The Byre

If you are not familiar with all the processes and pre-print requirements, you will have to go through a brokerage, such as ourselves or Burnham. As a guide price, we charge about £550 + VAT for 1,000 CD with print and cases, delivered. Artwork at cost. If you fancy doing all the artwork and mastering yourself, then you could try these people - http://www.vdcgroup.co.uk/aboutVDC.aspx You can also find loads of brokerages in the small ads and back pages of SOS magazine.

I would have to dissagree with Mr. Blue Mountain. Even if you have access to one of the hybrid hardware-software packages, Reaper is seriously better! The only thing that come close, is ProTools HDX, but that costs about £6k and then you still have to either get a deal on Autotune and a few of the other plugs that you need, or fork out for them. And I still prefer Reaper for editing. BTW, the BBC is now using Reaper for its outside broadcast trucks - how's that for an endorsement!

+1 for Reaper. We have all sorts of DAWs, including ProTools, Soundscape and older Nuendos and stuff like that and of course the brilliant Radar - but when it comes to editing, Reaper is my weapon of choice. And it is stupidly easy to use! You don't have to build a virtual mixer, organise your routing, collate your sound files into a media pool, or do any of the other frustratingly pointless nonsense that so many other DAWs require. And you can mix files types and sample rates and even edit between them. And it comes complete with its own Autotune, beat detective, harmonizer and all the other effects you could need. And it has just the best squeeze and stretch tool on the market today. On a minor point of order, it costs $60 if you want to pay for a private licence, but there is no limit to the lenth of time you can try it out.

It is never ever a good idea to buy cheap microphones. (Well, except the SM57 and 58!) The studio must-haves for kick are Audix D6 (hard, loads of impact and modern sounding) D112 (soft and 'boomy'). Snare and toms - Audix D1 through to D4. Also AKG D202 or D222. Now discontinued, but available on ebay for about 50 - 100 each. Beyond that, we are looking at expensive stuff like the EV RE20 or the Sennheiser MD421, but both of these are far too expensive for what they are. We have them, because some customers expect to see them, but they are not my go-to mics for drums! OH? Quite honestly, you are better off, getting a couple of SM57s and tweeking the highs a bit, than wasting good money on cheap Chinese tat like the Behringer B1, etc., and the C1000 from AKG, both of which distort badly. If the time comes to upgrade, you will be able to sell the mics I suggested and for more or less what you paid for them (unless you buy fakes on ebay!) but the cheap Chinese stuff is totally worthless, once you have bought it. You will get 100 times better sound from two SM57s on OH, with a D6 on kick and a D202 on snare, than with cheap mics on everything. And if you don't believe me, come by and I'll demonstrate it to you!

The device you are looking for is an Auto Wah. New MXR M-120 Auto Q Auto Wah Envelope Filter on eBay (end time 17-Nov-10 22:33:08 GMT) There is also the fixed auto-wah, that just sweeps back and forth, but the proper auto-wah sets the depth of the filter by the volume envelope and therefore gives you that funky-chicken sound for the rhythm guitar (but only when played properly!!!) A regular wah pedal is still a must-have and take a look at the Heil Talk Box, though they cost far too much and you can build one yourself for very little money.

Please tell your friend that the job market is pretty much non-existent! I strongly suggest that he has a look and perhaps posts an info request on the Sound-on-Sound forum, before committing to any career choices. There is one university in the UK that does provide an excellent education in audio engineering, and that is the Surrey Tonmeister course (but not their other audio courses!) For live sound, LIPA is excellent. The reason for this is the fact that colleges all over the World are churning out thousands of graduates in Music Technology (or something with a similar name) each and every year. Very often, the quality of these courses is doubtful to the point of being utter rubbish. It is not unusual for a graduate of an MT course to not be able to read music or even a circuit diagram! Not all, but enough to make potential employers not want to take any, but those who come from the best courses, such as LIPA and the Tonmeister at Surrey. The trouble is, it is very very hard to get on these two courses - so here's what I would do - If I were seeking a career in professional audio today, I would start by going to a traditional university to study electrical engineering or perhaps electronics and computing. A good alternative for a less academic career would be to do ONC through to HND in electrical engineering or something similar. At the same time, I would write to radio and TV stations, recording studios, theatres, independent outside broadcast companies, dubbing houses, film studios, live sound companies, hire companies, mobile recording companies, freelance sound engineers in all disciplines (and anyone else I could think of!) asking for the opportunity for unpaid work experience. During the holidays I would work my butt off to be a keen, reliable, useful, interested member of the staff, while learning as much as possible about every aspect of everyone's job. The more places you have experience of, the better, and the more contacts you will make. By the time you graduate your degree course, you will have a useful and recognised qualification which proves your intellect, your ability to learn, and your self-motivation. Your work experience will have provided you with a broad and useful background knowledge, realistic expectations of the industry, and a lot of contacts. With luck, one of those contacts may well turn into a job offer, but if not, you will have a CV which will be taken far more seriously than most media or sound engineering course graduates.

