The Byre

Of course we can do it (and spell checker is right, at 100 MB/s minimum bulk transfer rate, the figure is 80 seconds, but remember Big-B means byte and Little-B means bit!) using really fast RAID arrays and good SCSI cards. In fact we could do it allot faster than that. The question is one of COST. Even buying all that stuff direct and by the container load, it would add many thousands to the cost of the machine. OK, the sounds need heavy tweaking to make them sound real, but our Triton and Karma synths hold hundreds of samples by just storing one sound and creating the different notes by multiplex shifting. One day it will be possible to do these things, but given today's technology, it would be prohibitivly expensive. Imagine sampling a Hammond organ - every note and every drawbar! The big, big problem with a sampled piano is that the sound changes according to how hard you hit the key. If you hit a good piano really hard, it sounds percussive, almost like a bell. If you press the key softly, it sounds almost like an organ. Mellow, smooth and round. That means that you have to have samples for a whole range of volumes. And this is true for all intruments that have dynamic range. The greater the range, the more volume levels have to be sampled. A Rhodes E-Piano can get away with about four and a bit of volumetric cross-fading, a harpsicord just needs one.

CaVa has had to close its large studio and is now left with just the small room, so the Boesendorfer had to go. Castle Sound and ourselves both have a Boesendorfer 275 with the extra half octave at the bottom. After that, the next piano down the UK in a studio is the Granery near Liverpool, then there's Real World near Birmingham and of course London has about eight or ten studios with good Boesendorfers and Steinways. A good concert grand costs about 60,000+ which is conciderably more than the total cost of the equipment for most smaller studios, who already baulk at the cost of more than one multitrack or hardware in general. The number of customers who ask for a concert grand is small, but steady and they bring in quality projects like films, TV ads and of course piano recitals. My wife kicked a bit at the thought of spending all that money on a piano, but it was the best investment we have made in the studio.

In fact there are only two studios in Scotland that have concert grands, ourselves and Castle-Sound. www.the-byre.com

Hi Ian, glad you're happy! Let me know when you get your website up and running, so that I can put a link up to you. Cheers - Andrew.

If you are looking for a studio with a good piano, then we have a Bosendorfer 275 once owned by Andre Previn. www.the-byre.com

As everybody will be VAT registered and all figures are net, nobody will give a hoot about VAT. Also much of the business takes place outside Europe and the band will have to have an off-shore holding company to do business. As for the realism of the figures, they are exactly the way it is. The big problem is the lack of realism in what it takes to get to that level. See the eight (was it eight? I think it was.) boxes to tick. Even a jobbing musician (i.e. a hired hand working for an A or B lister) can expect a fairly large paycheque. Sting pays his people 5,000 a week. So do most of the other A-Listers.

Let me quickly explain: A top ten single will earn the artist maybe between 10' date='000 and 50,000, depending on when it hits and what poistion it reaches etc. A good CD that sells over a period of years can earn a good bit more. Again, it is one of those 'How long is a piece of string?' subjects. But a medium-sized gig, say 3,000 people at the Apollo or even just 1,000 in a Corn-Exchange somewhere can earn as much. Work it out: 50% of the door at 10 each? And if an up-and-coming band opens for a major act in front of, say 10,000, just the minimum legal performing rights (PRS) of a 50 ticket comes to about 3,000 if they get one-third of the PRS. A headliner will get much, much more of course and this is done by selling tours for a set price. The tour is put together by a tour manager who gets together with local promotors who have to pay 50% up front to confirm the booking. PA, lights, trucking is usually paid in advance (well, some of it!) from the tour advances. This puts everything on a solid footing. The balance is paid in the form of a cashier's cheque on the night to the road manager, tour accountant, or band leader. So if a band costs 100,000 a night, the promotor has to find 50,000 to confirm and hopes to sell 10,000 tickets at 50, so he stands to make 400,000 gross profit (but of course only if he gets to sell ALL the tickets and at full price!). The band gets 100,000 in all and will have about 50,000 in total costs for PA, lighting, trucking, hotels, road musicians, crew, etc. So the band (or perhaps just the band leader, if only one person ownes the name and rights) makes [b']50,000 on ONE NIGHT. Compare that with record sales! And a tour is usually about 50 to 100 gigs. You do the maths! The above example would be for what is known as a B-listed or larger C-listed act. If you ever get to the dizzy heights of an A-listing (Missy Elliot, Shania Twain, Snoop DD) your total nightly fee should be about $1m or 500k. (OK, this is hoplessly over-simplified, there's much more to the whole thing, but you get the idea!)

