Music Recording & Production at SHStudios

Here at The Coolest Recording Space in South London we like to get supercharged - which is why we're renown for turning All our knobs up to 11 !! Here's a few videos showing how tube compression affects the sound of the mics: 1 - The Behemoth: - lots of heavy duty transformer / valve compression - great on drums. 2 - The Vortexion - a tad more hi fi sounding - these were used by Joe Meek - The Who - & a whole bunch of cool engineers back in the day. Also great using a condenser mic for piano!   3 - Akai preamps - these came out of an Akai reel to reel tape machine - they sound nice & crunchy on drums - great on guitar (electric & acoustic) & great on percussion. We do have a large collection of vintage tube preamps at www.shrunkenheadsstudios.com - all have distinct supertasty flavours we use to capture a certain je-ne-sais-quoi - that magic element that makes a good recording sound Great. Sometimes - you just need some e

Here at The Coolest Recording Space in London Town - we got all kinds of studio shazzle - mixers / compressors / eq's - but for audio capture, the most important thing aside for the mics - are mic preamplifiers. They come in all shapes & forms - from lovely vintage tube pre's that warm up the sound of an instrument or space to super fast solid state units that capture transient material (like metal drums or fast picked acoustic guitar) to transformer based pre's that you can distort at the input to add bloom & energy to an audio source. This is a Vortexion tube preamp as used by Joe Meek & the Who back in the 50's & 60's - beautiful for recording drums, guitars, vocals & ambient spaces with ribbon microphones. They were broadcast quality units that add a rich, fullness to the mic chain. You can also use them to pleasantly saturate vocals etc in post production. vortexion   These Ampex 602 units came out of an old tape recorder