The Airlab is a professional audio mastering studio originally based in South London, which has now moved to The Pierce Studios in Hammersmith. Owned and run by experienced mastering engineer Jerome Schmitt, 2015 saw the studio refitted, refurbished and acoustically fine-tuned, with the help of Phil Pyatt of Munro Acoustic. We spoke to Jerome to find out more about The Airlab, the vision behind it and his future plans for the studio.
Jerome has been a mastering engineer for over 15 years. His clients include Alt-J, Sony PS3, Extreme Music, Ninja Tune, as well as the new Space album mixed by Jon Withnall, and many more. However, his career started in 1993 as lead guitarist and producer in the rock band Corpus Delicti. After producing the band’s three albums and touring the globe, Jerome moved to Millennium Studio in the South of France to hone his mixing and mastering skills. He also established himself as a writer and producer of soundtracks for TV and film as well as a sound designer for video projects. In 2001, Jerome moved to London and spent five years working in a busy post production facility in Soho, mastering on Sadie as well as sound editing and mixing for broadcast TV and DVD authoring (C4, BBC, Sky). Finally, in 2006, Jerome opened his own mastering studio, The Airlab (previously named Air Mastering) to provide independent artists with an affordable but high end mastering service.
In an interview with MusicTech last year, Jerome described the studio setup in more detail, “The Airlab is built around a custom Crookwood mastering console that allows you to plug any analogue piece through the chain in any order. It also has a fantastic monitoring section that allows you to match monitoring levels from different sources, pre- or post-mastering, for example. It’s super-transparent and doesn’t add anything to the sound. It was an essential piece of kit for us, as every decision is critical and the flexibility and transparency of the Crookwood is fantastic compared to other consoles.â€
“The other ‘essential’ is the converters. There are so many great-sounding converters out there, but after a lot of testing I went for the Prism ADA-8XR for its sonic solidity, great flexibility and eight ins/eight outs, which is useful in my setup.â€
Monitoring in the studio is via a PMC IB1S system with a Bryston 4BST amplifier chosen after further testing and taking the size and sound of the room into consideration. These midfields “were the best match”, Jerome explains. “Not only do they sound neutral, they also give a very accurate representation of the whole spectrum. You can hear things that are often hidden in the mix room and, as a standard in mastering houses, they transcribe extremely well.”
Other favourite items include a Maselec MEA-2 mastering equaliser which is in use 99.9 per cent of the time, a classic Sontec 250 EQ, as well as compressors/dynamics from Maselec, CraneSong, Avalon and Thermionic Culture which can be inserted “to raise the level with a nice touch before limiting.â€
Mastering clients wishing to use The Airlab are welcome to attend sessions in person, or they can use a comprehensive Online Mastering service which Jerome established when online mastering was quite a new idea. “There was definitely some room for a serious online facility to become available to a large, independent scene like ours. The Airlab offers the same standard you’d get from any big-name mastering studio at a fraction of the price. We work with a lot of independent artists, because they like our personal approach and our sound.â€
The Airlab also offer their own Online Mixing service with Jon Withnall on board as mix engineer. With over ten years’ studio experience and a further five years prior to this spent as a professional musician, Jon has developed an impressive client list and worked on many award winning records that have sold over 30 million units worldwide.
Jerome told us, “The Online Mixing Studio has been carefully put together around a Neve console with a hand picked collection of boutique outboard compressors, EQs and reverbs; all the best tools to give your recordings shine and separation whilst retaining their punch and bounce. To put it simply, our goal is to offer top-end sound quality to the independent world and to encourage independent artists to use skilled engineers to get their music to a level of sound quality that they might not have thought accessible to them.â€
To find out more about The Airlab or to make a booking enquiry please contact Jerome via the studio’s listing here.
