Trip to the Real World Studios

The watermill with the exterior of the Big Room.

Hey buddies,
sorry for this long break but I've just come back from Bristol, UK.
Cool city with tons of cool music.

I went there with my mate Mattia Garimanno, the owner of Ænima Recordings, the indie label I work with.
The first day we went to Box (Wiltshire) to visit our friend Marco Migliari, producer at Real World Studios, famous studios founded by Peter Gabriel, associated with his label, the Real World Records Ltd.
There we also met our mates Maurizio Bulgarini (who's been in Erasmus Placement at the RWS for three months) and Galileo Tarricone, who were there to work on a few tracks with the singer Valentina Camilleri. Maurizio and Galileo are the owners of DoubleDominant studios in Turin.

For me it's been the second time there, but I can't hide that it's always exciting to cross that threshold. And most of all, this time I could take a lot of photos (the previous time it was night...).

The studios are built as a little village around the old watermill which represents the centre of RW. Marco works as a freelance producer in a little mixing and mastering studio called the Green Room, located in a hangar inside the complex of RW, which covers a very large area.

In the Big Room

Inside the watermill you'll find the well known Big Room (one of the biggest control rooms in the world) which houses the SSL 9000K XL mixing console (where I'm sitting at in the photo), a lot of preamplifiers, additional outboard equipment and effects you can see in the shootings below, a 7.1 main monitoring system (customized) with a huge screen (used when they're working with video, but hidden in all other cases). The console is mounted on rails to be moved in case of need. There's also a secondary mid-field stereo monitoring system (sometimes more than one) which often changes (now they're using Mackie and Focal, last time I remember I saw a couple of NS-10).

Wooden Room

In the same building you can see the Wooden Room, which is designed to function as a flexible live room. It features a more lively acoustic and a booth, mezzanine floor and movable acoustic screens. This room can operate as a more budget-friendly studio, independently (with a temporary control-room setup) or, most commonly, the two rooms are used together. (wikipedia)

I had previously seen the accommodation area with the kitchen (they also have a French on-site chef), living room, etc.

But this time the biggest thrill was being able to enter Peter's personal studio, also called "The Writing Room". Unfortunately I could take photos of that place, as it is, in fact, a private area. But I'll keep all I've seen there in my mind as long as I live. Vintage synthesizers, tons and tons of outboard equipment (often vintage and/or custom and rare), the tape masters, instruments, effects, stuff, wow... amazing, believe me.

Looking forward to getting there again.

In the meantime here's the full gallery of photos I took: follow this link.

See ya, mates.