Dogs - yes. They're lying on their beds and snoring loudly and farting copiously as I speak! You would imagine that they would be outside,playing in the snow, but Great Danes don't seem to 'do' cold and wet! "You only need arrangers, session players etc if you are not good enough to do it yourself." Well, from Rogers and Hammerstein through to Lennon and McCartney, they all used arrangers. Most of the great classical composers used arrangers and orchestrators to take something they had banged out on a piano and turn it into a full-blown orchestral score. And there are very, very few bands that just never use session musos. Altogether, there is a vast array of weapons that any musical act needs to get ready to do battle. Fan club. Website. Marketing and mechanising. All that used to be done by the labels and now all that infrastructure has been taken away. But we are getting away from the original point - is a studio somewhere around Aberdeen a viable proposition? I believe that, for the right person, who is both close the the local music scene and also understands the business and the technology right down to his or her fingertips and also has access to the right location (building!) and at the right (low!) price, the answer could be a tentative 'yes.'

I doubt you can make the city centre studio business model fly. The costs of the building would kill a demo room stone dead. We do not do visual work - I was referring to music for ads and films. We used to do videos, but demand was just too low and we could not get good freelance camera people. We are reviewing that position and may invest in a hi-def set of cameras, but TBH, demand remains very low for quality product. I might be tempted to go in for digital film, when that technology comes of age, but until then, it's a case of wait and see if someone comes beating the door down. We do not differentiate between unsigned and signed, as all labels expect the artist to pay for recordings anyway. As I stated above and it bears repeating - nine-tenths of commercial studio recording is NOT rock-pop or even anything like it. Music for gaming, films, TV and advertising is the largest segment, followed by club-based stuff like pipe bands and choral societies. After that comes classical and jazz. The flood of rock-pop stuff you get to hear is centred around a handful of producers and studios in New York, LA and London and most of it done in the private suites of the better producers and engineers. Targeting a studio at rock-pop is to target a market that hardly exists and what little there is, is nearly all demo work and therefore very price-sensitive, which in turn effects profits. And like it or not, no profits, no studio!

1,000 CD? Well, yes, if you take payment in kind. But if you are to stand some kind of a chance against the big boys, you will need the best arrangers, session players, editors, mix rooms and so on. The quality of the audio does not cost that much, but the quality of the arrangements, orchestrations (in the broader sense of the word) and good session people are what makes the difference between success and failure. You can make a CD for absolutely nothing if you have access to these people and we do that sort of thing all the time - "I'll swap you a week's editing, for a week in the studio!" You can even make whole feature films this way, if everybody is prepared to work for points - and that happens, to a limited extent, quite often! Though, even if you are working with services 'in kind,' you still have to put a value on them. But I wish you every success with your CD - the Scottish music scene certainly needs a shot in the arm - and I hope one day to be able to hear it. As for the viability of a studio in or around Aberdeen - hmmm . . . The big problem for the old studio scene or market is that they relied largely on the rock scene and that is gone. The labels are just not doing those large 'forgiveable debt' development deals any more, where a band could spend a month in a studio and the A&R guy would just drop by now and then to see what was coming out of all that. The labels are now distributors only and expect a musical act to come ready made, complete with large fan-base and several CD's worth of original and good material. But back to the idea and viability of a studio around Aberdeen - The one thing that EVERY studio needs and is ALWAYS short of is space. If you build an 80 sq m room, you will wish you had 100. If you build a 100 sq m room, you will be wanting 200! When you remember that there are only three or at the most four studios in the whole of Scotland with a live room of over 50 sq m (roughly the size of a largish living room!) you begin top realise just how poorly Scotland is served, as far as recording studios are concerned. The equipment that goes into a studio is cheap and getting cheaper (and better BTW!) and even a budget set-up like a power-Mac with Logic and 24 converters would be perfectly acceptable today for nearly all professionals. And I picked up a perfectly good 48-channel AMR studio desk (vintage 1990) for just 240 a week ago! We shall be using that for our new 'overflow' room. The problem is the building. Unless you have a large barn with no neighbours that you are not otherwise using and you do not have to push that mortgage rock up a hill like Sisyphus every month, the sums involved may be too large for the turnover you can realistically achieve.