Some agencies/lables etc., will go for untalented peoiple or for acts with limited talent, because they know that they will fold quickly, so they never have to pay them anything. There is the misconception that somehow getting a record deal = success. It does not. Getting a hit record into the charts does not = success either (any more!) Records are there nowadays to promote the band and help to tie the fan to the band-star-whatever. The marketing boys call it 'emotional proximity' and it is a very important concept in the rock-pop markets. That is why so much effort goes into fan-clubs, marketing, interviews, videos, etc. Rock music is all about live gigging. Both from a business sence and from a musical standpoint, live gigging is everything and you have to be able to play your instruments to play live. Hey, here's a thought: a band is only as good as the drummer! Discuss!

Behind this, is the idea that it is hard to get a break in this business. That somehow agents, managers and lables are just sitting on their hands and refusing to deal with bands or acts, no matter how brilliant they might be. That is not true! I can think of no business where it is easier to 'make it big' than music. BUT YOU MUST TICK ALL THE BOXES!!! If you leave one of the boxes 'unticked' than no one will want to know you. If you can tick all the boxes, everybody will be fighting to get a piece of you. They will even fight to get you if they think that you might be capable of ticking all the boxes sometime in the future. Here are the boxes: You must be 1. Young 2. Good looking 3. First class musicians (all practice to a metronome, all guitarists can play any tunes without squinting at the fretboard, drummer is rock solid on the beat, etc) 4. able to sing and hit a note and project your voice (i.e. take lessons!) 5. not doing anything else. Full timers only! 6. able to write songs that people can remember and whistle or hum. 7. able to write songs with more than just one good melody line. 8. ready for long, hard twelve hour days for many years before success comes your way. There are other boxes that need to be ticked as well, such as being easy to get along with and be prepared to do as the public-agency-promoter wants and not get ideas of stardom, but realise that it is a job like any other. But one takes that as given. (BTW, watch out for local Inverness band The Cinematics - formerly known as Snodgrass. They did a one-day demo here and the agencies and lables were falling over themselves to get at them. They tick all the above boxes, though it might still be a few years before they break.)

