"Ergonomics is very important to us."

TYX Studios in London, UK, is a commercial studio facility for music studio recording and podcasting. We spoke to Jack Freegard from TYX Studios to find out more.

 

Thanks for taking time out of your busy day to talk with us, Jack. To get started, where did the idea of TYX come from and what did the vision look like?

 

TYX Studios came out of a need for Tileyard London to have a commercial studio facility, both for the residents to utilize and as an access point for creative businesses, agencies, production companies and creatives alike to become part of the Tileyard community without having to lease space.

 

 

The music studio production rooms are all the same size, with the same equipment. What was your process of choosing studio equipment that sounds great but is also compatible with the user’s needs?

 

We needed to create spaces that were consistent across locations and units, so if you were in studio 3 on Wednesday and then studio 7 on Thursday, sonically you were hearing the same result. We achieved this with our acoustic designer, Chris Walls of Level Acoustic Design – who is responsible for some of the world’s best sounding rooms designing us a space that not only feels good, but sounds great to monitor and record in.

We also needed the equipment to not be the blocker to efficient set up, we needed the studios to be plug and play, so we designed a workflow that includes the best class compliant interfaces, all routed through a patch and power point on the workstations that allow people to plug in their laptops with one USB C cable and get going instantly. All of our kit choices go through this thought process.

 

The Red Studio has a live room and control room. It’s nice to see a live room included in the setup!

 

We wanted the facility to have a space people could track drums, and there is a Yamaha U3 piano in there too, most people just need a good sounding room to overdub/track, we didn’t want to get into the business of having a proper large format studio room, as they are operationally heavy and to be honest – there are many good spaces in London that fill that gap – we didn’t need to fight in that space.

 

Then, the Dolby Atmos room, which also gets used as a writing room. How has Atmos been adopted by the TYX community? You decided to use the Audient ORIA as the main interface in that room, how did you decide that it was the interface for that room?

 

The Audient ORIA was chosen for the same reason the Prism LYRA 2’s were chosen for the production studios. It was the easiest interface to get an external client set up on without having to configure their DAW/ system on every session. We just have a simple USB drive with all our set up files, you can get going on an Atmos mix in that room in 5 minutes.

 

People have been using the room for a variety of spatial applications, whether its Matt Lawrence finishing off his Atmos mixes, Podcasts being mixed in Atmos for Audible or Atmos playback sessions for labels.

 

Over at the podcast studios, it’s a part of the TYX business that has massively grown over the years. What do you offer clients who have a podcast and are looking for a location to regularly create their podcast episodes?

 

We now have several high spec podcast studios that have been co-designed with DOP Josh Williams, a deeply respected cinematographer who has helped us refine the visual aspect of our podcast production over the years. That coupled with our in-house knowledge of audio, we have some of the best visual podcast spaces around.

 

We offer packages from preset and pre-lit sets but we excel at custom sets as we have a black book of some of the best talent in the industry, from producers to set designers. This has allowed us to work on Podcasts such as James Corden’s This Life of Mine, to The Apprentice Unfinished Business.

 

TYX has recently added another podcast room, so it’s becoming a real creative empire! With podcasting technology having moved on so quickly, what new tech or services have you added over the years?

 

We try and keep our operation limited to the technical and set touch points but we have a number of producers we work with who we deploy for a number of our clients. We also have a couple of very efficient and capable editing partners, so we are able to deliver a fully end to end, edited service including trailers, social cut downs and a distribution strategy.

 

In both podcast buildings you’ve got the Buso Audio Producer Rise 2 Pro as the workstation. You chose the Rise, which is the sit/stand version. This must be helpful to your engineers who usually have to sit down all day.

 

Ergonomics are incredibly important for us, and sometimes our engineers are on record for 10 hours, The Rise 2 Pro was the perfect solution, not only does the layout allow us to cater to our workflow, it’s all within reach and extremely comfortable to use.

 

It’s a very neat setup, with dual monitors and the rack space being used too.

 

We are housing a lot of routing to the rack points, so build quality and access are a big plus, the Rise 2 allows us to be flexible with our patching, power, interfaces and screens in way that no other desks on the market can provide us.

 

The desk is incredibly well made, if there was an earthquake, I am certain that the desk and everything racked in it would still be standing!

 

TYX has a great choice of music studios, podcast and creative rooms with the in-house engineers and staff all available to hire as a part of the service. What’s next for TYX?

 

Watch this space, but we have big plans for expansion over the next couple of years- which I am sure includes purchasing more of Buso Audio’s products!

Visit TYX Studio here.