Studio Focus: Parkway Studios
20 September 2016
Townsville-based guitarist Mick Lockhart has spent much of the last 20 years on the road as a guitar player for a who’s who of Australian country. However, now with a young family and a whole bunch of space on his property 15 minutes North of Townsville, he decided to build a high quality, well-proportioned studio in his backyard. 18 months ago, Parkway Studios became a reality.
The studio consists of a good-sized live room, with a nice neutral tone and ambience, a great sounding, spacious control room, with two well-isolated booths attached – one for vocals and the other for acoustic instruments and amps. There’s lots of ceiling height and the rooms are really well lit and laid out.
The studio is built around an Amek Recall RN56 console. Lockhart says, “It’s a beautiful old board that sounds fantastic, is really functional for tracking sessions and is easy to get around. I love it more and more every day that I use it.” The studio recently upgraded to a full blown Pro Tools HDX rig, with 32 ins and outs. It’s configured so up to 32 channels can go into the well spec’d iMac via a combination of console and outboard preamps, with 16 returns coming back to the console, making it easy to configure headphone mixes to the various recording spaces. Monitoring is through a pair of ADAM A7xs and a pair of Yamaha NS10s.
The microphone collection is also pretty healthy, with the familiar Neumann, AKG and Sennheiser stock you would expect (Lockhart’s beloved vintage KM84 collection is enviable), with a few selected mics by Australian mic companies Rode and OPR Microphones. The studio has a beautiful Sleishmann house kit, all miked up and ready to go, and Lockhart’s collection of amps (Matchless, various vintage Fenders and Marshalls), pedals and guitars (he estimates there’s 100 usable guitars on the property). It makes the studio a great creative hub, attracting both local and interstate visitors. Indeed, in his 18 months of operation he’s already racked up a few country number ones with Billy Bridge and Rebecca Lee Nye from Melbourne.
Lockhart adds, “Being 15 minutes north of the city (Townsville) and having a nice big block of land, it instantly feels calming for the clients when they arrive; we have a big bar area, a spa and pool-table to relax around. We record live bands, solo artists and pretty much anything else that can make a noise! “Country, Rock and Pop are our big markets with the sounds we get. We have great sight lines from both iso booths through the control room and out to the live room, and with the big analogue console it’s fast and simple to route the monitoring to our personal mixers in each recording room so you’ll always have a great sound to play along to! The studio was built with with two main things in mind; great sound and spacious comfort.”
RESPONSES