Engineer Cribs: Inside Matt Weiss's $800,000 Studio (Akon's Head Engineer)
Engineer Cribs · studio tour
Matt Weiss is Akon’s head engineer and he built an $800,000 studio in Miami with no console in it. On purpose. When I asked him why, the answer was the most useful thing anybody said to me all year.
The build
$800K
Two rooms, Dolby Atmos, a floor that is one giant bass trap · and zero dollars on a console
Full episode on YouTube: Engineer Cribs — Matt Weiss, The Good Days (Miami). Timestamps for every room are in the description.
I flew to Miami and filmed inside The Good Days with Matthew Weiss — head engineer for Akon and Konvict Muzik, credits with Ozuna, Becky G, Damian Marley, Nicki Minaj, Chris Brown, Royce da 5’9”. Below is everything he showed me: the rack, the tricks, the Atmos room and the gear he actually reaches for. Timestamps link straight into the video.
The $200,000 question
Walk into Studio A and the first thing you notice is what is missing. No big desk. No rows of faders. For a room at this level that looks like a mistake, so I asked.
Matt, at 11:54
“A console costs $200,000. We’ve got $800,000 to spend building something. Do you want to spend a quarter of that on a single recording console? I don’t think it’s the wisest use of resources.”
He is not anti-console. He said they sound great, they look great, they photograph even better. The point is what a quarter of the budget buys instead: the room itself. Everything at The Good Days was built from a bare shell to Bolt ratios, the flooring is a giant bass trap, and the rest went into monitoring. That is the trade — a photogenic desk, or a room that tells you the truth.
He bought the thing you hear.
Studio B: his personal rack, moved in
Studio B is a copy of the home studio he lived with for ten years — he literally moved his own gear into it. This is the room where the interesting stuff lives.
| Gear | What he does with it |
|---|---|
|
Focal Alpha Evo + PMC TB2S+ $429 / used |
Two sets of nearfields, the PMCs driven by a Bryston 4B SST power amp. PMC no longer makes the TB2S+; the closest current one is the PMC result6 ($3300). |
|
Lynx Aurora (n) $3100 |
The conversion the whole rack is built around. |
|
dbx 160SL discontinued |
His tracking compressor, in OverEasy mode. The modern cheap way into that dbx behaviour is the dbx 266XS ($259) — not the same unit, same family of sound. |
|
Avalon M5 preamp discontinued |
First stage of the tracking chain: M5 into the 160SL. Avalon’s current equivalent is the VT-737sp channel strip ($3866). |
| Drawmer 1968 (modded) | Used on melodic material, not vocals. He pushes it into the red for a bit of tube saturation on guitars and keys. Current model: Drawmer 1978 ($1399). |
|
Master Room XL-305 spring reverb vintage |
A spring that behaves like a chamber. He also uses its input and output stage as a saturator with the reverb turned off. |
|
Eventide DSP-7000 Ultra-Harmonizer vintage |
One-shot effects, weird delays, reverbs that do not exist in nature. Modern descendant: the Eventide H9000 ($7999). |
| Bricasti M7 | His default reverb. “If I just want a reverb that sounds brilliant, it’s going to be that.” |
| Handsome Audio Zulu 500 | Mix-bus colour. See the trick below. |
| Circle Audio 251 | The mic that was up when we filmed. Clean, no strong personality of its own — his words: the thing you reach for when you are not sure yet. |
The dbx trick nobody tells you
This one is worth the whole video. There is a glitch in the dbx 160SL, and he uses it on purpose.
At 9:01
Put the limiter in bypass, but keep pulling the threshold down anyway. The unit stops limiting and turns into a soft clipper. “It actually kind of sounds like pushing the outs of an MPC.” He uses it on drums.
Two more from the same rack. On the Zulu, he pushes top end into the unit, which then pulls the top end back — a fake multiband effect where the highs sparkle without ever getting harsh, and the low mids pick up body on the way. On the XL-305, he runs signal through the in and out stage with the reverb off, just for the saturation. Same box, three different jobs.
Studio A: the Atmos room
Certified, treated, tuned. PMC ci65 surrounds, PMC 6-2 as mains, Dutch & Dutch for nearfield. At the time of filming it was 7.1.4, with two more speakers spec’d to take it to 9.1.4 that same week — plus two large outdoor-rated cabinets in the corners, rated around 106 dB, purely for clients who want to feel it.
How he actually mixes in Atmos
- It depends on the song. A folk record with things flying around the room loses its honesty. An EDM record has no natural reference to break, so everything is fair game.