Where do I begin? Asking me how to mic, mangle, mix and master music is like asking how does one build an ocean-going sailing boat or how does one build a house. It's a very big subject! You could start by reading some of the pages on my website on how to record. Monitors and the NS10: Simple - the NS10 was originally supposed to be a cheap bookshelf speaker from Yamaha. But then someone noticed that it sounded much clearer and crisper than any of the other standard small nearfield monitors, so it began to apear in US studios. This habit spread to the UK and soon customers began asking for the NS10 and also had them at home. It gave them a reference point. The 'secret' of the NS10 is no secret. They are not ported and have a very light weight membrane on the little eight inch bass driver. Speakers are ported to give them an extended bass. This has the huge disadvantage of causing the speaker to have a poor response time, i.e. it takes them much longer to react to a chage in the signal. This in turn, gives them a 'muddy' sound. PA speakers get around this by using very stiff membranes and long transmission lines for the bass port. They also use masses of power - the latest JBL line-arrays use 6 kW - yes, 6,000 Watts - for each and every box. The NS10 also had a very good tweeter, so the package became irresistable - just as long as one remembered that they had more or less no bass below 80Hz. They also peaked at around 1.1kHz, so any mixes made on them tended to pull sharp and screachy things like lead guitars and lead vocals further back or the engineer would make these elements more mollow. In this way, mixes made on the NS10 'translated' better to other systems. Some people (Mark is one!) like to use them with a sub-woofer to create a full range sound and therefore have control over all the sound right down to the sub-bass. The fact that only a fully closed speaker has a better (i.e. faster) response time has since been used by that other studio standard, the M&K 1025 active system with sub. The M&Ks are mid-field, i.e. they throw the sound further. There is no point using full closed speakers (also known as infinite baffles) for a PA, because they are very inefficient. Now to the home recording debate: getting a good sound down on tape (well, hard disk) is not only a very academic subject (it involves music, technology, acousics and computer programming) but it is alos very expensive. Flash touched on the subject of how to make a sound stand out in a mix and that is a very good example of why studios are costly places to build and run. High quality real instuments stand up in a mix in a way that all commercially available samples just do not. That means that real concert grand pianos have to sit in rooms that have been designed to sound as good as possible. (BTW, Tori Amos bangs on about Boesendorfer pianos because she is sponsored by them! But they are very good and are the best European-built hand-made piano available. Steinways are good, if you can get a hand-built version. The off-the-shelf Steinways are mass-produced and not that good. Very, very sadly, almost all the rest are cheap rip-offs banged out at rock-bottom prices in Korean and Chinese factories. The old names like Bechstein and Grotian have long since been bought up and used to sell cheap imports of poor quality boxes. I have heard good things about a marque called Estonia pianos that are built in -yes, you've guessed it! - Estonia. But I have not heard one. Fazioli are high quality Italian pianos, but loose their tuning quickly, so are unsuitable for recording.) Can you and should you record at home? Well, as I pointed out before, Mark Knopfler has a home studio - but it cost 10 million. Dave Gillmore has a home studio and it cost just 2 million. But what about normal mortals? Well I would not do it for the same reason that I do not do my own pumbing! I am not a plumber. (Last week I thought that I would quickly replace the immersian heater that had failed in the house, so I went to Wickes and bought a 16,99 heater and a wrench and set to work. Well, to cut a long story short, I managed to put a hole in the boiler and had to get a new one installed by a real plumber who knew what he was doing. My 16,99 immersian heater cost me 300 because I am not a