Bally Rehearsal Studios.
Tottenham Hale, N17. London. 

At the back end of 2021 half the musicians we knew were binge watching The Beatles' “Get Back” documentary about them recording their album "Let It Be" which was recorded in glorious 8 track, meaning the music was recorded from 8 separate microphones/music sources, before being mixed together.   Compared to the options that we have today of practically unlimited channels it was stripped back to say the least, and back in the day recording sessions were so expensive that only a lucky few bands could afford them.   When The Beatles recorded their debut album “Please Please Me” they knocked it out in a single day, partly on the back of the hundreds of 6+ hour gigs in Hamburg over many years, but mostly due to the cost of £400 per day to hire the studio, at a time when the average house in London cost £2,530.  You could have a week in the studio, or a 3 bedroom house in London.  Eek! 
 
Nowadays advancements in technology means that it’s possible to buy all of the recording equipment you need to record to 8 track for £1,500 - £2,000 including everything; the recorder, the microphones, the cables, etc.  Today many recording studios  offer much more sophisticated recording facilities for £250-£300 per day, a fraction of the cost in real terms compared to 60 years ago.  They can be a bargain for what you get, no doubt, but in a world where even established acts can still be making less than £10,000 a year from their music, and where COVID-19 has basically wiped out 2 years of touring income for most bands, for many people it's just not affordable. 
 
This is why we have launched our 8-track recording facility.  It's designed to get 80%+ of the results at 5% of the cost.  It has limits, naturally, but the results that it gets are well worth the paltry investment put into it.   Bands that come to us can record their sessions in the same 8 track format that albums like The Beatles “Sgt Peppers…..”, The Beach Boys “Pet Sounds”, Led Zeppelin’s “Led Zeppelin I” and loads more classic albums were recorded in.   Most of the Motown records, and Miles Davis’ “Kind Of Blue” was recorded to 3 track, so 8 tracks can be plenty, depending on your circumstances. 

Q - So I can record an album to the same quality as those albums?!?! 
 
Whoah, hold on….. probably not.   But that’s also looking at it in the wrong way.   Some of those bands had thousands of hours of playing together behind them, they had world class acoustics with 30 ft high ceilings, hand made microphones with some of the world’s best audio engineers, and those albums have been mixed, mastered and polished by some of the world’s greatest engineers for months at a time, at great cost. It’s just not realistic to expect the same results at such a price reduction, but that doesn't mean you can't get great recordings quickly and cheaply.    

This service fills a gap in the market for bands that simply cannot afford to pay thousands of pounds to record their music. and it allows bands to record their music quickly and cheaply so that it can be released, which in turn will hopefully gain the band the attention and the financial backing that they need to move onto the next level.  It’s not meant to compete with professional studios, it’s a perfect compliment to them.  In the short term a band will get a good recording of their music to promote themselves and build a fan-base, and in the long term the direct format of this kind of recording session, and the limitations that the recording format has will allow bands to learn, to become more aware of what they need to improve, and to become empowered, relying on themselves to make progress, as opposed to waiting for someone else to come along and do it for them. 

Q - What benefits does this approach have over going to a professional recording studio with a trained producer/engineer? 

Again, it’s not meant to directly compare with going to a professional recording studio, and unless you’ve had lots of recording experience and everything falls into place then you're not likely to better the results of going to one  - if it was that easy to get the same results with a fraction of the equipment and cost then studios around the world would all go out of business pretty quickly -  but you’ll come close to it, closer than you think. There will be a compromise, sure, but you're not giving up the opportunity to re-record that music at a later date, and there are also some big extra benefits of recording your music this way yourself, as opposed to getting a hired hand in, that will help the band in other ways.  

a) It’s actually a realistic, lower risk option.

Sure, many professional studios are “only” £300 a day, and for what you get that's a great price, but we’re living in times where some bands haven’t made any money at all for a year or two, where inflation is high and money is tight. Most bands can’t justify spending £1,500 for 5 days in a studio.  If they only buy 2 days of studio time as a means to save money then they risk rushing the whole process, leaving them £600 poorer with a recording that’s a compromise in itself.   When you spend that kind of money on a recording then you need to hit a certain standard in order for it to be justified, which brings with it an element of risk and pressure.  By comparison this is a £29/£55 investment, that’ll get you 8/10 results for a minuscule fraction of the costs.   There’s a huge difference between throwing £29 into a project and hearing the odd squeak here and there, and spending £1000+ on getting the same results.    

b) You’ll hit other limits before you hit the limits that this set up has. 

