Acoustic design is by London’s famous Recording Architecture partnership. They have created a highly flexible recording space with reversible/removable panels, a folding vocal booth, hidden amp chamber and deliberately ‘live’ and ‘dead’ areas. In the extremely quiet and detailed control room, soffit-mounted Quested VS3208s are partnered with dual VS1112 subwoofers calibrated to Bob Katz’s K-System.

We’ve invested heavily at all stages of the signal chain to ensure our recordings are of the highest possible quality, using microphones by Blue, Earthworks, Neumann and Royer amongst others, 24 channels of Focusrite Liquid and ISA series pre-amps, and Apogee AD & DA convertors. Additionally, we use balanced power throughout the studio which delivers an extremely low noise floor, free of buzzes and hums.

We keep a large collection of quality instruments, which unusually, are all included in the price, including our Yamaha C3 grand piano with MIDI and DW Custom drum-kit. Other favourites include a Rhodes Mk1 Suitcase 88 (one of only a few in London), MiniMoog Voyager, guitars by Fender, Gibson and Martin, together with some fabulous backline & stomp boxes, and tons of percussion.

We have over 150 third-party plug-ins from quality names such as Antares, Audio Ease, Celemony, East West, Eventide, Native Instruments, Spectrasonics, Synchro Arts, TC Works and Waves covering all manner of processors and virtual instruments. All plug-ins in our studio are legitimately sourced; software writers get their dues, and we get reliability and technical support.

The studio is built around a 5-card Digidesign Pro Tools HD Accel system with C|24 control surface running on a 2.8GHz 8-core Mac Pro, with an additional 32 channels of EQ and compression from our Focusrite Liquid Mix. The resulting combination of TDM, RTAS and external DSP power is sufficient to perform complex mixes with very high plug-in counts, even at higher sample rates.

While we don’t claim to have invented the 100% reliable computer for recording, we have taken many precautions: thorough testing of plug-in compatibility, an 'essentials-only' upgrade policy, Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS), backup OS and audio drives, ‘one-click’ backup script, and even a complete backup computer. We’ve avoided patchbay problems by simply not having one − you'll find an input wherever you need it.