The BarCoe team
Raising the bar
A brand-new home has opened the next chapter in the story for UAE recording space BarCoe Studios
Revenues from recorded music in the Middle East and North Africa have risen dramatically in the last couple of years, with trade body IFPI recognising the region as the world’s fastest-growing market. So, it’s no surprise that a flurry of recording studios has also sprung up in recent years to capitalise on this popularity.
Opening his first studio space in the suburbs of Abu Dhabi’s Khalifa City long before this new wave of demand, BarCoe Studios owner Sean Barcoe was well ahead of the crowd. As a producer, guitarist and singer, he spent the preceding decade nurturing local talent, with the fruits of that journey most recently leading him to a new plot on the outskirts of the city and embarking on the construction of a vastly bigger studio space as the business expanded. With a background in aviation, firstly serving as a US service member and later as an instructor pilot in Abu Dhabi, Barcoe at first may seem an odd choice to become the flagbearer for the Middle East’s first fully AES67 Dolby Atmos studio.
“I have a huge passion for music but, if I’m honest, I’m not a brilliant musician,” he laughs. “And because I’ve been a pilot my whole life, I never really had much chance to pursue that passion. When I first moved to the UAE, I started a band, but we quickly realised none of us had any proper knowledge of sound. I decided to undertake an audio course and it was here I figured out that my passion for music really came from my ears. I am great at picking apart sounds – something I wish I’d known 20–30 years ago. Next, I started to learn live sound as a passion, but I was still a working pilot at the time. A little later, I met a local producer here and started working with him. He introduced me to the production side of things and everything just kept growing from there. I started recording and the rest is history.”
Barcoe opened the Khalifa City recording space back in 2014, welcoming artists for consultations on their homegrown material with the studio’s in-house producers and engineers, taking part in song-writing classes and even getting a session shot and edited for a potential music video. “Originally, the whole idea was to showcase and promote local artists, but we had been struggling with getting local venues on board,” the owner recalls. “I figured why not build my own space, taking inspiration from shows I love like Tiny Desk, Sofar Sounds, Jimmy Fallon’s The Late Show and BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge. The ultimate goal has been to open a live music venue here in Abu Dhabi that is purely dedicated to original music. It’s through venues like these that a music scene can really evolve in the city.”
Such an involved approach is a far cry from the normal practices of studios in the Arab world and the popularity of BarCoe Studios naturally led it to quickly outgrow its Khalifa City home. Furthermore, the recording industry itself was changing, spurred on by Apple’s requirement for spatial mixes in its Music Store. In early 2023, the pilot moved to an empty plot of land on the outskirts of the city and set about creating something new entirely from scratch.
“Two years ago, I was in the US and Blackbird had just built their new Atmos room,” Barcoe recalls. “It was a monumental investment, so I’d written Atmos off as something we’d never be able to do over here. But I learned that Apple had booked out the space for two years, seven days a week, mixing their entire back catalogue into Atmos. I walked away thinking, well, if they’re willing to put such a big investment into this, how long is normal stereo 2.1 going to stick around?
“Of course, it’s not going away anytime soon,” he rationalises, “but, if I’m going to spend money, I want that investment to last as long as possible and get the best bang for my buck. The future is clearly immersive and if I didn’t start getting into it now, I’d be behind the power curve. When I rented this place, we were basically handed a clean slate. The focus was to get the Atmos room up and running first. I took an empty villa and did what I could with what I had. The Atmos room is now completed and we’re finishing up our sound stage.”
Taking pride of place at the new studio is naturally the 5m x 4.3m Dolby Atmos control room, the first in the region to be fully AES67 connected. Over the years operating the previous studio, Barcoe has built up a close relationship with Sennheiser Middle East, going so far as to be the host of a number of regional events, training and product launches on behalf of the German manufacturer. Having already settled on the use of Neumann monitors for Atmos playback, this existing relationship with Sennheiser, which at the time of talks had only recently brought the Merging Technologies brand into its family, also paid dividends elsewhere. “Prior to making this decision, they’d already demonstrated they have my back and were not going to steer me wrong. Ryan [Burr]’s always just been a call away, so I contacted him and off we went. He performed all the necessary calculations and figured out the speaker placements.”
Built around a pair of Steven Slate Audio Raven MTi2 touchscreens serving as the DAW control surface and running through a Merging Technologies Anubis AD/DA and a single Universal Audio Apollo X16, two X8P, an X4 and UAD-2 Satellite audio interfaces, 13 Neumann KH 120 II monitors, supplied by the company’s local distributor Thomsun, serve as the front and rear speakers, with a further four filling in the height channels. Four Neumann KH 750 AES67 subwoofers placed behind the bespoke studio desk support both bass management and the LFE channel.
“Neumann brought Marcus Blight across from the UK support team to assist me with configuring the system,” explains Ryan Burr, head of technical sales and application engineering at Sennheiser Middle East. “He also did a onceover of the designs while still on paper before we got to the install stage. He’s done hundreds of studios like this in Europe.”
The network itself took the best part of two days just to get the audio-over-IP infrastructure up and running. “Getting everything aligned is tricky because you’ve got added latency inside the switches,” Burr notes, “and the IP element adds things that makes that alignment even more challenging. Everything needs to talk to each other at the same speed.”
