Malaysia’s Wasp Studios is aptly named using the initial letters of its four founding members; Walid Omar, Andrea Duarte, Segaran Subbiah and Paul Morrison. There is plenty else having begun life in a quaint single-storey bungalow in 2001, it has gone on to establish itself as one of the top five ranked recording studios in Malaysia for music and audio post-production in the advertising industry.
Creative Director Paul Morrison is the musical genius behind the exponential success of Wasp Studios. He hails from the United Kingdom and has, since arriving in Malaysia 12 years ago, built an incredible reputation for his music composition, soundscapes and musical arrangement, and has also bagged numerous awards in the advertising and music industries. Among these awards are several prestigious Kancil Advertising Awards, the Malaysian Video Awards (MVA) and the Malaysian Music Industry Awards for original music composition and for best sound design work over the years. Paul also plays the drums and has often been seen performing on stage with the likes of Reshmonu, one of Malaysia’s most popular singer songwriter as well as Steve Thornton, a world-class percussionist, who is often seen in Sadao Watanabe’s entourage.
Managing Director Walid Omar has an extensive and impressive background in audio post-production, having worked with the likes of the BBC, Discovery Channel, Disney, Buena Vista and Warner Brothers in the USA. Walid ensures the continuous business development, personnel management and keeps abreast with providing high production standards for all of WASP Studios’ services and offerings, to all its clients.
Of the two other key founding members, Marketing Director Andrea Duarte is at the helm of client relations in WASP Studios. Having 15 years of prior experience in the advertising industry, she forged dynamic long-term working relationships with major advertising agencies leading to WASP’s exponential success within a few short years. Lastly, Technical Director Segaran Subbiah maintains the efficiency of the multi-room facility ensuring little or no-downtime in any of its studios. With an extensive electronics background while having worked in Motorola’s research and development department, Segaran has been working the music and audio industry for many years. His credentials include working as technical manager for Synchrosound Studios and WowFM. Segaran’s passion, dedication and attention to detail has resulted in his own hand-made custom-built tube microphone preamplifiers and a vocal Class-A tube compressor used throughout the many production rooms in WASP Studios. Apart from maintaining the in-house facilities, Segaran also heads WASP Tech, an affiliate company providing turnkey systems integration and complete maintenance for a variety of other facilities and recording studios in Malaysia.
WASP Studios’ large new double-storey facility houses a large recording and surround sound mixing control room with its own isolated vocal booth on the upper floor, fitted with superior-sounding ADAM active studio monitors on custom-built lead-impregnated heavy duty speaker stands, a ProTools HD2 Accel system which resides in an Apple Intel Core 2 Duo desktop, Digidesign’s Control|24 control surface and a separate Apple G5 desktop system outfitted with a Blackmagic analog video capture and playback card to run Gallery’s Virtual VTR software; a video-assist software system that is synchronized via SMPTE to provide frame-accurate random-access video without placing any strain to the digital audio workstation. For surround sound encoding and decoding, they use Neyrinck’s award-winning Dolby Digital AC-3 plug in for ProTools HD.
The facility also houses a MIDI composing, recording and stereo mixing control room with a medium-sized booth that isolates a drumset perfectly on the ground-floor of the facility. This room is equipped with a ProTools HD2 Accel system with another Virtual VTR system and a Mackie D8B digital mixing console. Upstairs, there are an additional four MIDI composing and music arrangement rooms equipped with Apple Intel Core 2 Duo desktops running the latest Logic Pro 8 software. All rooms’ digital audio workstations are linked to a shared server-based storage, primarily to share projects and files between rooms as well as to accommodate WASP Studios’ MIDI sound samples as well as their large collection of sound effects libraries. Almost all audio, music, video and MIDI data are available instantaneously as random-access files throughout the facility, which in effect, drives its operators in the individual rooms to focus more on their creativity and work more efficiently.
Having a great team is crucial to the continued development and success of services offered by any studio facility. As most of WASP's directors come from the engineering and composing background, they still take a very hands-on approach to their work and anyone will still find them in the studios everyday, actively composing and mixing work for their clients. Creating the right team is a process that requires nurturing, belief, trust and a strong sense of commitment from each and every one. Their biggest assets are the team at WASP Studios and their calculated investments in the highest technological equipment to ensure effectiveness and efficiency at all times. This synergy ensures their continued success in the long-haul.
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