plumber!) Firstly, let's just look at the statistics: Here is a list of hits that have been recorded, mixed and mastered at home: um . . . err . . . There, that was the list! It was not very long, was it? Zip, nothing, zilch, not a sausage. Not one record in the history of mankind has been recorded, mixed and mastered at home. OK, some have been started at home and then overlayed in a proper studio. But that is all - and that is very, very few. So statistically speaking, the chances of getting a good sound at home are very very poor. So why do people spend money on all these home recording packages? Because it says 'A Complete Recording Studio in your PC at Home' on the package. That is a bit like pretending that Microsoft Publisher is a complete printing works and will let you publish something on the scale and quality of the Sunday Times. It isn't, it doesn't and you can't. But there is a whole industry out there geared at selling the idea that you could record the next World hit at home. Trust me on this one; if it were possible, someone would have done it. But aren't the newspapers (and mags like Sound-on-Sound) full of stories about people having done just that? Well, yes they are - but it is all complete bollocks. It is just hype to create interest in the product and make the customer think that, by buying this CD, he or she is somehow 'kicking' the system and the major lables. In reality, it is the major lables who put out this kind of stuff to help sell their product. Sometimes they are the same people who sell the music software - Sony for example. But there is an ugly side to all this. So a whole bunch of kids all over the World spent billions on home recording, that ain't so bad. It's fun to do and does not make you go blind! But there is another industry that tells people that they can earn a living putting up small studios that are just home recording opperations. That is when it gets unclean. I say unclean, because there are fewer than 50 full time commercial music studios in the UK and they are mostly struggling. Here is a thread from the SOS forum and I want you to read it all, from May 2003 to June 2004. From the announcement of the studio to its closure and with it the misguided dreams of a young man and his family. All his kit was later to appear on eBay and was sold off for a fraction of what he paid for it. It makes good reading and should be manitory for all those wishing to enter the studio-for-hire business at the demo end of things: http://sound-on-sound2.infopop.net/2/OpenTopic?q=Y&a=tpc&s=215094572&f=884099644&m=4923001037&p=1 The person who began that year-long thread, began with "Expect to see a brand new recording studio opening in central Southampton within 6 - 8 weeks. For full details, visit xwww.arby-studios.co.uk to see the amazing equipment and instruments it has to offer." The words "amazing equipment" kind of remind me of someone else . . . On the PA and mixer ownership question, most professional bands have a small rig to cover the gap between pub gigs and large tours with PA thrown in (together with hotels, travel, etc) by the promoter. As a small PA rig only costs a few thousand and can double as rehersal rig, it is far cheaper to buy one than to spend several hundred pounds two or three times a week just to hire one. You know, all those gigs in town halls, university canteens and army barracks. Piss-houses we used to call them! A PA or live mixer is a desk designed for work on the road and in the clubs. they are divided into FOH (front of house) mixers for the main mix and monitor mixers for the band, so that every musician has his or her own mix. Studio mixers are very different, in that they have to be able to route to and from a 24 or 48 track multitrack recorder and do other things that no live mixer would ever have to do like 5.1 mixes, route to different sub-groups and have inserts on every channel, group and output. They also have to have large monitor sections so that the engineer can switch from 5.1 to stereo to mono and compare the mix on different sets of speakers and with and without subs. ___________________________________________________________________ Damn!!! I wanted to write a line or two of clarification. Now look what you people have gone and made me do!!!

