Bally Rehearsal Studios.
Tottenham Hale, N17. London. 

Bally Studios 8-track recorder. 

Q - So what's the deal with the 8-track recorder?   

You book your rehearsal session as usual, in whatever studio you want. We recommend the bigger studios so that you have more space for setting everything up. You pay the usual rehearsal studio rate for the time that you use.   You then hire this extra equipment on top of it, to turn the rehearsal into a recording session, and this adds a flat fee of £50 to your session price.  If you carry on recording the next day then there's no increase in the equipment hire fee, you just pay the usual rehearsal rate to hire the studio for the following day. 

You get everything that you usually get in your rehearsal session, such as the PA system, the amplifiers, microphones and stands, and the drum kit with snare and cymbals, if you need them. We then provide you with all of the equipment that you need to record the session, and we also set everything up for you.  We check that the microphone gain for each channel is set up correctly, and then we leave you to it. You record your band without there being a sound engineer present, so you have to press "stop" at the end of each take, and then "record" at the start of every new take, or you can leave the machine running and turn it on/off every 4-5 takes. 

Q - So as it's an 8-track recorder, this means that we can only use 8 microphones in total? 

Actually, no, you can record up to 16 tracks in total, but only 8 tracks simultaenously.  We recommend that you use the 8-track recorder to record everything live, with the following instruments being mic'ed up and recorded to the following channels, with the following set-ups.  

Live recording: 2 guitars, bass, drums.

 1: Bass drum. 
 2: Snare drum
 3: Drums Overhead Left
4: Drums Overhead Right
 5: Bass Guitar
6: Lead Guitar
 7: Rhythm Guitar
8: Vocals 

You can then expand on this in various ways.   There's more information here as to the different ways that you can use the 8-track recorder here.  
 
Q - What type of session would you recommend that we do? 

We recommend that you treat this session like a rehearsal session that gets recorded, as opposed to a recording session.  If a rehearsal seession everything gets played live, so that shoukd be your focus.  If you're not sure what kind of session you want, then you should keep it as simple as possible and record it all live to 8-track. You should only record to 16 tracks with overdubs if you are sure you know how to do so, or if you are willing to learn how to do so in advance. (We can provide you with the information that you need.) 

Q - How can the session be so cheap? 

We are able to offer much cheaper recording rates through a combination of factors: 

- The recording format is a super simple 8-track format.  Whilst some studios will spend £100,000 on their studio equipment, with 40+ microphones, world class pre-amps and options that offer ultimate flexability, our set-up is much more stripped down, costing us about £2,900 in total.  Most bands will use about £1,950 of equipment, and  this means we can pass these savings over to you.   
- There is no sound engineer/producer in the studio with you during your session, meaning you don't need to pay their wages. 
- These sessions are designed to record the band whilst playing live, as opposed to each band member recording their parts individually, as it's meant to capture a "live" sound.  Therefore these sessions are much shorter.  It takes much less time to record 5 musicians at once, rather than recording 5 musicians individually. 

Q - How good will the recording be? 

You can check out an example of a past recording on this link, here.  It's difficult to say what quality the recording will be done to, as it's a very subjective matter,  but we can definitely say that it will be much better than most people would expect, given the simplicity of the set-up and the price of the sessions.  

Q - Can we record with our own laptop/interface?    

If you want to, sure!  In that case we will provide you with all of the equipment that you need, and then you can fit it together with your extra equipment.   However, please note that our staff have learned how to use the equipment that we offer at the studios, and may not be familiar with any equipment that you bring with you. Therefore, whilst we will try our best to help you, we do not guarantee to know how your equipment works.  We have created a super-simple setup in order to make the recording process as straightforward as possible. If you then want to start bringing in extra equipment with you, you really need to know how it will work with our set-up. If you're not sure as to how your equipment works, then it's best that you stick to our simple set-up.  

Q - Where does the equipment get plugged into? 

Anything that needs to be minitored in the headphones will go into a splitter box, which will then split the signal into seperate paths to be monitored and recorded.   Keyboards/synths and DI boxes can be plugged directly into the recorder.