Renowned producer and engineer, Eddie Kramer acted as a consultant on the project and recommended SSL's System T production platform.
Internationally renowned concert and lecture venue Massey Hall in Toronto recently completed a massive revitalisation project that included the construction of the adjoining seven-story Allied Music Centre. The new tower houses performance and production spaces for the historic 129-year-old hall, including the Deane Cameron Recording Studio, which opened in September 2023 and is equipped with a Solid State Logic System T S500 64-fader console.
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The new seven-story building expands Massey Hall’s talent support services, offering rehearsal rooms, artist dressing rooms, and other amenities. New public spaces include a lobby, lounge, and new performance venues, including the 500-capacity TD Music Hall on the fourth floor and the 100-seat 6th Floor Theatre. “My role was to oversee all technical aspects of the entire project and to connect all of these spaces so that we could record audio and video in a high-quality way from anywhere at any time,” says Doug McKendrick, Vice President, Production & Technology at The Corporation of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall, the not-for-profit charitable organisation that operates the concert halls.
McKendrick and his staff had a short list of requirements for the mixing console to be installed in the main control room of the new seventh-floor studio complex, which is named in honour of Massey Hall’s late CEO, Deane Cameron. Primarily, the console needed to accommodate fast-paced events in Massey Hall as well as easily switching between live shows in the Allied Music Centre’s various venues and studio recording projects in the new production facility. “We needed it to be a digital console and we needed to be able to recall fast,” he says.
Veteran producer and engineer Eddie Kramer (Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin) who lives in the Toronto area, consulted on the studio project, and recommended the Solid State Logic System T production platform, McKendrick adds. “Eddie has been a real friend of the project and a real mentor to me.”
“System T is so clever, so slick and so flexible—and it does sound bloody marvellous,” Kramer enthuses. The new console is also easy to learn and operate, he says: “It has a certain logic that anybody who has sat behind a console will get fairly quickly.”
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