Quote Flash: "The Byre - We had some demos come through that sounded simply stunning." __________________________________________________________________________ I'd love to know who that was, as we keep copies of everything done here. __________________________________________________________________________ Quote Spellchecker: " i thought there would be more studios with this capability. how many are in a full orchestra? is it like 70 or 80 or something? Have you ever worked or been inside metropolis in chiswick? it looks pretty big" __________________________________________________________________________ Their biggest room is 90 sq m with two 15 sq m booths. (We are 70, 25 and 10, but with definate plans to expand the main room.) 90 sq m is about enough for up to 20 musicians with instruments, but they do not have a piano, so orchestral work is out. The acoustics of Studio A are very good indeed. The equipmnet is a bit dated (old monitors, old desk and not 5.1 capable) but of a high standard and the control room is just great - lots of space and good acoustics. It is one of London's best mid-sized facilities. But Nathen nailed his colours to the mast of top London facilities - and that means being in a totally different league. The main room at Abbey Road is 470 sq m, Air is about 300 and Whitfield St and Angel are both under 200 sq m. All have brand new AMS-Neve desks (the 88R with a sticker price of around 200,000) and all are fully equippend for 5.1. But back to Flash's comment on quality, I make it a rule to not allow anything out of the building that is not as good as it can be (within the bounds of reason of course!) I also do not allow guest engineers to work here that do not come up to a certain standard. (There is a sort of a studio mafia that allows every studio owner to see what is going on and who is working where and which engineers are doing which projects. So if someone makes a claim that they have worked somewhere or on a certain project, any audio professional can look that up and check - even if they have not been given any sleeve or screen credits. So anyone who claims to be an audio engineer, but has never actually worked on anything real, would soon be exposed - or rather just be not listed.) The UK music scene is very, very small - as is the music scene in every European country - and everybody knows everybody else. The result is that it is very hard to get a new studio up and running and especially hard right now with so much home recording going on. The home recording industry has almost completely wiped out the demo market and taken massive chunks out of the pro market as well. In order to gain a foothold as a studio, the owner has to offer the customer something that he or she cannot get at home. And let's be quite clear about this: Home studios come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from CuBase on a PC, through to Mark Knopfler's new studio that cost him about 10 million. One of the first things a musician does, once they have been able to earn some real money, is invest in their own recording rig. The guys who are in right now are using their own HD3 rig and a shed load of 192s. The engineer has his own studio with good monitors from Dynaudio and Genelec and a range of first-class mics. He has his own piano, his own Fender Rhodes Mk I, his own Hammond C3 and a huge sampling system. So, in order to gain his trade, I have to give him something else. Something that he cannot get in London. There is no point driving all that way if he has the same things at home! On top of that, if I am going to attract trade from London, I have to be up to their standard. Now, nobody expects me to have a bar, a canteen, an in-house hotel and a wide choice of rooms featuring every piece of kit known to mankind. But I do have to have the basics. And the basics usually cost money. When it comes to kitting out a bog-standard studio, there are suprisingly few choices. This may come as a suprise to many who see all the sexy ads for channel strips, monitors and mics in the pages of Sound-on-Sound or Mix Magazine. Some things are a matter of choice, but most are not. Many industries are like that. If you are setting up a steel casting works, there is just one make of casting machine you can use. If you do not have a Giesematic (I think that is the name) you will have very few customers. And as I stated before, if you want to run a taxi company in London, you will have to have an Austin Taxi. If you want to run a power tool hire company, you will have to use Stihl chain saws and strimmers. Within an industry, certain products and other things such as education and qualifications, become standards. Here's a good example: stage vocal mics have to be Shure SM58. This is a cheap mic. It costs less than 100, but it does the job better than any other mic. That is the standard. Yes, you can deviate from that standard for certain special uses and effects, but 9 times out of 10, the SM58 is what one expects to see. Studio standards are not all expensive. Some are quite cheap. More often than not, the standard is not the most expensive option. Near-field reference monitors MUST be the old NS10 from Yamaha. These were never particularly expensive speakers, but all customers expect to find them, not because they are particularly nice-sounding, but because they have certain propperties that make then very good reference speakers. Some items just have a certain sound and the studio has to have that item if it is to provide the customer with that sound. Only a Hammond A100, B3, C3 or RT3 fed through a Leslie 145 or 147 sounds like a Hammond organ. Altogether, when it comes to instruments like organ or piano, a studio cannot fob the customer off with samples - he's got all those sample CDs at home. He pays for a studio to get the real thing. If we are talking about pianos, it had better be either a Steinway or a Bosendorfer concert grand. He probably has something from the Far East at home. But if he or she is paying by the hour, it had better be something real. And so it goes on, right across the studio kit list. The reverb, the desk, the multi-effects, the dynamic processors, the multi-tracks and the monitors. And before I am accused of being elitist, every section of the market has these standards for every type of studio. A home studio can have a Soundcraft Ghost, a demo room can go for an Audient or a DDA. A mid-market studio used to be able to opt for an Amek (up to about two years ago) or perhaps an older SSL. Top studios have to have an SSL K series or the AMS-Neve 88R. So yes, it is possible to run a studio at all ends of the market, but the demo end of the market is hopelessly overcrowded and underfunded. As Spellchecker points out, his mate has a perfectly viable studio in his home. So does Mark Knopfler!

