Studio sense

October 2009 saw the formal arrival of Geet Audiocraft on the Mumbai recording scene – a unique studio serving the city’s thriving music industry. The facility is the brainchild of Jatin Sharma, a star of India’s recording community, and is the latest in a line of enterprising studios.

An electronics engineering wiz kid, who grew up in Assam – a state in the northeast of India – Jatin Sharma has made Mumbai his home over the past 16 years. Assam has a rich culture of music and – having grown up with music around him – he learned to play the guitar and also worked in a studio as a recording engineer for four years. As a youth he had dabbled in electronics from a very early age and mastered many of the principles that would help shape his future career.

It was in 1993 that Mr Sharma first came to Mumbai and he quickly started working in commercial recording studios, including Kumar Sanu’s Musician Studio and Raju Singh’s Joshua. He was one of the first engineers in India to work on the Soundscape DAW and, being a musician, soon realised that his latent talent for composing was being stifled if he worked as a recording engineer for others. As a result, he yearned for a place of his own, where he could compose and work at his own pace and on his own terms. His experiments of remixing tracks at home were proving so good that he was rewarded with his first studio in Mumbai at Andheri East in 1996. In spite of its inconvenient location, his abilities as an engineer attracted clients from far and wide, and managed to make the studio successful for 12 years. In fact, it was so popular that it is behind more than 90 per cent of all the remix albums currently on the Indian market, and is used by DJs from all over Mumbai.

Mr Sharma next set his sights on setting up a new studio in Andheri West, a locality that is home to the majority of Mumbai’s studios. After one-and-a-half years’ effort and investment, his new studio – Geet Audiocraft – is finally ready. Located in an industrial estate, it occupies 350-sq-feet of the building’s ground floor. Clever use of the available space have created a cosy studio that is compact, yet packs a punch that can give other, bigger studios a run for their money.

Wooden panels and wooden flooring give the studio a rustic feel – it is airy and bright, and the live room can accommodate four or five musicians. Closer inspection of the walls in the live area reveals bass traps built into the panelling and acoustic treatment on the wall. The bass traps are full-range Helmholtz diffusers and control the dispersion of acoustical energy over the entire frequency range. An assortment of microphones, including models from Neumann, Sennheiser and beyerdynamic are available to the engineer, and artists readily feel comfortable in a space that also delivers a very good recorded ambience.

Moving to the control room, it too is spacious and carries on the all-wood theme. It is well lit and the two rooms share a huge glass window – which is more like a French window than the usual control room window – that adds to the feeling of spaciousness. Cleverly designed wooden furniture houses the equipment, with everything placed ergonomically. At eye-level above the table is a big LCD video monitor for the DAW. ‘We have realised that there is no real need for large-format multichannel consoles any more,’ chief engineer Abani Tanti explains. ‘Most of the time, a couple of channel strips are all that is required since everything happens “in the box” nowadays. So we decided to offer our clients the best channel strips we could lay our hands on – we have here a Neve 8801 channel strip coupled to a Neve 8816 summing mixer and a Neve 8804 fader control. We also have an API 7600 channel strip for those music directors who like the tone it offers. For mic preamps and compressors, we have the Amek 9098, the Neve Dual 33609J, the Toft Audio ATC-2 and a Joemeek Photo-optical oneQ.’

Complementing this impressive line-up, effects processing duties are shared between a TC Electronic M5000 and Lexicon 300L. All of these units are neatly installed in the ergonomically designed table, which also has a clever air-conditioning ducting system incorporated within it. A further unique feature is the DAW set-up – Mr Sharma has long been a Nuendo user, but with the widespread use of Pro Tools, he has had to make sure clients are able to use their preferred system. Many of them debate which of the two systems is better – a Mac with a Pro Tools or a PC running a Nuendo – and Mr Sharma has come up with a solution for all of them. At the flick of a switch, the monitor, keyboard and mouse are transferred from controlling a Mac running a Pro Tools HD 3 system to a high-end PC with a Nuendo set-up. The two computers share the same keyboard, mouse and monitor and this option gives clients complete freedom to work on either system without any repatching. A Lynx Aurora 16 I/O is the studio’s I/O device and is configured such that both the Pro Tools v7.4 and Nuendo v4 systems can record identical 16 inputs simultaneously if required. Both DAWs are equipped with a wealth of plug-ins, and picture monitoring (if required for scoring background music) is done on an LCD screen mounted above the DAW monitor.

Main stereo monitoring is courtesy of a Genelec 1037A system, which is flush mounted into the front wall of the control room. There is no subwoofer as the 1037A gives good low-end definition without, while for close-field monitoring, Mr Sharma has a variety of options – these include Genelec 1030A, Genelec 1031A, DynaudioAcoustics BM6, Yamaha NS10M and Roland DS-90. Recording engineers rarely have such a wide choice.

Mr Sharma is ably supported in his latest venture by IT specialist Pranav Saikia, who takes care of the computing needs of the studio. The computer that hosts the Nuendo DAW is no ordinary PC, instead it is a monster of a machine running on an S5000 motherboard, loaded with Dual Quad Core Extreme GMP 3.16GHz Intel Xeon processors with 4Gb of RAM and sporting internal drives running at 10,000 rpm. On top, there is Windows XP 64 bit OS.

The studio is primarily designed for music and song recording for the Hindi film industry that is based in Mumbai, and A-list music directors like Sajid Wajid, Lalit Pandit, Nikhil Kamat, Preetam and Anand Raj Anand have become regular visitors. ‘Jatin has custom designed this studio from end-to-end,’ says recording engineer Nobo (Navjyoti Medhi), who works in the studio along with senior engineer Abani Tanti. ‘A music director who wishes to work here can choose whatever mics he wants, what DAW he wants to work on and what close-field monitors he wants to track and mix his music. No studio in Mumbai can offer these choices. This studio can be tailored to suit any music director’s preferences.’

‘This is a technician’s dream studio,’ adds Abani Tanti. ‘Very soon, we plan to add a Logic DAW, along with a Manley Slam mic preamp and an Avalon compressor. Our main goal is to provide very good sound quality.’

Mr Sharma’s straightforward, rather shy character belies the expertise and enthusiasm that has gone into creating such a capable and flexible facility. He is responsible for aspects of the design ranging from the acoustics of the entire studio to the air-conditioning ducting. The entire studio lighting is also his design and the LED panels – which can be remote controlled to achieve the desired level of light required – were both designed and fabricated by him. Mr Sharma has carefully selected the equipment needed, and bought only those things he knows would be used. The entire studio equipment can be powered up by the use of just a single button, which automatically switches on all the equipment in a predetermined sequence to manage the power supply and protect the loudspeakers. The process is microprocessor controlled – and was again designed by the studio’s owner. Even the XLR panels mounted in the walls are designed and made by him, as are the custom designed headphone distributor panels.

Geet Audiocraft is not one of Mumbai’s big studios in terms of the floor area it offers but it more that makes up for by the ingenuity of its design and engineering. ‘Actually, a studio does not depend on its size, it depends on the equipment and the creativity of the engineer who works there,’ says Mr Sharma. ‘If you can play with your gear and create good music, then you have achieved your goal.’

In Geet Audiocraft, good music is certain to be created.

Geet Audiocraft, India: +91 22 2834 7421

www.geetaudiocraft.com