The Smell of Fresh AWS Studio

The audio world is ever evolving, and CRAS is no stranger to that idea. Always looking to expand, upgrade and improve, we refuse to be left behind. Among the changes we’ve made expanding to the school, Monday marks a new dawn on the beginning of a new pair of studios.

SSL, or Solid State Logic, have been building amazing consoles for decades now and have developed a great reputation in the music industry. There are hundreds of studios throughout the world that use SSL equipment every single day, and we are happy to say we are one of the few educators in the world that teach comprehensive audio recording and production education using SSL consoles. Our flagship Studio A at each campus use SSL 4000+ series consoles, which demonstrate classic analog circuitry and rich, warm sounds.

We are excited to offer education on two brand new SSL consoles – the SSL AWS series! We have built two brand new control rooms, with two isolation booths and a live studio specifically around these boards. Running two AWS 948 boards, which are connected to two full Pro Tools HDX playback systems, we will be able to give a much higher level education to aspiring audio engineers.

These new facilities will provide more opportunities for students who are wanting to learn the recording arts to practice and hone their skills on a wider variety of gear. This will also allow them to focus on specific areas of the music industry – post production, music production, audio recording, overdubbing, mixing and even mastering! These new rooms are absolutely amazing quality and a fresh facelift to our buildings.

Each control room will have a 24 in, 24 out capability with full patch bays allowing interconnectivity with numerous bits of outboard gear like Manley compressors, Distressors, Empirical Labs FrEQs and all kinds of other goodies.

We had a visit a couple weeks ago from the SSL Broadcast truck, and that was very interesting to see for a couple reasons. It was great to know that we have the same vision for the direction of the audio industry. They brought out their truck to our Gilbert location, and I was able to take a tour of it and see how it contrasted and compared to our own broadcast audio truck that we recently have been finishing up. It’s great to know that our school is sharing the same vision with such an iconic company as SSL and even better to know that we are able to fill our studios with a ton of their gear!

Check out our build progress time lapse video!