It is with great sadness to see legendary Cape Town Studios B&S close it’s doors for good. B&S have been a Cape Town staple for high end audio production for a serious amount of time. First opened in 1981 by Jerry Barnard and Eric Smith, it has been Cape Towns premier recording studio for the past 32 years. With a reputation that has secured B&S contracts with some of the worlds leading brands and a plethora of award winning productions B&S have always set the standard for high end South African audio production. Clients range from Johnny Walker to Lamborghini with legendary South African producer/engineer Jerry Barnard at the Read more »
Check it out! Our brand new promo video. Special thanks to Dan Mace at If not why not media for directing and editing the video. Bring in the you tube hits!!
In the next three articles I am going to be discussing some techniques to get the best possible drum recordings at home. This can be a difficult prospect in a fully equipped recording studio let alone in your lounge or garage, but there are some useful techniques that can be used to improve your home recordings. One very important thing that is often overlooked is Read more »
The second day of the Red Bull studio workshops went underway yesterday as part of the build up to the Cape Town Electronic Music Festival hosted at the V&A Waterfront. The festival itself will be running over this weekend and should be an amazing experience for the more electronically minded of us. The discussions last night focused on a few different aspects of the electronic music industry with a focus on local talent. South Africa possesses a truly underground electronic music scene that Read more »
New developments complete in the cosy little corner that used to be studio 1. Studio 1 was always a well equipped studio, sporting the famous Mackie 8 Buss recording console, NS-10 monitoring and a pretty serious looking rack box. For years students have enjoyed the the benefits of this top end project studio setup. A full featured 48 channel analogue mixer provides great diversity when considering mixing and recording options. And the accuracy of the legendary Yamaha NS-10 studio monitors makes it a favorite with mix engineers.
The added addition came in the form of a good sized dedicated tracking area, specifically designed and treated for drum and guitar recording. Able to operate independently from the main live room and fitted with enough Read more »
Always good to hear what our Cape Audio College graduates are doing. The Cape Audio College has been producing quality sound engineers for the past 16 years. Our graduates are working in all aspects of sound production in all corners of the globe. This time we catch up with Kyle Sanders who has been “making waves” with his band Wolftown. We thought we would catch up with him to see how things are going.
Richard: So Kyle, what have you been upto since you graduated from The Cape Audio College?
Kyle: Well since i graduated, i took a year off and joined The Ragdolls. We toured, played alot of shows, toured some more and then we hit the studio’s
Richard: When did you change the bands name from Ragdolls to Wolftown and why? Read more »
Andrew Rawbone-Viljoen, an ex-graduate from our Cape Audio College Diploma in Sound Engineering, finished his time with us seven years ago, in 2004. We catch up with him now, doing well, and busy recording some great SA bands; currently working with Watershed and Macstanley(formally known as Flat Stanly). After a lot of hard work and continuous practice, Andrew now co-owns Digital Forest Studio with his brother, Jeremy, who takes care of the marketing aspect at the studio. Cape Audio College recently headed out to Klein Constantia, to ‘Huis in Bos’ farm, where Digital Forest Studio lies nestled amongst vineyards and mountains. Read more »
Every now and then we are going to post some of the more memorable assignments handed in by our students. This time round our release is in the form of a radio advert produced by some of our first year students Tammy Pretorius and Tina Hansen. This is a good example of the students first assignment and was particularly memorable due to the hilarious BooYaa sections. Read more »
Before I get started I just want to reinforce something – sometimes a reduction in parameters actually generates more creativity. Being aware of a set of limitations, or guidelines, can actually allow you much more creative control over your final mix. This could mean limiting the amount of effects that you allow yourself to use, or a more obvious one is to only use a particular set of effects that suits the genre or style. If you have the permission to do it, perhaps editing tracks or even muting/removing “surplus” instrumentation or vocal is the first step.
Approach-wise, ideally you want all aspects of a song to reinforce together and create a stronger impact, and if you aren’t aware of what you’re doing, it’s very possible (in fact more common than you think) to get a generally nice balance of instruments that somehow doesn’t “gel”. You can hear everything, but it lacks the emotional impact.
So here’s some ideas to think about next time you’re mixing a song. There are certainly many more ideas and concepts to experiment with than just this list, but I stopped myself before the post became a novel. Read more »
News | Richard Harriman January 11, 2013 | 
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