FEATURE STUDIO PROFILE Te 130sqm Studio A was remodelled in 2008


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POWERPLAY STUDIOS


Back to the Beginning L


Jake Young looks into an 80s facility that has undergone refurbishment and reinvention to bring its facilities up to scratch for modern users.


ocated in Maur, Switzerland, Powerplay Studios reinvented itself last summer after 30 years as one of the country’s top recording facilities. Te studio has been in operation since 1983, but it had been operating on a small level and without all the residential services in recent years. A decision was made that all the rooms were needed to return the facility to its heyday of the 1980s. Powerplay now has four studios, between five and seven beds to offer, a lounge with a new pool table, and a totally new kitchen. In January the refurbishment of the MCI JH-500 Series desk in Studio B was finished. Replacing it with an API console was a possibility, however the facility stuck to the concept of the house. “Everybody has an API console, but keeping this MCI console is quite interesting,” says Christian Müller, studio manager, who joined Powerplay in 1997 as a runner,


28 May 2014


grew as an engineer, quit in 2000 to study jazz piano, and came back last summer. “We have an MCI console and an SSL console. We stick to that because that’s what the house is, that’s what we are, and that’s what we learned here.” Also new to the facilities, Studio D is a mastering, pre-production, vocal, post-production, radio, and mixing suite. Christian Beusch, the co-founder of audio post facility Magnetix Studio, designed it. Studio C is kept by mastering engineer Ursli Weber, who is also Powerplay’s analogue technician. Te studio is used for digitisation most of the time. “Studio C looks a bit trashy,” says Müller. “But it sounds great so at the end of the day that doesn’t matter.” Powerplay is owned by Jurghe


Peterhans who, together with UK guitarist Jim Duncombe, launched the whole facility in 1983 after the duo had outgrown their previous MCI-equipped studio in Horgen,


Switzerland. Te situation now is that Müller and Reto Muggli, the studio’s chief engineer, are running the facility in the name of the Powerplay Music & Studios association. “Jurghe had acquired a parcel of land in Maur, an attractive lakeside (Lake Greifensee) then-rural location outside Zurich and he wanted to build – from the ground-up – a combined multi-room studio facility as well as an apartment for himself,” says David Hawkins of Eastlake Audio, who designed and built Powerplay. “Te Maur location’s only drawback was its proximity to a Swiss air force base from which appallingly noisy F15 or similar jets overflew frequently on exercises. Te construction of the new Powerplay building shell therefore required much more built-in isolation than would have been the case in another location. Ironically, as the city of Zurich’s boundaries have marched outwards over the years since Powerplay’s construction, the air force


base has had to cease to operate its noisy planes around Maur. Eastlake’s involvement was principally with the two main recording rooms A and B. Te construction material for the fit- out of the two studios was sent from the UK by road together with the four-man Eastlake expat crew who completed the construction on-site well within the allocated timeframe.”


RAISING THE ROOF


Eastlake refurbished Studio A in 2008, lifting the ceiling and removing the windows between the live room and the dry room. Te live room is now one big space, but drums can still be moved for wet or dry sounds. It has a rig with lights and a PA system where live sessions can be recorded. “Following Jurghe’s recent (and quite inspired) idea to make the Studio A space a combined live performance/recording facility, Eastlake returned two operatives to


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