Abbey Road Institute to Open Campus Inside Hollywood’s Sunset Gower Studios

The Abbey Road Institute will open a Los Angeles campus on October 26, embedding a production school inside the active studio complex at Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood. Rafa Sardina, the producer and engineer whose credits span D’Angelo, Rosalía, and Stevie Wonder, will direct the new outpost.

Founded in 2015 as the educational arm of London’s Abbey Road Studios, the institute now operates in Paris, Amsterdam, Johannesburg, Sydney, and Miami. Los Angeles becomes its seventh campus and the second in the United States, following Miami’s launch in 2020.

Students will not train in isolated classrooms. The program provides access to United Recording, the four-studio facility inside Sunset Gower that has hosted sessions by Frank Sinatra, Radiohead, and Green Day. Rather than replicate a working environment, the school places students inside one from day one—selected classes and activities unfold on the same floor where landmark albums were cut.

Sardina described the campus as the culmination of a long-held goal: to bring professional experience directly to emerging mixers, producers, and music business practitioners. The diploma course leans on that proximity, prioritizing practice in active rooms over theory alone.

Anchoring the school on a Hollywood production lot, not in a designated music district, reflects how contemporary production blurs lines between film, television, and recorded sound. Sunset Gower gives the institute a working address, not a symbolic one.