Returning to their native Ecuador after years in France, Willan Farinango and Jorge Luis Serrano set out to build studio that offered a ‘British sound’ control room. ‘That’s the main characteristic that differentiates us from other studios here in Ecuador – or anywhere in Latin America, I would say,’ Farinango says.
Built from the ground up to a custom design, Estudios El Dorado is a multi-room, multi-purpose facility in Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, whose all-analogue workflow is centred on a 32-channel Solid State Logic Origin mixing console.
‘This is a multi-studio because it is three-in-one,’ Serrano adds. ‘All of these rooms are interconnected to the SSL Origin console. ‘There is nothing like this in the rest of the country.’
Serrano, formerly Cultural Attaché at the Embassy of Ecuador in France, and Farinango, who studied classical guitar, composition and arranging while living in France for 20 years, believe that Estudios El Dorado is one of only a handful of facilities in South America to offer such a variety of services from under a single roof.
‘We usually run stems through the PureDrive and EQ to add colour and texture to mixes that, in Ecuador, usually come from home studios,’ Farinango continues. ‘What a gift to have them on all 32 channels.’
SSL’s Bus Compressor also gets used a lot at El Dorado: ‘The Bus Compressor is used on the mix bus, generally to fill and glue sounds together, as well as add a bit of drive and character. With 3dB or 4dB maximum reduction, we get very satisfactory results.’
The Origin is installed in Studio A’s 450sq-ft control room in custom studio furniture that incorporates a wing on either side to house outboard analogue processors. There is also multi-bay credenza behind the console operators, packed with more outboard. The control room acoustic design features a reflection-free zone at the engineer’s listening position.
British-made ATC SCN110ASL Pro reference monitors are soffit-mounted in the front wall. There is an adjacent 625sq-ft. live room with variable acoustics and a 12ft ceiling, and a collection of high-quality microphones. The spacious tracking space features a Yamaha G5 grand piano. ‘This is the only Disklavier in Ecuador, maybe in South America,’ Serrano says.
Studio B, a 235sq-ft all-analogue mastering suite, is equipped with a variety of British-made processing devices. A third space, Studio C, measuring 430sq-ft, is set up for photo and video shoots and audiovisual productions, and offers LED lighting and 4K cameras.
El Dorado officially launched on the last day of January 2024, but was open for sessions for several months prior. Serrano says that two features of the studio are proving to be a significant attraction. ‘The piano in the live room and our SSL Origin are really working well together. They are attracting a lot of people who thought that they might have to make their records outside Ecuador. But when they discovered El Dorado, they made the decision to make their records here.’
Since opening, Serrano and Farinango have seen a variety of artists working across a range of music genres pass through their. ‘We have worked with every kind of artist – classical, jazz, folk, popular music and what we call chicha in Ecuador,’ Serrano reports. This is cumbia-based electronic music popular throughout large parts of Latin America.
‘Our key goal was to have an analogue workflow and to bring the British sound to the heart of Quito,’ Farinango reflects. ‘We have musicians from cities outside Quito that are coming to record with us. Ecuador is about the size of the UK, so one of our goals was also to attract people from outside Ecuador to record with us. We are getting good responses and attracting interest from musicians all over Latin America. We hope that we will soon have musicians from the US and Europe work with us here too.’
Farinango says, El Dorado is marketing its facilities to professional musicians anywhere in the world who are looking for a very high-quality, professional sound at an attractive price. ‘Something that we always tell our clients is that our prices are Ecuadorian, and that allows us to compete with the rest of the world,’ he says. Being able to offer the authentic SSL sound to clients gives El Dorado an additional edge over the competition, he believes: ‘It allows us to offer the best of the British sound industry to Ecuador and to the region.’
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
