Musitechnic visits Studios Piccolo

Rene Aube in the Studio A Main room

This spring several students of Musitechnic had the opportunity to visit  Studios Piccolo. Since the studio had the Main Studio A booked at 10am, we all arrived at 8:30am. The studio manager, Rene Aube, was kind enough to give us a history of Studios Piccolo and then a walk through of the various rooms from the main Studio A to the two postproduction studios. The main control room overlooks the beautiful recording room and is fully equipped with an SSL console. The postprod studios Studio B and Studio C are setup to be able to record VOs from a central VO booth. Pierre Messier, one of the founding engineers, joined us half way through the tour and was able to go into detail and reply to the technical questions of the students.

Henry Jr Godding and Pierre Messier in studio B

The students were very lucky as there was a post production session going on and the mixing engineer, Henry Jr Godding, was very gracious and generous with his time. He took a break from mixing the TV show “La Voix“ and gave a very informative breakdown of the process by playing examples of the different stems (fx, music,voice, band, different microphone mixes, full mix) and talked a bit about automation, placement for surround mixing and sources of his effects. He then was very open to questions from the students.  

Pierre Messier, Iain Booth and Rene Aube

One of our students David Pierre summed it up quite nicely:  “Visiting Studios Piccolo was a very exciting and enlightening experience. While we were at the studio we got a chance to hear about the history and development of the studio as well as some insight into the life of a studio engineer. It’s not often that we get a chance to talk to engineers, especially at the studio they work at, and really get a chance to ask them, as well as see, how much work really goes in to what they do.”