Over the last 6 years, Brad Toan has forged a name for himself in both the Melbourne live performance and recoding industries as both an engineer, technician and audio equipment specialist.
Working closely with both up-and-coming and established artists, Brad will often be found behind the sounds emanating from some of Melbourne’s most (in)famous music venues.
In daylight hours Brad can be found sequestered in the technical office of Abbey Road Institute’s studios in Southbank where he serves as the Technical Manager of the state-of-the-art studios he personally designed, installed and now oversees with his trademark attention to detail and perfectionist mindset.
We caught up with Brad this week and asked him about the amazing facilities at Abbey Road Institute Melbourne:
Our students here get their hands on amazing equipment from day one. Our Studios are fitted out with world class monitoring solutions including the B&W 802’s and PMC TwoTwo 6’s, giving us consistency between our studios and edit suites.
From the beginning of our course, students start in our Avid S6 production studio. In this studio, they begin the journey of audio production. Including principles of mixing and the basics of audio signal flow. The Avid S6 is a modular control surface, it is the most advanced control surface ever built. It has been designed for flexible workflows and used throughout the world in leading studios.
ARI’s Studios here are powered by Avid Pro Tools 12 HD, Logic X and Ableton. Every student has access to Universal Audio interfaces and plugins, and plugins from other leading manufacturers including, Slate Digital, Mcdsp, Waves, Izotope, Native Instruments.
Our students move into the analogue world on the beautiful API 1608 recording console. This studio has been fitted out with the who’s who of analogue outboard processing including units from Universal Audio, SSL, Shadow Hills, Empirical Labs, TC Electronic and Heritage Audio. This is an amazing recording and mixing space, the API 1680 has a beautiful sound. Students in this space learn the fundamentals through to advanced analogue workflows and patching.
Students at ARI also have access to a huge microphone list including microphones from Coles, Neumann, AEA, Royer, Shure, Sennheiser, Audix, AKG and Beyerdynamic.
“We at Abbey Road Institute are very proud of our Equipment List and our facility.”
Brad will be hosting the afternoon session of our upcoming Study For A Day opportunity Abbey Road Institute on September 23rd.