A recording signal chain has numerous parts to it, and the end result is only as good as it’s weakest link:  the microphone, the exact positioning of the microphone, the cable connecting it to the recorder, the gain input level, the pre-amp, the recording bit-rate, the performance of the playing, the acoustics in the room, the sound quality of the instrument being played, the processing of the recorded sound, the final mix, the mastering, the speakers that the listener uses, the listeners musical ear -  all of these are factors that will determine how good the final music sounds.   If any one of them is off, then the quality of the music won’t be conveyed as accurately as possible to the listener.   95% of the chain could be amazing, but if the strings of the guitar are knackered and rusty then it won't matter how amazing the microphone is, it won't sound good. 

Any good sound engineer will tell you that all recording projects are about accepting what factor will limit the quality of the recording the most,  and recognising that no matter how great the other parts of the process are, the overall quality of the recording will not exceed it's weakest part.   If you have an amazing microphone and an amazing pre-amplifier, but the cable that links the two of them in really crackly, then this weakest part of the chain will limit your recording, more than the positive parts will improve it. Again, it doesn't matter how good other parts of the signal chain are, it is only as strong as it’s weakest part.    This is the reason that some bands spend months and vast amounts of money on recording their album, to try to eliminate any potential weaknesses within the recording chain. 

Our argument is that with this setup there will be limitations, yes,  but there will likely be other factors that will have a greater limit on the bands music elsewhere in the chain anyway, and you’ll also likely bypass other factors that would have otherwise limited your recordings even more.     For example, the biggest factor to hold many bands back is the cost of the recording.  If there’s a studio with amazing microphones, amazing acoustics and a world class producer, but it costs £1000 a day to rent, and if you can’t afford that, then the price is the factor that holds you back the most since it means that you can’t do any recording at all.   Using £1000 microphones could be amazing, but if you’re using basic instruments then you’ll be recording an average sound with an amazing microphone, which will capture that average sound perfectly; giving you an average sound.    Some will be surprised to hear that Spotify has a playing bitrate of approximately 96 kbps, and many people listen to their music when on the move, in an atmosphere such as in a vehicle or on the street, meaning that there will be added noise pollution when they listen to the music, which they may do so by using the free headphones that come with their phone. Or they may listen to their music on a radio in an office, which is likely to be set at a volume that doesn't allow the listener to fully hear every detail within the music, in a room that isn't set up for good acoustics.   They may have the music on in the background, or they can’t concentrate on the music fully.   

All of these factors will limit what people get out of the recordings more than the limitations that the equipment puts on the music.   By all means, if you want to record an album that gets listened to on £2000 speakers, in a room with perfect acoustics, to a listener that sits perfectly between the speakers with no distractions on a lossless format then they may notice that there’s a bit of rattle from the snare drum: but that’s not the circumstances that most music is listened to.  The circumstances that music is usually listened under has factors that means that the subtleties within the music are missed anyway, most of which will cause a greater limitation to the music than this recording set up will.  

c) You can learn your recording technique, and what suits your music best, so that you can get the most out of a more expensive, future recording session. 

This is by far one of the biggest selling points. Sometimes it’s only once you put yourself into a recording session that you learn what works best for you, and what doesn’t.   I’ve been in sessions myself where a band says that they want to play to a click track, and they just don’t prepare for it. It’s an afterthought for the band, and particularly the drummer.   I remember times when a drummer was playing the same song for 6 hours at a time, as they just couldn't get the hang of playing it to the click track, and this was at £40 an hour back in 2004.  The whole process just felt so unnatural to them, and they were more focused on hitting the right drum at the exact right time than they were at getting ‘the feel’ of the song right.  If only he’d learned that lesson in a cheap recording session.  

Likewise,  I’ve seen band members that just froze in a studio;  they’d never played with 6 people gawking at them before. A few days into the process they’d gotten over their nerves, but again, it’s was a shame that it cost them so much money to learn that lesson. I’ve seen bands that tried to play with just drums and bass guitar, that after about 8 hours suddenly worked out that if the guitarists play at the same time as them, even if the guitars are not recorded,  it made the other members play so much better.   I’ve seen guitarist forget to check all of their pedals before a session, and spend 45 minutes trying to fix 'pops and clicks' in the chain that they can't identify, and vocalists who wanted to get their vocal recorded as quickly as possible in overdub sessions, first thing, so that they can get their parts over with.  They later learned that their voice is a lot better later on in the day, once it’s had a better chance to wake up.   All of those morning sessions needed to be wiped and re-recorded.  

There are factors that will limit your band, and other factors that will make your band deliver their best performance, and the more recording sessions you do, the more of these factors you will learn.  Recording your sessions on an 8 track multi-track recorder will not only move you forward as a band, but it’ll also make your future recording sessions more productive and your future recordings better.   

d) 'Music recorded to a compromise' is infinitely more productive for a band than 'music that hasn't been recorded yet'. 

