Toulouse, France (July 24, 2025)—Studio owner, multi-instrumentalist, engineer, producer, and film and TV composer Olivier Cussac has launched Studio Condorcet in a new location with a new mixing console.
Several years ago, Cussac received news that Studio Condorcet, a recording facility founded near the center of Toulouse in the 1970s, which he had owned since 2007, had been scheduled for demolition as part of an urban renewal project. In January 2025, he relaunched Studio Condorcet with a multi-purpose room housing a new Harrison 32Classic 32-channel analog console, the first of several planned spaces at the new location just outside Toulouse.
The large mix room, where Cussac is surrounded by guitars, keyboards and other noise-making devices and which offers views of the countryside through a large window, was acoustically designed by Camille Hamel and Jean Marc Vernaudon to double as a recording space. The high-ceilinged room beyond the front wall is currently being converted into a 430-square-foot tracking space for bands or ensembles of up to 15 musicians.
“As a film score composer, I have to work in various musical styles, from orchestral to jazz to electro to every kind of pop, rock and funk styles,” Cussac comments. “As a record producer, I really focus on the intensity in music, no matter the genre. The 32Classic can handle anything; a heavy rock band like Slift, all the way to a fully acoustic project.”
Indeed, Cussac, who worked on the last Slift album at the studio’s previous location, has been working with the band on pre-production for its next project on the new Harrison console. “All the drums went through the 32Classic mic preamps and I can tell you—they rock! I was used to miking drums with vintage mic pre’s and the 32Classic has the same punch and density.”
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He continues, “I’m not an EQ guy so I mostly rely on my favorite inductor-based outboard gear, and the proportional Q on the Harrison gives me some of the same feeling. I dig it! The summing adds depth and width, with lots of headroom. The master bus transformer option on the bus master is subtle but can add some mojo to some mixes.”
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Cussac’s first project in the new space was mixing an album, OK, for French trumpet player Daoud. “Fifteen tracks mixed in five days with no recall and no mods,” he reports. He has since completed albums by Julii Sharp and Words of Sara at the new facility.
