WESTPHAL COLLEGE
With a 32-channel Rupert Neve Designs 5088 console, the new studio is possibly the most advanced recording operation in town.
Drexel’s Music Industry program is turning up the volume.
As of last fall, future music producers, audio engineering and music executives being trained in the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design’s Music Industry program have access to the most technologically advanced recording studio of its kind in Philadelphia.
The $4 million facility at One Drexel Plaza boasts a state-of-the-art, 1,500-square-foot recording studio, two large electronic music labs, audio archive space and a small production studio designed by Wal-ters Story Design Group. It was conceived by faculty in the program, in collaboration with the acoustic design team behind Jimi Hendrix’s legendary Electric Lady Studios in New York and made possible by sup-port from Thomas R. Kline, and Drexel alumni Virginia S. and Richard A. Rose Jr. ’84, Cynthia C. and Ray Westphal ’59 and Monica and Howard M. Benson ’80.
When the Music Industry program established MAD Dragon Re-cords, one of the nation’s first student-run record labels, in 2004, the school also opened a 700-square-foot studio designed by Assistant Pro-fessor Ryan Schwabe. Since then the program has expanded into six other studio spaces and two electronic music labs, in which MAD Drag-on has produced 32 titles from 17 artists over the last 13 years.
“This new studio has the best acoustics of all of our spaces,” says Ryan Moys, a Grammy award-winning engineer who will serve as the studio’s manager. “Having our labs, archives, student lounge area and two studios centralized also provides a home for our program and will hopefully contribute to more collaboration between students.”