Brilliant stuff!

Quote: "Andrew! do you really think that your diatribes against Aberdeen studios are gonna attract customers?" _______________________________________________________________________ Sorry, what diatribe? I did not mention anybody's studio, nor do I intend to. I do not know any of the Aberdeen studios and I have not heard any product coming from your studio or anybody elses, so I am in no position to comment on your skills or those of anybody else. Nor indeed have I done so. I commented on your statement "we get the results that top UK studios get." _______________________________________________________________________ Quote: "Can you only see opportunities to state "how much better the byre is than everyone else because of all our cool expensive kit" ???" _______________________________________________________________________ At no time have I listed anybody's kit - not ours or anybody else's. I was making general points about demo studios and their viability. At no time did I refer to our studio and I certainly do not post on forums to tout for trade - I do so because I find the subject of making music and recording music interesting. As I have been doing it for a few years now, I feel that I have something to add that might be of benifit. It is an interesting subject and as I have been doing this job since the first days of multitracking, perhaps something I have to add might be of use to somebody somewhere. Who knows! _______________________________________________________________________ Quote: "If you have something constructive to add to the debate, then it is about time we heard it, rather than your usual complaints." _______________________________________________________________________ I am not aware of making complaints and certainly not about other people's studios. Normally, what you do in your studio would be entirely your business and I would be well advised to not comment on you or anybody else. But you decided to plaster advertising for your studio all over this forum with wild statements like "At our studio, we get the results that top UK studios get: - in the quality of the performances and in the combined skill of the artists and the production." Having set yourself up for comment with such a statement, you can hardly complain when someone examins that statement in detail. That's the problem with using a forum as a form of advertising - you can make a statement like that, but then everybody can come back at you. Using a forum as a means of advertising can be something of a boomerang! I do not think it is wise to make a claim like "We get the results that top UK studios get!" If I were to make such a claim, I would be asking others to take me to task on such a claim. They would be justified in asking if we can do A for V? Can we encode 5.1 in all formats? Can we master DVD-A and SA-CD? Can we author video DVDs? Do we have the space to record a full orchestra? Can we provide a full orchestra with headphones? Does each musician have his or her own fold-back mix and can they adjust the mix themselves? Can we provide video facilities? Is there a rest room and green room for all musicians? Is there a bar? One could then move on to standard studio instruments: Do we have a full concert grand? Do we have a vintage organ? Do we have a selection of vintage E-pianos like a Rhodes and a Wurlitzer? Do we have vintage synths like Moogs and ARPs? These are all questions that ANY large inner-city studio can answer 'Yes' to. I can answer yes to some and no to others. With just 100 sq m live space, we certainly cannot record a full orchetra and I very much doubt that Nathan can either! There are only four studios in the UK that can and they are Abbey, Air, Whitfield Street (just) and Angel (at a pinch). A large inner city studio, be it in London, Berlin, New York or Nashville, is a very different beast to anything in Scotland, your studio, our studio or any other Scotish studio. Prices are nearly all well above 3,000 for an eight hour day and all have a large variety of rooms at different prices. All of them have space for a full orchetra. All are networked with all major film studios around the World, so that daily rushes from a film shoot in LA or New Zealand can be played out in the studio for the A for V work to be done quickly. The Abbey costs 3,600 plus VAT for the large room, but as Mike Price stated (he recorded Lord of the Rings there and is the 'Music for Dance' link below) "When the orchestra costs 120,000 a day, the rent for the studio is nothing. But if they hold you up for an hour because something is not working, that can mean an extra 20,000 in costs." And if it is personal skills you are talking about, the staff in all these places have a classical musical education as well as engineering degrees. Even I have to roll up my sleeves and get down and dirty with Bach and Beethoven now and again. Right now, whilst the main room is being used for some film work, I am editing Bach from an EDL written all over a score (which is why I am taking time out to post to you - Bach wrote a lot of notes, so I am happy for the break!) As for samples of music - studios (ours, Nathen's or anybody eles's) do not own or have access to the rights to the music their customers record, but here are some links: http://www.simbioticstore.com/spokersloan/index.html?s=home&m=&c=viewitem&item_id=6419%20# http://www.musicfordance.com/ (Vol 5 was recorded and mixed here and some of the tracks were later used for a major film release.) http://www.theratpacksinger.co.uk/txt/download.html Unfortunately, not everyone who records here wants to have their music posted all over forums. ______________________________________________________________ Quote Flash (I always thought Flash was the dog from Dukes of Hazzard BTW): "Thing is that someone with ~500K and time on their hands can purpose build/convert a studio, and stock it with the finest of gear... or thereabouts. They don't have rent to pay either, and they haven't borrowed any money so they don't have to pay any interest. So they can charge 25 per hour, and be fussy enough to only work billable hours (because their equipment is good), and still make enough to live comfortably doing something they enjoy." ______________________________________________________________ Well, that sounds a bit like . . . well, never mind! But yes! That's how the music business works. Cash. Nearly everybody who borrows money in this game sinks like a stone. The economics of the music business are very different to anything else. Some of the reasons are: 1. The whole business is international. Records get sold in every country and gigs get played in every country. Keeping up to date (or ahead) of taxes in all countries requires black figures in bank accounts. Nothing stops you dead like an unpaid tax bill! 2. Income can be everything one year and nothing the next. You can spend years getting nowhere with your career (studio or whatever) and then do a project for points and see it go platinum. Suddenly you have points on a major hit and everybody wants to know you and use your sevices - well, for a few months at least. Then it's back to nothing for a while - and the last thing you need is to loose all that good money because you bought the gear on the slate! 3. There are just too many wide boys out there. You can give no credit and you'll get no credit. 4. You'd be suprised just how much leverage cash can give you in this business. Buy a new car cash, I mean real cash, not a piece of paper, and they'll give you what? 10 - 15 - 20% off? Unless it's a Rover or something built in Korea, that's the best you'll get. Now buy a new mixing desk from a manufacturer who does not know if he can meet his wage bill that month. Hire a band from an agent who is avoiding the balif. Hire a studio that has a mortgage or rent to pay and has not seen a good customer in months. Book a session musician that hasn't eaten in days. They will open at 50 points . . . 5. Many musicians, when they are faced with getting lots of money suddenly from a successful tour or a good song, will 'forget' to pay their taxes. They think, if they deal in cash, somehow the taxman will not notice. They are fools, but you will have to take their cash anyway. So yes, the music business is very up and down. I've had friends buy castles one year and have nothing left the next. Hanging onto those Pennies is a full time job and needs a clear head. No binges, no parties and no waffle dust! And Nathen - there's always a beer or two here keeping cool for you . . .

