Native
Capitol Studios
Make music in Hollywood's most legendary studios.
- Capitol Studios A and B. Track vocals, drums, and ensembles in rooms that have shaped generations of music, from Frank Sinatra to Frank Ocean.
- A Historic Mic Locker. Hear your tracks through vintage microphones with setups curated by Capitol alum Steve Genewick.
- Dynamic Room Modeling. Drag mics around the room and hear the space respond in realtime.
- Decca Tree Ensemble Setups. Send strings, horns, and vocal groups through the time-tested three-mic orchestral array used on countless albums.
- Capitol’s Underground Reverb Chambers. Add space and depth from four storied echo chambers beneath Capitol Tower.
- Classic Consoles and Outboard. Mix through Capitol’s priceless large-format British consoles and trusted in-house analog gear.
- Presets from the Pros. Start with settings dialed in by past and present Capitol engineers, producers, and musicians who know these rooms best.
What is Capitol Studios?
Get the Sound of a Hollywood Landmark
Frequently Asked Questions
Capitol Studios is worth it if you want your recordings to carry the depth and character of a world-class studio, because it puts the rooms, mics, consoles, and echo chambers of Hollywood's Capitol Studios into a single plug-in. Instead of stacking separate reverb, mic modeling, and console plug-ins, you place your track in Studio A or B and shape it through a complete Capitol signal chain. It also includes four underground echo chambers that have never been available in a plug-in before.
Capitol Studios models the entire recording environment, not just the reverb tail. Iconic rooms, a historic mic locker, studio consoles, classic outboard, and underground echo chambers all live in one interface. Most room and reverb plug-ins give you a space to send to, while Capitol Studios changes how your source, mic, room, and electronics interact from the very start of the signal chain.
Dynamic Room Modeling is UA's proprietary technology that lets Capitol Studios respond to mic placement the way a real room does. Drag a mic closer to the source or farther into the room and listen to the balance of direct sound, reflections, and ambience shift naturally in realtime. It's the difference between scrolling through reverb presets and actually walking a mic around a studio until it sounds right.
Use Reverb mode in Capitol Studios when you want to keep your original recording and add Capitol's ambience around it, and Re-Mic mode when you want to replace your room and mic sound entirely. Reverb mode works well on tracks you already love that just need some air and dimension. Re-Mic mode is ideal for dry or boxy sources, like a close-miked vocal or a kit tracked in a small room, to make the track sound like it was cut at Capitol.
Capitol Studios brings Hollywood's Capitol Studios A and B into your DAW, along with their high-end analog consoles, outboard gear, and four new echo chambers. Plus get access to the first Decca Tree ensemble setups in UA's studio plug-in lineup. UAD Sound City Studios and Ocean Way Studios each recreate their own celebrated rooms, with a character and history all their own. If your sessions lean on big, polished vocals, acoustics, strings, horns, or choirs, Capitol Studios is built for exactly that, and plenty of producers keep more than one studio on hand to match the room to the song.
Capitol Studios includes classics from Capitol's historic mic locker, including the U48 Frank Sinatra sang into, plus iconic C12, U67, M50, and C800G setups. Every mic setup is curated by Capitol alum Steve Genewick, so you start from mic selections and placements chosen by someone who knows these rooms inside and out. From there, you can drag any mic around the room and hear its sound change naturally, just like moving a real mic in a real studio.
Capitol Studios lets you run tracks through the legendary large-format British console EQs and dynamics from both Studio A and Studio B, plus a rack of Capitol staples: 1176LN limiting, LA-2A leveling, and the Capitol Mastering Compressor, designed by Capitol's own engineers. You can arrange EQ, compression, and chambers in any order to build your chain. That means a single instance can take a raw track all the way to a finished, record-ready sound.
The echo chambers in Capitol Studios are four of the underground reverb chambers beneath the Capitol Tower, chambers 1, 3, 5, and 8, available in a plug-in for the first time. These chambers have shaped the sense of space on generations of records. You can use each chamber's natural decay exactly as captured, shorten it beyond what the physical rooms can do, and dial in pre-delay and stereo width to fit the mix.
No, Capitol Studios is a UAD native plug-in that runs on your Mac or Windows computer's own processor, so you don't need an Apollo interface or UAD-2 DSP hardware to use it. It runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs as well as Windows PCs, which makes it easy to bring Capitol Studios into any setup, from a laptop on the couch to a full studio rig.
Capitol Studios works in all major DAWs on macOS and Windows, including LUNA, through VST3, AU, and AAX plug-in formats. Whatever you record and mix in, you can open Capitol Studios on any track, bus, or virtual instrument in your session.
Yes, Capitol Studios is built for strings, horns, and vocal groups, with three ensemble mic positions, including a Decca Tree: a trio of mics at the conductor's position that gives orchestral recordings their wide, anchored stereo image. You can mix the tree's center and sides independently, and set the room's walls live or tight to shape the space around your arrangement.
Capitol Studios gives drums tracked in a bedroom or project studio the size and life of Capitol's rooms through Re-Mic mode. Re-Mic replaces your original room and mic sound, so a kit cut in a small space can sound like it was played in Studio A or B. Move mics in close for punch, or farther out into the room for a bigger, more open sound.
Yes, Capitol Studios works on virtual instruments as well as recorded tracks, placing sampled strings, pianos, drums, and synths inside a real acoustic space. It's especially useful on virtual orchestral parts, where the Decca Tree setups and chambers add the depth and realism that dry samples often lack.
For making a track sound like it was actually recorded in a great studio, room-modeling plug-ins like Capitol Studios go further than convolution reverb plug-ins. Convolution reverb captures a snapshot of a space and adds it after the fact, so the studio experience lives only in the reverb tail. Room modeling lets you change how a track was "recorded," from mic choice and placement to the room and console, so the space feels like part of the performance rather than something layered on top.
UAD native plug-ins like Capitol Studios deliver UA's sound on your computer alone, so you can build a complete UAD setup without any dedicated hardware. UAD DSP-powered Apollo interfaces are still the way to track through UAD plug-ins with near-zero latency and Unison preamp modeling, which is why many studios run both. Think of it as two paths to the same sound: Apollo for the front end of your recordings, UAD native plug-ins for anywhere you open your DAW.
Yes, Capitol Studios is designed to take dry home recordings and give them the depth, dimension, and character of a professional studio by placing them in iconic Studios A and B. Great mics, real rooms, echo chambers, and a classic console chain are all a click away, so a pro sound takes minutes. You get the sound of one of recording history's most celebrated studios without booking time in Hollywood.
Yes, Capitol Studios gives you a complete vocal chain in one plug-in: a historic mic like the U48 Frank Sinatra used, the ambience of Studio A or B, console EQ and dynamics, 1176LN or LA-2A compression, and Capitol's echo chambers. Use Reverb mode to keep your original vocal and wrap it in Capitol's space, or Re-Mic mode to turn a boxy home recording into something that sounds like a Capitol vocal session.