Recording Studio

Viking Studio is a spacious three room recording studio on Diablo Valley College campus which houses a live room, control room, and iso room for professional level recording, mixing, and mastering. We feature a hybrid analog and digital production environment featuring the best mics, preamps, converters and analog boards used in music production. We also offer a digital production station for “in the box” producing for electronic music, beat making, and film scoring. Our aim is to provide the aspiring musician, producer, or audio professional with the best quality hands on experience in audio production and access to cutting edge music technology.

To gain access to this studio students must enroll in the MUSX-124 or 125 courses which are intro and advanced studio recording classes. These classes are a core component of our Music Industry Studies certificate and AA degrees.

Visiting Viking Studio

Viking Studio is located on Diablo Valley College campus on the ground floor below the library building. Enter the campus through Viking Drive. The best parking is lot three, directly in front of the of the Library. Here’s the location on Google maps.

Live room

An excellent environment for recording a live band, singer songwriter, or classical piano, our live room features everything you need to create such as a drum kit, baby grand piano, and guitar and bass amps. We also feature hear back headphone mixers so the performing musician can dial in the perfect multi-channel headphone mix.

Gear list

  • Yamaha Drum Kit
  • Yamaha Baby Grand Piano
  • Fender Guitar amps
  • Hear back headphone mixers
  • 24 channel studio tie line panel
  • Acoustically optimized environment treated with Schroeder diffusers, skyline diffusers, and absorption.
  • Gobos (movable sound isolation panel)

Control Room

Viking Studio control roomOur control room is a hybrid analog and digital production environment which features a Toft ATB 24 channel analog mixing console and Neumann monitors and sub. We offer an array of analog preamps, analog patch bay, outboard gear, and plug-ins. Additionally we have a dedicated electronic music production station for film scoring, beat making, and composing.

Gear list

  • Neuman monitors and matched sub
  • Toft 24 channel Analog mixing Console
  • Large analog patch bay to route signal
  • Outboard gear for mixing
  • Analog Mic Preamps by Grace Designs, API, Neve, AEA, Millennia, and Shadow Hill.
  • Apollo X16 and X8P Interfaces, virtual preamp emulations

Recording SoftwareRecording isolation room

  • Pro Tools Ultimate
  • Ableton Live
  • Logic Pro

Audio Plug-ins

  • Universal Audio Everything Bundle
  • Fab filter plug-ins
  • Sound Toys
  • iZotope plug-ins
  • Film scoring station with a large collection of industry standard sample libraries such as Komplete Kontrol keyboard, Komplete Ultimate, Audio Modeling SWAM all in bundle, and Cinematic Studio Strings.

Iso Room

Large isolation room with three windows for line of site visibility to live room and control room. The iso room is used to record cleanly without microphone bleed. With a larger group recording you may wish to isolate a vocalist, soloist, horn section or guitar amp.

Microphone Locker

Featuring the industry standard mic collection you will have direct hands on access to Neumann, AKG, AEA, Sennheiser, Schoeps, Bayer Dynamic and many more microphones for recording.