While configuration of the audio-over-IP network might have created some initial headaches, the time it saves the pilot and his crew down the line is invaluable.
Moving to a fully digital setup also brings other benefits. “When I go to those big studios in the states like Blackbird, I see their desks and no doubt they’re impressive,” says Barcoe. “But I get to have four of those rooms in one by putting everything through the Apollo; I like that flexibility. I think the days of massive desks are gone. Dante has just made everything that much easier.”
Beyond the Atmos studio, BarCoe houses separate photo and video production studios, a spacious live room and a small song-writing/break-out space. Every single room is interconnected digitally when it comes to the AV. “If I want something to go to the video production studio, I can send it, without even lifting a finger,” the owner explains. “Previously, our live sound and studios desks were the same, so every time a different band came in, I’d have to get behind the desk and reroute everything. Furthermore, I kind of think it’s cool to say that from the time the signal leaves your instrument to the time it reaches your ear, it’s all digital.”
Sandwiched between the control and live room is a Vicoustic VicBooth that doubles as both a vocal suite and the backdrop for the BarCoe Booth. Set up with a Neumann U87 at the time of Pro AVL MEA’s visit, BarCoe isn’t only a fan of the German manufacturer’s monitoring solutions. He has a vast selection of Neumann mics to call on, including KM184, TLM102 and TLM107 models. For special occasions, this even extends to Neumann’s M 49 V large diaphragm condenser microphones, one of only 300 ever manufactured.
“Our last vocal booth was a converted bathroom, so this is quite the step up,” explains the owner. “The point of the BarCoe series was that I wanted to show what singers sound like off the desk and without processing. There’s no postproduction done whatsoever, which is rare. A lot of today’s music is quite overproduced, and I wanted to showcase what real talent is out there.”
The live sound stage is the other major focus for the studio and the new location has allowed the owner to scale operations up considerably. It’s roughly four times bigger than the old site. “We’ve styled everything similarly to before, with a few lighting rigs overhead and a complete stage setup,” Barcoe notes. The extra floor space allows artists to host their own live concerts inside in addition to serving as a backdrop for livestreaming. “The room has been set up so that when you turn sideways, we can build sets in here that allow us to shoot videos,” he adds.
“Just this last year we turned into a record label – I have five artists signed and here we’ll do their album release parties, their song releases or video premieres. It’s back to that same idea of finding new ways to showcase the artists.”
From the outside, you’d never guess this sleepy neighbourhood was secretly home to a 100-plus-capacity live venue, and stepping inside the surprises keep rolling. With a stage at the back of the room adorned with L-R pairs of QSC K12.2 speakers, four rows of lighting rigs overhead and plans to install a large LED wall at the rear to serve as a reconfigurable backdrop, artists have access to everything necessary to stage a professional show. New equipment servicing the space includes a 128-channel Allen & Heath Avantis digital mixing desk that replaces a rack-mounted Behringer X32 used at the previous location, and multiple channels of Sennheiser EW G4 in-ear monitors. “In the last studio, because of its size, our live sound was also controlled by the desk in the control room, so there was always an involved changeover. That’s why I got drawn into the Dante world, simply because I just got tired of crawling around under the desk.”
Livestreaming and broadcasting from inside the live room is done using a TriCaster 4k and Canon 4k film cameras running over the studio’s 10GB network. “I run dual backbones with NDI and SDI and we kind of do a blended solution,” says Barcoe. “We run our Blackmagic BMPC 4K converted to NDI so I get the look I want, and then run one BirdDog P400 PTZ for the closeup controllers.”
Sandwiched between the live and control room is another small studio setup serving as an impromptu breakout room. “We call this the song-writing room,” says the owner. “In the previous venue, I was always running into issues with clients wanting to come in and hang out – we didn’t really have a space for them beyond the foyer. Here they can sit down together, close the door to get away from everything and collaborate.”
Serving as a simplified recording setup, the room houses an Apple Mac Mini hosting Ableton and Logic Pro DAWs, connected to a Neumann MT48 two-channel interface and Neumann KH 120 and KH 750 2.1 system for monitoring. BarCoe’s capabilities have broadened considerably since first dipping its hat into audio production, and there are dedicated studios for photo and video shooting and video production. “We’re multi-faceted,” the owners claims, “and we have future plans to do virtual production.” As a result, the video production studio has been outfitted with Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve paired with a Universal Audio Apollo Twin that feeds L-R pairs of Neumann KH 310A speakers.
While the new space is still a work in progress before becoming fully operational, the Atmos studio is already online and being actively used. For the BarCoe team, the transition has been surprisingly painless. “When we moved to the new location, the change really wasn’t that big. My priority was that I didn’t want to invent an entirely new workflow, because that would hamper our productivity. The only thing we had to learn that’s completely new to us is Atmos. I ran Dante – albeit much less – in the last studio, so most of the gear just transitioned over and was expanded.”
With the paint barely drying on the walls of the new space, BarCoe’s story is just beginning a new chapter. “We haven’t even had the official opening yet, we’ve just done a tech rehearsal to make sure all cables are connected for the live space. But I have full faith in what we’ve created. The whole purpose for me here was to create a space and pay things forward to the industry and I feel we’ve done a great job in getting to where we are. I can’t wait for the doors to officially fling open.”
