Marwah Studios
FC 14/15, Film City, Sector 16A, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
https://www.marwahstudios.com/
Marwah Studios stands on a quiet, tree-lined street in Film City, Noida, yet few passers-by realise the scale of what happens behind its modest sandstone façade. Founded in 1991 by Dr. Sandeep Marwah, the complex began as a single 2,000-square-foot shooting floor for television serials; today it occupies a ten-acre campus that feels less like a conventional soundstage and more like a self-contained media village. Eight independent shooting studios in varying sizes—from 40 × 60 feet to the cavernous 180 × 90 feet Studio 1—nestle around a Japanese rock garden, marble corridors and an outdoor amphitheatre sheltered by neem and arjun trees. It is the intersection of aesthetics and utility that first strikes a visitor: exposed maple trusses hover over stone walls inlaid with brass notes, while corridors display rare photographs—Kishore Kumar at the piano, Pandit Ravi Shankar fine-tuning a sitar—each annotated with QR codes that open archival audio clips on a phone.
Music flows through the veins here. Studio 4, designed expressly for acoustic recording, features adjustable panelled walls of Norwegian spruce, 28 overhead diffusers and a floating floor that sits on coiled springs to eliminate traffic rumble from the nearby expressway. An adjoining 32-channel Neve Genesys console provides analogue warmth that many producers still crave, while a Pro Tools HDX system captures up to 192 kHz/32-bit float sessions that survive orchestral sweeps and the booming drums of Punjabi pop alike. A Yamaha C7 grand, maintained at 42 % humidity, is flanked by vintage Rhodes and Hammond B3 organs; tabla sets in every pitch, tanpuras, sarods, and a rare bulbul tarang donated by the late Ustad Vilayat Khan complete the live room. The ceiling hovers at 26 feet, allowing choir or choir-plus-string overdubs without flutter echo.
But Marwah is not only bricks and EQ curves. Its Faculty of Performing Arts offers a one-year diploma in Music Production & Engineering capped at thirty students, who spend mornings in acoustics labs and afternoons patching flutes through Telefunken V76 pres or aligning two-inch tape machines. Visiting residents have included A. R. Rahman, who mixed a Delhi-6 song cue in Studio 3, and Berklee professors who run week-long songwriting labs in the rooftop turret that doubles as a solar-powered writing retreat. At night, the amphitheatre hosts unplugged sets where Sufi qawwali singers share stage-time with indie electronica acts, projected onto a 40-foot screen with 7.1 Meyer Sound reinforcement. Free chai and samosas circulate as students fiddle with patchbays in the control room glass, watching legends through flickering LEDs.
Marwah Studios is thus a continuum: a technically impeccable recording environment, a conservatoire-level teaching hub and an informal salon where genres, generations and dialects braid into a single soundscape. Walk out at 2 a.m. and you will still hear a santoor scale echoing against the freight elevator—a quiet reminder that here, music never sleeps.
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- Published: August 2, 2025
