Beebs to Belgium!

We have just shipped this rather lovely set of Reslo microphones to Thomas at Le Lupanar Studios in Belgium. He will be recording a brass section with two of our 'Beeb' Reslos, and a pair of upgraded cardioid Reslo CR mics on goosenecks.

His studio is still under construction but Thomas has been making a photo diary of the project - from the pictures so far it will be an amazing facility in a great location! How's this for soundproofing...

Good luck with the building, and we will watch with interest as it all comes together.
:)

Ed Laurie with a Melodium 42b at Kore Studios

It is very gratifying to know that the mics we service and repair go out and get used to make great recordings.

Of course it is not just the microphone - to make something special you also need good songwriting, a strong performance, and an engineer that knows what to do.
Here we have it all...

This beautiful song by Ed Laurie was recorded by George Apsion at Kore Studios.

George and Kore are good customers of ours, and we recently serviced a pair of Melodium 42bs and a little Cadenza microphone for them. The vocals on the video were recorded using one of the Melodiums, running through an Xaudia impedance matching transformer box. A Neumann U67 was used for the guitar amp, and a pair of AKG 414s as room mics, all into some vintage Neve preamps. I think it sounds stunning!

Ed has a new album out in January, and is currently out on the road.

Summer is here, and it is Reslo season.

Another typical day at the Xaudia studio & workshop...

Outside the studio .... flowers, blue sky and cows.

And inside, in the basement workshop.... a Reslo production line!
We see a lot of these little British microphones. The original ribbons are quite thick and have an unusual 'square wave' corrugation. Very often these have oxidised and become noisy, and after 50 years they usually benefit from a clean and a fresh ribbon.

Winter is here! And so are Modern Day Chicane.

This was the scene at Xaudia studio yesterday - a beautiful cold, crisp and bright day in North Yorkshire, and it's times like this you really appreciate the peace & tranquility we get here. Ideal for creativity and recording. And this was the view from the studio over the surrounding fields.

We're a little isolated, not quite in the middle of nowhere, but certainly just down the road from the middle. They don't grit the road here, and sometimes the pipes freeze, but yesterday everything was perfect.

Modern Day Chicane were here to record some drum tracks for a future EP, in what turned out to be a productive, if somewhat frantic session. I arrived early to mic up the kit as drummer Pete was coming up from London on the train, which of course arrived a little late due to the weather, which left us about 4 hours to get the drum takes. We tracked at a blistering pace, cutting six live versions that may (or may not) see the light of day as bonus tracks, then we did five of the songs again to a click track, with Ryan and Nicola (pictured) in the control room providing guide vocals, guitar and bass.

Once we had a couple of decent takes of each drum track, we abandoned the editing and packed up early because it was getting cold and dark, and the talent had to get to a gig. It had already dropped to -4︒C by the time we had to scrape the ice from the cars. Brrr!

I went home and lit the fire!