Milestone Studios, Cape Town

Murray Anderson started Milestone Studios with Patrick Lee Thorp and Zayn Adam in 1987 to record demo songs for songwriters who were contracted to Mountain Records at the time, including musicians like Robin Auld, Lesley Rae Dowling, Robbie Jansen and many others. The studio was one of the first tenants in the Old Castle Brewery building in Woodstock, and consisted of a four-track Tascam cassette recorder, a Shure SM58 microphone, a Yamaha DX5 keyboard and RX5 drum machine, and an SPX90 signal processor.

After a few years, Murray Anderson bought out his partners and moved to the UCA Building in Bloem Street, central Cape Town. This was the studio’s home until 2004. The studio expanded from a single room featuring a Soundcraft 2400 mixing console and a 24-track Otari MTR90 2-inch tape recorder to three fully-equipped ProTools rooms, one of which had a live recording room capable of recording bands and choirs.

At the end of 2004, a developer bought and demolished the building housing the studio premises. Ex-South African architect Ivan Kadey, now based in Los Angeles, designed a state-of-the-art studio, which was constructed over a period of three years. The studios are all built on the room-within-a-room principle: by a combination of floating concrete floor slabs, walls isolated from the structure by rubber sway braces, and acoustic ceilings suspended from spring hangers, the rooms are decoupled from the structure of the building. This creates superior sound isolation.

The control room in Studio 1 was constructed around the FrontWall design and shipped from Los Angeles together with the custom Waterland speaker system and other electronic components, and assembled on site. 48 microphone lines from the main music recording room and another 48 from the four isolation booths are fed into the Raindirk Symphony LN2 console, which was completely recapped on installation. The end result is a studio complex that can hold its own with anything else on the continent.

• Studios
• Recording Studios
• Film Developing
• Film Printing
• Music Production Studio
• Opname-ateljee

• Cape Town
• Johannesburg
• Durban
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