to go down the SSL route here.

‘It was the same thing with the outboard equipment,’ he adds. ‘We went down the route of stuff that I was lucky enough to work with at Abbey Road because, again, I know what to expect from it.’

Civetta is an old-school engineer, and favours the workflow of large-format mixing desks. ‘I very much have a tactile approach, rather than point-and-click. I point and click enough in the mixing process, but during recording I really like to have the faders. I also wanted an analogue path for our headphone feeds and reverb sends.’

As an alternative to the SSL preamps there are 26 channels of Neve preamps, as well as preamps from Millennia and the Chandler REDD.47.

Civetta prints live mixes through the Duality Fuse during tracking sessions. ‘I can do that through the extra buses,’ he explains. ‘I tend to print the live mixes, because not many people have access to high-end gear at home. If they like the sound of it, I might as well just give it to them. When they go home and open the Pro Tools sessions, with all the faders at zero it sounds as close as possible to what was going on here, and it saves time in the mix.’

Civetta had his hands on many of the projects that passed through Abbey Road during his time at there. His credits include Will.I.Am, Skrillex, OneRepublic and Ed Sheeran, Nile Rodgers’ recordings with Bruno Mars, The Carpenters, The Beach Boys, Mary J Blige, One Direction and a host of others. He worked with Giles Martin on various Beatles remixes, most notably the 50th anniversary reissues of The White Album and Abbey Road. He also worked on approximately 60 high-profile film scores. ‘Stef was always the guy I asked for at Abbey Road, because I think there’s no one as good as he is at score checking,’ Sunnucks says.