This is a HUGE benefit that cannot be underplayed.   No matter how good your music is, until it’s recorded the only people who will hear it are the people who come to see you live, and if COVID-19 has shown the music industry anything, it’s that we can’t be relying on this method to connect with your audience.  Even then, recording your music and putting it on streaming services is the best way to get people along to your gig in the first place. Even if the recording hits that 8/10 standard, so long as the songwriting is good enough,  that's enough to pique the interest of music fans.  If they listen to your music and think it's a great song with amazing production then they'll come to your gig.    On the other hand, if they listen to your music and think it's a great song with very basic production, they'll still come to your gig.   They're not going to say, "well, I would have gone to the gig, but I was put off a bit by the fact that the hi-hats were competing with the rhythm guitar in that 6khz range......"  If you're an unsigned band who has to work a day job to support your music then you're not at the stage of recording your Magnus Opus yet, instead you should be trying to build up as much momentum and  attention for the band as possible, and that won't be done based on the production levels, it will be done based on the quality of the music.   Solve today's problems today, and leave tomorrow's problems until tomorrow.   Once you've built up your fan base a bit, these recordings can then be re-recorded at a later date if needs be.  

e) You can keep the full control and ownership of your music yourself.   

Once you've signed your record contract you'll start to make an average of between 50p - 80p for each album sold once everyone else has taken their slice of the pie, which is also set against the recording costs.  If you go to a flashy studio and spend £10,000 on recording the album, and you're getting 50p per album, you won't see any return for the first 20,000 albums sold, which will go to pay those costs back. Until that time you'll be living off of your advance, which also needs to be paid back.   The fact that the session is so expensive means you need to sign contracts to cover the process, which brings with it even more costs. 

With our recording equipment you'll stump up £55  in advance for renting the recording equipment, and you can start selling the music at £5, (half the price of other records) and even with taking into account the commission that the retailers take and other costs, by the time you sell your 15th-20th CD, you're already into profit for the whole project, and getting 800% the profit margin on every extra record sold, selling it at a much more attractive price.  Sell it for the usual price and you'll earn even more.     You won't sell as many as on a major label, but then you won't need to.  As opposed to your album being a product that has low margins and needs to be sold in huge quantities to be "economically viable", it's now being sold in an incredibly efficient cottage industry that can sustain itself on very low sales levels.  

Of course, there's going to be a big difference in the quality of the recording for the £55 that you'll pay to record your album yourself, and the £10,000 that it'll cost to record it in a professional studio, but you'll only need to sell 3,000 albums or so at £5, or 1,500 sales at £10, and then you can go into a professional studio yourself and get those songs re-recorded with the £10,000 earned from those sales.  Once you've got your new polished recordings you can then sell them again, and if the album goes on to be successful then the people who purchased the initial basic version of the album that you knocked out on 8-track now have an incredibly rare, personal and valuable initial pressing of a copy of an album that later became very successful.  It's win-win for everyone.  By using our studios you can do whatever you want, the options are all yours, and that's not possible if you sell the rights to your music to a label to go straight for the professional studio option.   

f) You have full creative control over your band. 

Working with a big name producer can be incredible, and they can really bring new life to the band's music, but in most cases they're not a member of the band.  There's an argument to be made that any recordings that you do with them will be a collaborative effort between band and producer, instead of being representative of the band's process alone.   If there's one thing that a debut recording should be, it should be representative of who the band are at that time.   

Go through the list of the vast majority of bands, and whilst there are numerous examples where the band's debut album was their best, nearly all of them are also a snapshot in time that can NEVER be recreated at a later date. Writing songs about working a dead end job whilst wanting to leave your hometown and see the world can ONLY be done when you're at the pre-success stage.  Doing it by funding the project yourself, and putting those songs down on an 8 track recorder without any outside help has a huge romantic element to it.  The limitations of the situation add to the project.    

Once the band starts to take off, and once you've played 75 gigs in the last 4 months across Europe, with the fame and the financial rewards that come with that, the band will have changed.   The people within the band will have changed.  The music you record from now on might be better, but it will never capture the band at the time and place that they've left behind.   You might think that you have limitations that will stop you from getting the best out of the recorder, but those limitations are something that you can NEVER recreate once the band takes off, so you bypass them at your peril.   

The limitations that you have now are arguably your "unique selling point".   Get them down on tape now - you can't do that later on. You only have to look at the success of The Beatles Anthology 1 which was released in 1995 to see how much interest there was in the biggest band of all time, who had made some of the most beautiful music ever, and yet people were going mad for a crackly, ramshackle recording that the band had made in the late 1950s,  which paled by comparison to the masterpieces that they made later.   Nobody was sitting at home listening to the band's version of Buddy Holly's "That'll Be The Day" and thinking, "wow, this is better than Side 2 of Abbey Road!"