Interesting debate - well partially, anyway! Hi! I haven't been here for over a year, but I'll get stuck in anyway - To the OP, as you may be aware, we run a studio near Inverness and I have been working in this business on and off for 40+ years. Last year, we recorded and also did the editing, mixing and mastering for ten full length, commercial CDs. Not one of them was rock music. Not one! Four classical, two jazz and four traditional. After those, we also did some film pre-production and two hours of TV ads. There was some rock work of course, but it was not much and mostly short and fairly hectic sessions. You can pretty much say that the rock recording business has all but completely collapsed. What little business there is, does to London and New York, because that is where the management and agencies are. Very, very roughly - to record a rock album costs 10,000 (mates rates, swapping favours, etc.) or 25,000 if you do it by the book, pay full rates to session musicians, pay for the two, three or four engineers you will need. There are four stages to making a CD, tracking, editing, mixing and mastering. Tracking usually takes place in a studio like ours, but with additional overdubs (often using professional sessions guys) done in home studios, or smaller rooms. Editing can be done just about anywhere, even on a laptop with headphones. Mixing has to be done in a good mix room or studio control room. You need top class engineers and monitors for this. Mastering is done in a dedicated mastering studio by someone with oodles of experience. So far, so good. The problem is (for rock) that a band starting out just does not have 10,000 or anything like it. So they go to a demo room and bang out something rough. After all, they just need that demo to get gigs and the venue owners are well aware of the problems that a young band has to face. In many ways, they prefer the grott-demo, as it gives them a more honest idea of what they are going to get! Once that band has used that demo to get a few decent gigs, in particular, to get a showcase gig at one of the bigger festivals, they get seen by all the management and agency people. If they are any good, they will be picked up and signed up. Then the agency will want them to use a studio that they have a relationship with and they will have to use engineers and producers who will insist on using their favourite studio. The act seldom gets to choose the studio! We have three or four people who come to us like that, all of them based in London. But TBH, that is hardly enough to support a business and it takes years to build up such a set of relationships. When the act is really big and successful, they build their own studio which can double as a rehearsal room and is also tax-deductible. So even when they do have real money, you still don't get them as customers! The more successful producers and engineers all have their own studios as well. But I absolutely agree with all those who have said that Aberdeen is lacking a decent studio - but then, since CaVa sold their main room, so is Glasgow! You might like to take a look at audiotalk.org for more info on running a studio, but - as the man said earlier on - the biggest problem for all the smaller studios that try to make a fist of it on a limited budget, is all the other smaller studios. So my advice to the OP would be, by all means go for it, but don't imagine that even one-tenth of your turnover will be rock. But a nice, big room and a great piano and you could be giving us (and others) some serious competition!

Most music management companies seem to be run by lawyers, with a few MBAs thrown in. If you are not into law, I would suggest (as has been stated above) you work towards an ordinary business degree, finishing up with an MBA. A proper business degree will allow you to work in any industry, including music. There are some courses on music management, but they are VERY Mickey Mouse and to be avoided at all costs.

You will be able to run two 8 Ohm speakers just fine. Two 8 Ohm speakers in parallel give you a nominal resistive load of 4 Ohms. Tube (valve) amps have an output transformer that should be matched to or be higher than the resistance of the speaker. So you can run a tube amp set to 4 Ohms into an ordinary 8 Ohm speaker, but it is not a good idea to do this the other way about, as this will damage the EL34s and possibly the output transformer as well. Solid state amps (FET) just have to work harder into a lower resistive value and 2 Ohms could make the amp see a short circuit. The better PA amps are able to work with 2 Ohms. This is only the nominal resistive value when measured with a small DC voltage. When driven, the speakers behave very differently. I'm sure there's loads on this subject at Wickipedia.

Also, look here - Music Theory

I suppose the flippant reply would be to say the Neumann M149, which is a breath-takingly good microphone. But at 3k it bloody well better be! No, my heart goes out to those cheap mics that do one or two things brilliantly. The Audix D6 on kick. The AKG D202 and D222 (cheap on eBay) on toms, cabs and brass, the Neuman 104 and 105 on vocals, the DPA 4061 on all kinds of things, especially when used as a boundry mic. The AKG C391 as a stereo pair on just about anything. All FAR cheaper than the better Chinese jobs - and far better as well!

Here are some thoughts on CD-Rs - (health warning, some of this is just my opinion!) 1. If you do use CD-Rs, make sure that they pklay on things like car stereos and the old box in the kitchen. So only the best (Tayo Yuden, Sony) and burn slowly, x4 or x8 max. 2. No shop or distributor will accept CD-Rs. 3. Pukka CDs cost about 1 each for 500 and it's all done for you - no stress and all nicely packed in a cellophane wrapper etc. and delivered to your door. There are literally hundreds of CD manufacturers nowadays, so prices may even be much lower than that! 4. There is pretty much little or no money in CDs now anyway. The record companies blame cheap imports, pirating, downloads, you name it - anything and everything except themselves and the crap product they produce! The money and career is all in live performance. But a good CD is something worth selling at gigs and if someone likes a band, they will pay 7 - 10 for a full one-hour CD and 3 - 5 for an EP of four or five songs. 5. The coming product is live concert DVDs in 5.1 and hi-def. The sooner all in the industry realise that, the sooner we can go back to earning some real money and engaging the fans with great shows!