Studio Focus: Wick Studios
17 June 2015
Glenn Scott and Dan Corless have made a rock solid commitment to the Melbourne and Australian music industry at The Wick. So solid, it’s in bricks and mortar. The pair had taken over the old Dane Centre rehearsal business in Melbourne’s Brunswick area. A old rock dog haunt, that had its heyday in the ’80s — John Farnham auditioned for Little River Band there, and Billy Thorpe used to rehearse in The Auditorium.
“We had The Wick studio next door,” said Scott. “And the bloke that was running Dane kept complaining and saying he wanted to get out. So we called his bluff. We put an offer in front of him and said, ‘there you go, sign this, and you can have the money by five pm today.’ And he did.”
They cleaned up the place, renamed it The Wick to link with the studio brand, and turned the business around. But it still had old Peavey PAs, and was only getting by. Then two years ago the place flooded, damaging everything badly enough to weigh up the costs of walking away or reinventing the business. They chose the latter, rebranding the complex Wick Studios.
The first step: Building rooms that actually worked for rehearsals. “Most rehearsal rooms aren’t actually soundproofed,” reckons Scott. “So it turns into a war of attrition.” They wanted to build rooms that would stop the war, and ended up with 15 studio live rooms. Each room has fully-floating double walls with an air gap, and each wall is built with two layers of 16mm Firecheck plaster with Green Glue between, and every sheet is sealed with Mastic. Acoustician Andrew Steel from Ultrafonic was behind the room design, treatment, and fresh air intakes. “And our foreman, Gianni, managed the build meticulously,” said Scott.
The slab is still one piece, but walking from room to room, even with a cranked system next door, only a tiny amount of sub bass carries through the structure. Walls and floors are all hard, clean surfaces. To demonstrate just how dramatic an improvement the treatment had made, they left one room untreated for the launch party: like walking between a well-defined live room and the inside of a concrete silo.
Although the metal bands used to love the raw Peavey power, Scott and Corless decided to over-spec the rooms with much louder and cleaner modern systems from Group Technologies. Across the rooms there are a range of boxes from Nexo, Coda Audio, Quest and RCF, with companion subs. The systems are unbelievable for a rehearsal space, and show The Wick’s commitment to not only local artists, but demanding professional outfits too. The two large rooms can accommodate a full band and monitor rig for pre-tour rehearsals. If that’s not enough, the main studio live room next door is big enough to house an orchestra, and can be used for full-scale festival rehearsals — Corless has even hung a line array in there. They also bought a container load of Midas consoles, one for each room, which all have a Firewire port so bands can plug in a laptop and record pre-production rehearsals.
In it’s own corner of Wick Studios is another recording studio with a Tascam M-series analogue console in it, PSI Audio monitors, a handful of outboard, and its own medium-sized live room. “In the ’90s, you had to beg to get into a studio. If they trusted you, they’d give you a midnight-to-dawn session deal. It let you bring in work, bands could afford to record, and that’s how we all cut our teeth. No one really does that anymore because most studios are owner-operated. So the mentor process is broken. We’d love it if this was full of young guys learning 24/7.”
It’s taken over a year to build, but the results are worth it. There’s an entirely new common area big enough to host acoustic gigs with local beer on tap and a coffee machine. Free Wi-Fi throughout, a huge photography cyclorama next door, printing and photocopying services, and best of all, a team of professionals on the case, including American music industry veteran Lynn Robnett. Over the last eight years she’s worked for a management company called Panacea, owned by Eric Gardner, who looks after clients from John Lydon to Paul Schaeffer and The Hoff. Robnett still works with Gardner to manage Sean Kirk, an Australian musician she signed to the company who’d recorded his record at The Wick, and Corless mixed live. Her plan: “I’m going to be developing talent and try get people signed overseas.” She’s living around the corner in Brunswick. Two days in and she’s already got a bike with two baskets on it. Right now, she’s on the lookout for young country girls looking for record deals. “They need a female Keith Urban over there!”
So if you’re serious, it’s worth giving her a call. Even just to ask questions like, ‘What’s the Hoff really like?’ She says there’s a hunger for Aussie talent in America, and the cross-Pacific collaboration ideas are coming thick and fast. As well as recording and sending artists over to the US, a number of American producers have already shown interest in taking up residencies at The Wick to catch the talent first hand.
It’s exciting times, and good to see such large-scale investment in something so useful for the music industry. We’ll feature the completely refurbished main recording studio in another issue.
23-25 Leslie St, Brunswick
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