Studios

Studio 07Uylsses Records has built many studios over the last 25 years and in true form we build our own facilities with our own hands to suite the wide variety of requirements  our clients need. The latest is on the south east coast of Spain and you can catch up with how the build is going here at Building Studio Spain.

Our main UK facility is located in the Avenues of Kingston Upon Hull. The local area offers plenty of immediate parking, a multitude of shops, cash points, pubs and an all night garage and off licence so you’ll never be out of chocolate or beer during your session.

Garden 01 SMThe studio garden offers piece and quite, and space to reflect on your work.  It’s also a great place to gather for a well earned rest and great food.

The studio offers a great range of facilities and has been home to all manor of recording and filming projects over the years.

For those artists requiring a little more direction our producers are well versed in the art of musical arrangement and we have a healthy list of top class session musicians too.  The studio’s live room has been acoustically designed with a warm balance of natural wood and deeply bed sound tiles with three bass traps in the centre of the ceiling.  The room gives great result whether your recording a full live band or individual instruments.  There’s three room separation for clinical division between players and  to help clean up those live recordings and open microphone applications there’s a plentiful supply of portable sound tiles which can be suitably arranged.

Studio Celing

The studio hosts several drum kits including a 70’s 7 piece mark 2 Pearl Export, there’s a great range of cymbals and an almost unlimited digital drum library. In the percussion range we have a vibraphone, several sets of conga, bongos, chime bells, a range of wood blocks and cow bells, cabasa, shakers, maracas, guiro.  In the strings we have a jazz double bass, Yamaha electro acoustic guitar, a beautiful hand crafted full body Zemaitis 12 string, Gibson Epiphone 335, Delgada classical acoustic.

In the keyboard and synth range we have an acoustician Salk upright piano, a full size electric Clavinova Piano , Roland Juno DS with 88 weighted keys and an original Roland A50 full size with weighted keys.  The later three are all excellent as primary controller keyboards because of their professionally graded velocity sensitivity and weighted keys.  We have an original 70’s Roland Juno with a modern midi conversion, Korg Trinity, original 80’S Yamaha DX7, Korg DW6000, Roland JX-305 Dance, Yamaha CS1x, Roland Sound Expansion units for Dance, Vintage Synth & Orchestral.  If your still keen on professional sampling and sound manipulation for phonic art then there’s an Akai S5000 with a TB drive and a Roland S50.Mesa Boogie 01 SM

For amplification we always point clients to the Mesa Boogie because of it’s increasable valve sound and awesome recording outputs but we have Fender, Marsha, Orange and plenty of additional cabs by Toa, Bose, Electro Voice and Peavey.

There’s a great range of microphones too.  All the solid golden mics which have proved themselves over the years such as Sure SM57’s & 58’s, AKG D112’s, C1000 & C3000’s, a range of Sennheiser mics for various special applications: riffle, shotgun, ambient and batter proof drum skin recording. Rode’s NT1’s & NT2’s and plenty of the large diaphragm  Sontronics STC2’s greatly favoured for vocals and acoustic instruments.

Vocal Mic 01 SMAt the hart of the studio is still a number of original Yamaha O2R digital consoles with a few updated modifications to their effects boards and a full 32 way light pipe (fibre optics) connection to the various software programs we run. The system has run seamlessly without any major faults for the last 20 years. It gives great scope for both a plentiful simultaneous multi track input (record) and playback (remixing) at the same time. There’s no particular limit on digital tracks to record to, or playback from, although every PC (no matter how powerful it is) will have it’s breaking point, we’ve never as yet hit that limit. However there is a limit to the physical faders you might break your mix out in to if your not mixing in the box.

Studio Desk 01 SMIn the good old days tape machines use to return one analogue track to one fader on the desk. You only ever had instruments together on a fader if you had already bounced them down together deliberately and usually as a consequence of the limitations of the recording tracks available on the tape machine.

Today you might mix an eight track brass section or a full drum kit in the recording software’s mixer but still arrange for them to return to the desk for the mix over two faders i.e. L & R.  On the contrary you may want to keep greater hands on control over the section and have every track return to an individual fader.  This is a great advantage during recording and overdubbing in regards to individual monitor mixes.  Whilst recording software allows you to group off instruments for quick access to volume, EQ and effects it’s still very slow in comparison to hands on faders and desk controls.

The desks together can cope with 64 digital fader returns and 16 analogue returns for digital MIDI instruments such as keyboards all simultaneously. This doesn’t stop you running hundreds of digital tracks in the software at once but it is the limit of physical digital desk faders you can break those track out in to.  These console faders can then also supplies up to 8 individual monitor mixes giving individual performers (playing together) the balance they require during recording and allows everyone to be comfortable in their own headphones.

The system also provides 4 sets of MIDI connections giving a total of 64 MIDI channels for recording and communicating with keyboards and outboard equipment.

Whilst our system is very flexible and has worked arduously over the last 20 years, providing only top quality production, times are changing, so we have also integrated newer systems in to the studio.  Available at the push of a button (via the optical patch bay) are the new Mackie Onyx Blackbird interfaces.  They use the same light pipe connections to the console but interface to the computer via firewire and allow for access to the newest software running on windows 7 -10.

We still run plenty of outboard equipment such as compressors, limiters, gates and multi effects units but their use within the modern digital studio is quickly disappearing.  However we do confess to regularly compressing and limiting on channel inserts pre record.  We’ve never found a better way to produce that punch or fat sound you get from a set of Drawmer compressors.

When it comes to mixing the studio offers a wide range of monitors. Today the key to a great mix is consistency over a verity of speakers.  Long gone are the days of supper stacked home high fidelity speakers.  Today it’s tiny winy phone speakers and Beats Audio to contend with.  You need to produce a symmetry of audio precision across the spectrum of secular speaker. Our monitor combinations is a great and includes an original set of Yamaha NS10’s, Genelec 1029a