- Lead vocals stay forward, pulled ever so slightly into the sides so they step toward you. Push that too far and the vocal starts phasing with itself — there is a point where it stops being wider and starts being wrong.
- Sometimes a touch of the vocal into the height speakers, but only a touch.
- Kick stays front and centre with a little LFE. He is not a fan of leaning on the LFE channel — it is an extra sub, not a bass strategy.
- Nobody has this figured out yet. He has been mixing Atmos for three years; the format has only been in the conversation for five or six. Anyone telling you there are rules is guessing too.
Workflow, which is most of the job
| Gear | What he does with it |
|---|---|
|
Focusrite RedNet $3499 |
Dante backbone. He rates the routing software specifically. |
| Sphere | A second routing layer on top of RedNet. “Now basically I can do anything with anything.” |
|
SSL UF8 + SSL UC1 $1299 / $799 |
Fader control and the plugin controller. Both bought for speed, not for looks. |
|
RME preamps and RME interface $1899 / $2799 |
A rack of preamps, plus an RME interface he keeps for video content work. |
The booth, and a DIY panel recipe you can steal
The isolation room is properly specced rather than improvised, which he says is rare — most booths are “okay, we can stick a little space here.” The target is a dead sound that still breathes. He and Hiro built every panel by hand from a recipe they got from Valley Acoustics.
His answer for a bedroom studio, at 17:27
Four-inch Safe’n’Sound behind a breathable fabric. “It’s gonna do the job for sure.” That is the entire recipe.
Rapid fire: one word, one piece of gear
At the end I gave him single words and he had to answer with gear from his own studio.
| Word | Answer |
|---|---|
| Kick | Neumann M 147 ($3495) |
| Microphone | Custom Langston Massengale LMI 251 |
| Speakers | Dutch & Dutch |
| Referencing | Slate VSX |
| Headphones | Slate VSX |
| Mouse | Kensington trackball ($39) — and he is clear that the plain one beats the SlimBlade he bought for the A room |
| Saturation | The in and out of the XL-305, reverb off |
| Special effect | Eventide DSP-7000 |
| Compressor | dbx 160SL — in software, the MixWave Teezio Azul |
| Preamp | His own Command Save Audio juice box, coming soon |
What I’d actually steal from this
- Spend on the room before the gear. He put the money into the build and the monitoring and skipped the object everyone photographs. Your version of that decision costs a lot less than $200,000.
- Learn the glitches in what you own. The best trick in this episode is a bypass switch used wrong on purpose. You probably own three boxes or plugins with something like that in them.
- One box, several jobs. The spring reverb is also a saturator. The compressor is also a clipper.
- Buy for workflow. Every controller in that room exists to keep the session moving, not to look serious.
- Four-inch Safe’n’Sound behind fabric. The cheapest thing in this whole article and probably the one that will change your recordings the most.
This is what I do for a living
Fly to rooms like this, ask the questions you would ask, and write down what actually gets used. Five years of it turned into the Vocal Chain Bible — 88 real vocal chains from Grammy-winning engineers, every plugin and setting in order, with a free rebuild of each one.
Get the Vocal Chain Bible — $48 →Keep going
FAQ
Who is Matt Weiss?
Matthew Weiss is head engineer for Akon and Konvict Muzik and co-owner of The Good Days recording studio in Miami. Credits include Akon, Ozuna, Becky G, Damian Marley, Nicki Minaj, Chris Brown and Royce da 5’9”.
Why does his studio have no console?
Budget. A console runs around $200,000 and the whole build was $800,000. He put that money into the room and the monitoring instead, and works from control surfaces.
What is the dbx 160SL trick?
Put the limiter section in bypass but keep lowering the threshold. Instead of limiting, the unit behaves like a soft clipper — close to pushing the outputs of an MPC. He uses it on drums.
What acoustic panels does he recommend for a bedroom?
Four-inch Safe’n’Sound insulation behind a breathable fabric. He and his partner built every panel in the studio by hand using that recipe.
Filmed at The Good Days, Miami. Gear, credits, budget figures and plans are what was said on camera at the time of filming; the Atmos room was 7.1.4 that day with 9.1.4 planned. Some links above are affiliate links to Sweetwater — if you buy through them I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you, and where a unit is discontinued I have said so and linked the current equivalent rather than pretending it is the same box.
Who's behind this
Ivan Meshcheriakov · IvanFromRnD
5+ years ago I moved to LA with zero connections and started building from nothing — 14-hour days, meeting people and interning at studios. It took me 5+ years to meet and interview 100+ Grammy-winning engineers — then I turned it all into the Vocal Chain Bible.
Read my full story →