Home brew in paper cups? I must disagree with Flash and agree with some of what Cloud says here and the reason is as follows: There is a complete mismatch with and an utter disregard of reality by most people running 'demo rooms' project studio' (call them what you will.) There is a real belief that somehow a cheap desk can do what an Amek, Neve or SSL desk can do. Many in the project World honestly believe that somehow a budget mic will sound every bit as good as a Neumann or Brauner. They actually and honestly think that somehow a set of plugins in ProTools, CuBase or CoolEdit will give the same results as a rack full of hardware costing tens of thousands. They believe that thier garage or bedroom conversion will sound as good as the main room at Air. I'll put this bluntly: You can no more build a commercial studio for a few thousand, than you can start a taxi company by bolting two bicycles together and calling it a car - or start a JCB hire company with a bucket and spade. Most musicians have got their own project studio where they can record into CoodEdit or PT-Lite and do some bar-beat editing - most will have their own PA mixers and a load of stage mics like SM57s and 58s. They are looking for something that they do NOT have - like good mics, a grand piano, a big room that sounds nice, a proper drum room, a real monitoring system, a choice of multitracks, good 5.1 monitoring with a choice of systems and so on. They certainly do not need what they have already at home in the garage! That is why demo studios struggle to get clients. There is a complete parallel universe thing going on here. This other universe is sadly being fed by the home-studio industry and they (i.e. the manufacturers of semi-pro kit) perpetuate all kinds of myths and good old fashioned untruths in order to sell their boxes. These myths include out and out lies like: - Many hit records have been recorded at home on a computer - Plugins can do everything real studio hardware can do - A hit record will make you rich - You don't need to learn about music to succeed - Samples are as good as the real thing People spend huge sums of money chasing these myths. They buy channel strips and tons of software and all kinds of Chinese microphones from the likes of AT, Rode, SE etc. and waste vast amounts on mickey-mouse monitors from Behringer, Mackie, Samson, etc. Worst still, they attend courses in audio technology, believing that there is a career out there (somewhere) for them, not realising that there are about 50 full-time, commercial recording studios in the whole of the UK. Just as there is no number of bicycles you can tie together to build a taxi company, there is no number of cheap mics or Yamaha desks you can install to build a studio. There are standard pieces of kit that every studio has to have to attract clients, just as a London taxi company has to have an Austin Taxi, or a JCB digger hire company has to have a line of JCB Site-Masters. Hey Flash! Could you sell home-brew in paper cups in your bar? How about bar stools from Ikea? Or a PA made from a hi-fi from Asda? Na, I didn't think so! Hey, don't shoot the messenger - it's the way it is. Cheers - Andrew www.the-byre.com

