10 Years of the RSNO Centre: Scotland’s Studio Posted Fri 15 August 2025
This year we are celebrating the tenth anniversary of the RSNO Centre – our home in Glasgow. Thanks to the generosity of individual donors, trusts, foundations and corporate partners, the custom-built facility has developed into a centre of creativity and is a hub for world leading artists and Scotland’s National Orchestra.
In 2021, the RSNO opened Scotland’s Studio, comprising the New Auditorium and its control room that includes world-renowned pro-audio capabilities developed by our corporate partners Cirrus Logic.
RSNO Chief Executive Alistair Mackie tells the story of the Studio’s evolution and how it has thrust the Orchestra into the limelight.
The RSNO Centre’s New Auditorium was designed around the acoustics of Abbey Road’s Studio One in London, the world’s largest purpose-built recording studio, which has played host to greats from the classical, pop and movie world.
In 2015, the RSNO was undertaking a significant amount of classical recording work using a small, isolated control room. In the five years following, demand grew for commercial recording projects from all over the world, scoring films and video games. The resounding feedback from film industry clients was that we had fantastic musicians and an amazing recording room (the New Auditorium), but the control room was inadequate, so we needed to be creative with our space and find a solution.
To create the new control room, we used a space where the RSNO percussionists practiced and stored their instruments. It was a completely sound-proofed box, double height and spacious – perfect for percussion acoustics – and ideal for our new control room. The new control room features a large screen that can be used to play back film, but which also serves as a virtual window looking onto the New Auditorium, making it possible to watch musicians in detail. We have an extended analogue desk, surround sound and space to accommodate more industry professionals. For larger projects we can have as many as 12 people in the control room including the producer, composer, arranger and music supervisor.
The technology of the control room features Cirrus Logic’s integrated circuits – chips in the audio equipment that convert analogue to digital and vice versa. The RSNO have used Cirrus Logic chips for over a decade and actually pioneered their use in film scoring. The studio is more than the sum of its components, but with Cirrus Logic pro-audio codecs embedded in the equipment, it now offers an immersive listening experience.
In the last few years, we have welcomed Kevin Costner to score his movie epic Horizon; renowned composer Terrence Blanchard wrote parts of the Oscar-nominated score for The Woman King within the Studio; and we have undertaken multiple projects for Netflix, Disney, Apple to name but a few. We are now also fully rigged for remote recording and have worked with producers as far afield as Los Angeles and Sydney. International film producers demand world-class facilities, and the RSNO now has this to offer in the heart of Glasgow.
I’ll never forget the first time I walked into Abbey Road Studios when I was a young musician. I stood in awe thinking about all the things that had been done in that space. I’d love to think of a young musician returning to Scotland’s Studio in ten, fifteen years’ time and imagining all the amazing projects that have happened here. We are grateful to Scottish Enterprise, the RSNO Foundation and The Iain and Pamela Sinclair Legacy for providing the funds to make our studio possible. We also thank our corporate partners, Cirrus Logic for their ongoing support and technology that is integral to our world-class control room.