Founded by Grammy Award-nominated producer Maxime Le Guil and business partner Victor Lévy-Lasne in 2010, Mix with the Masters (MWTM) has rapidly become a global leader in audio engineering education with a vast curriculum of live and online workshops hosted by some of the biggest names in the industry, including Chris Lord-Alge, Timbaland, and Hans Zimmer among others. With the program continuing to grow after a decade of success, the MWTM team has announced the startup of a new recording studio in Paris designed by global architectural acoustic consulting, design, and A/V integration firm WSDG (Walters-Storyk Design Group). The new studio will serve as their flagship location for both in-person and remote workshops as well as a home base for the growing list of international talent that have become a part of the program’s extended family.
A new ‘classic’ located in the heart of Paris
The new recording studio will be located in a multi-story building within the inner ring of Paris, utilizing two floors to serve the production and administrative needs of MWTM. Its design was influenced by Le Guil and Lévy-Lasne’s love for ‘classic’ American recording studios, an approach that will give it a unique footprint. “Our goal with this studio is to ensure that all of our visiting producers and engineers will feel right at home here and be able to showcase their best work,” explains Le Guil. “There’s a real need for a cutting-edge American-style recording studio here, and by connecting it with our offices and video suites in the same building we believe it will be a truly stimulating environment.”
The WSDG Design Team, led by Partner Dirk Noy, Partner Romina Larregina, and Co-founder John Storyk, has been tasked with ensuring acoustic excellence across the complex while also creating a flexible working environment suitable for both the program’s in-person workshops and ongoing video content creation needs. The team has already made use of innovative acoustic modeling techniques as part of the process, including NIRO, an advanced low frequency analysis tool recently developed by WSDG’s research associate REDIAcoustics. “Building a recording studio that also serves as a video production studio without sacrificing the vibe and technical needs of either requires a balance of a lot of different needs,” says Larregina. “In order to do this, we decided to take a fresh approach that will allow them to convert the space for both purposes and have maximum control.”
Maximum flexibility and versatility
The ground floor will consist of two main rooms, Studio A and Studio B. Studio A is 48m2 and will serve as the main production room, in addition to being configurable to host video shoots, events, and masterclasses seating up to 20 participants for a variety of meeting configurations. The room will also be set up for Dolby ATMOS immersive multichannel audio reproduction and video projection. Featuring an innovative elevator-mounted console, Studio A will also be easily convertible into a live room, with absorptive curtains for maximum acoustic flexibility. Studio B at 19.5m2 will serve as a secondary control room, allowing multiple sessions or classes to be held at once. “This is our first time doing such a drastic transition between a live room and a control room and it proves to be a fascinating design challenge,” says Noy. “Its successful implementation means that MWTM will be able to use it for many production configurations without any acoustical compromises.”
The studio will also include a 15m2 Drum Room, a side room for additional instrumentation, a pair of ISO Booths and a glass-roofed lounge area built into the former outdoor garden space of the building, providing a calming center to the bustle of production activity in the studio. All the rooms will have flexible connectivity to allow for multiple production setups. “We’ve been incredibly happy with how quickly WSDG has been seamlessly integrating all of our ideas for this space,” says Lévy-Lasne. “We believe that with this facility the MWTM format will open up even more avenues to enable the exchange of world-class production approaches and collaborative experience-sharing.”