This thread had turned into a silly 'mine-is-bigger-than-yours' bragging match. Firstly, I feel Nathan should not use words like "as good as top London sudios" because that is obviously not the case. Making a statement like that just opens you up to ridicule, which is probably not what you wanted. Don't get me wrong, I am sure that you do a great job, but I feel that you are going about promoting your services in the wrong way. As for which ProTools is professional, the only ProTools anyone is interested in is HD3 - the rest are just toys and are priced accordingly. As for the quiality of the 001, it produces top end distortion that makes everything sound as if it was recorded using cheap Chinese mics. One can use the 001 to drive PT Lite for simple editing jobs, but that is about as far as it goes. I would be very reluctant to use it for tracking or even mixing. Nathan, top London studios? Which top London studios are we talking about? The Abbey? Air? Whitfield Street? Angel? Have you ever been in any of them? I have and I can assure you that a small Yamaha desk and an 001 is rathgera long way away from an 88R and a choice of every recording format you care to think of from PT-HD to Radar, from Logic to Soundscape, from, well, you get the idea! I have worked in studios all over Europe from London to Berlin and so have a fair idea of what to expect in a studio, top or otherwise. I have a feeling (just a feeling, mind) that the room might not be up to 'top London studio' standard. I might also suggest that the Yamaha upright and the other keys might not be up to the kind of instuments that one would expect in a 'top London studio.' Yes, Aberdeen is probably lacking good studios and Nathen might be just the guy to fill that gap in the market. But before making statements like the ones you have made, I suggest that you spend some time actually having a look at top London studios - or, as someone else has pointed out here, top Scottish studios. OK, I know MTA has come on a bit strong here and I hope you can forgive him! I know MTA quite well and (trust me on this one!) he actaully a really nice guy and he knows a good deal about recording, having worked with us and with John Cornfield down at Sawmills. In fact we bought Soundscape just so that he has something to play with! (I am more of a Radar man myself.) There is of course, nothing to stop you building a good studio and if you do, you will find that people from all over the Globe will come to record with you. We have just completed a Danish film earlier this year and we did the pre-production for a major UK film last year. Also we have a steady string of US and UK advertising work come to us. We just sent the music to a New York agency for an anti drugs campagne at midnight last night (Thank F for broadband!) and we have a top New York act coming here over the Winter period. So you see, if you build it, they will come! You could do well to follow MTA's advice and go for Soundscape. It's cheaper than PT and does much more. It is also 100% stable and you will have to admitt that PT Lite does go into a coma if you ask it to do two things at once! BTW, 60% of all films made in Scotland have their A for V done on Soundscape - ask John at 'The Base' in Glasgow. Oh yes, and if you are ever in the Inverness area, come past and crack a few 'brewskis' with us - you know it makes sense! Cheers Andrew www.the-byre.com

If you are just starting out with recording, then you have a good deal to learn. Get a head start by reading some of the tips here www.the-byre.com and also by reading some of the back articles on home recording at www.soundonsound.com

I have put together a page on this subject at www.the-byre.com under the heading 'Success in Music'. But the jist is that you will have to start thinking about getting an agent and a manager after you have decided to become fully professional. You might go with a local agent as far as booking gigs is concerned and one of the band or a friend could act as manager. But if you sign any contracts, be very careful - you will have to drop both of them later on when you become more successful. There are management companies that can guide your career and have the resources to get you onto talk shows and do radio interviews. These companies know how to get your music heard in Denmark and Italy and how to get tours in Spain and France. They know who to talk to, to get Rock am Ring and Rockpalast gigs in Germany and the two big talk shows in the US. They also know how to cut a good licensing deal with a major label. But there is absolutely no point in talking to management and agencies if you still have other jobs. Also - most important - you must be filling halls. Management, agencies and record comapnies are not interested in you and your music. They are interested in your audience. That is the market they are buying and that is the market that you hope they will expand.

Solid state amps like the GT1200H have a great deal of difficulty creating a clean sound with very small amounts of harmonic distortion that is created by tubes/valves. Try a Marshall JCM2000 combo or have a look on eBay for items like this: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Marshall-jcm-900-100w-full-stack_W0QQitemZ7340268361QQcategoryZ10171QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem and http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Marshall-JCM-2000-DSL-100-Watt-Valve-Amplifier_W0QQitemZ7341006032QQcategoryZ10171QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem It is impossible to get a full-bodied sound out of a solid state amp! www.the-byre.com

www.the-byre.com We have an engineer in Aberdeen who can take you through all the pre-production and talk you through the project.

Err . . . www.the-byre.com

If you do go down the CD-R route (I would not recommend it) remember that only CD-Rs designed to be used for music and burt slowly can be guaranteed to play on every player. Proper CDs with case and priting etc only cost 1 each, but they do have a minimum run of 500. www.the-byre.com

These things have been around for awhile, it's just that the sales company have been making some noise as the market has more or less ignored them. This is almost exactly the same as the old C-Ducer system and I bought my first C-Ducer back in 1979 and they had been around some time already back then. Do these things work for drums? Sorry, but unless you are using them to trigger samples, the answer is no! And if you are triggering samples, it is better and cheaper to get a dDrum pick-up. www.the-byre.com

There's a new pro-audio podcast (on-line radio show) all about recording music and recording technology at www.audiotalk.org Might be worth a listen!