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How Canyon Studios Keeps the Creativity Flowing — and in Sync — From Nashville to L.A.

Canyon Private Studios splits sessions between twin locations in Nashville and L.A. Here's how they keep it all together.

Wayne Grayson • Aug 25, 2026

Producer, songwriter, composer, and artist Don Miggs has worked with an incredible range of recording artists: from Dolly Parton and Fleetwood Mac's Mick Fleetwood to Yungblud, Aloe Blacc, and Paul McCartney. And the home base for his incredible collaborations is Canyon Private Studios.

Actually, we should say home bases—plural—because Canyon operates across two locations: one in Nashville and another in Los Angeles. Miggs splits his time between them, spending roughly 60 percent of the year in Nashville, where his kids go to school.

But the twin locations aren’t the only aspect of Canyon that makes it unique. As the “Private” in its name suggests, Canyon isn't a bookable studio you can walk into off the street; it was built, room by room, around Miggs' own circle of collaborators and friends.

We recently visited with Miggs and the crew behind the magic at both Canyon East in Nashville and Canyon West in Los Angles. You can watch the video of our time with Miggs below or read on for a tour of the studio and insight into how Canyon approaches the recording process and the gear the studio uses to preserve the work.

East and West

Canyon East, the Nashville property, houses two rooms: an A room built for full-band tracking, and a B room configured for overdubs and mixing. East is currently home base for mixer Mark Needham. Upstairs, the team has even run lines to a grand piano so a full arrangement can come together without ever leaving the property.

Canyon West, in Los Angeles, is a different animal by design. It’s a full house in Bel Air converted into a three-room complex (A, B, and C rooms) that leans more toward film scoring and pop production.

Despite the different creative focus, "It's imperative that all of the rooms can speak the same language," Miggs says. "We want all of the back-end equipment to be identical so that the experience is the same, whatever room you walk into.” That way, an artist or engineer never has to relearn a room just because they’re on one side of the country or the other.

Miggs is a serious collector of vintage guitars and outboard equipment, and he's candid about why: growing up with very little, he learned to cherish the few things he owned, and that habit turned into a lifelong appreciation for instruments with history. That appreciation for vintage gear shows up in both Canyon locations. Nashville's board is a 1968 console from a boutique manufacturer, chosen deliberately over a more common SSL for its rarity and character. Canyon West's console has its own pedigree, pulled from the famed Village Studios and used on records by Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac.

The Gear Backing Up the the Console

Canyon East’s main rig runs on a Mac Studio with Pro Tools, feeding an OWC Flex 1U4 populated with four independent drives split into a dedicated work drive for Miggs, a drive for outside clients, a samples drive, and a safety drive that clones everything overnight while the studio is empty. That safety drive backs up locally, and then a Backblaze cloud backup runs automatically in the middle of the night.

For shuttling media between Canyon East and West, Miggs uses the ultra-fast, ultra-rugged, IP67-rated OWC Envoy Pro FX which protects the precious data inside from physical harm and quickly offloads any new material to the other studio where it then enters that location’s workflow and backup process.

Meanwhile, mixer and producer Mark Needham relies on OWC’s ThunderBlade SSD. Because he is working with a lot of data and travels frequently, Needham appreciates the ThunderBlades extreme speed, premium construction, and the fact that it’s available in capacities as high as 32TB.

And no matter what room in which Canyon location we’re talking about, everything stays connected with OWC Thunderbolt docks and cables.

You can find more information about the OWC gear Canyon Studios relies on here:

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