+44 (0)20 7232 0008 bookings@miloco.co.uk

• Recording Studios
• Gear
• Builds
• Producer Management
• DrumDrops
• Online Mixing
• Studio Team
• About

Studios

Studio Categories

Engineers

Clients

Blog

Rover by Royce Wood Junior is now available

Royce Wood Junior’s track Rover is up now and available to download immediately when you pre-order his forthcoming Rover – EP.

Rover – EP and the whole forthcoming album titled Ashen Tang, both of which will be released through 37 Adventures, were recorded at The Summerhouse writing studio on Osea Island back in July of this year! Royce, who stayed in The Laurels accommodation, wrote, produced, and recorded the whole thing along with resident assistant Kit Carpenter.

Rover – EP is released on 1 December 2014 and the album will be coming out in Spring.

On the Rover – EP’s title track a broken falsetto deftly skips across sparse beats. Listen to the track Rover here, pre-order the 12-inch vinyl here, and pre-order the digital EP here.

Alan Moulder chooses PMC

Respected UK producer, engineer, and mixing specialist Alan Moulder (Nine Inch Nails, The Killers, Arctic Monkeys, Foals) has bought a pair of PMC twotwo.8 monitors, supplied by Miloco Gear, for his personal mix room, based at Assault & Battery Studios in northwest London. Moulder began to really notice PMCs when working at Trent Reznor’s studio on Nine Inch Nails’ 2013 Hesitation Marks album. “Of course, I’d heard about them, and working on Trent’s album, I liked them a lot.” Reznor has been a user of both PMC MB2 XBD-A midfields and AML2 nearfields for several years.

In early 2014, Assault & Battery Studios obtained a pair of the largest speakers in PMC’s twotwo nearfield series, the twotwo.8s, from Miloco Gear. After his experience mixing Nine Inch Nails on PMCs, Moulder wanted to try them. “I’ve got used to working with certain monitors over the years,” he admits. “So I didn’t really want to like the PMCs… but I instantly did! They don’t have a hyped sound – they’re very flat – but they are very detailed, even at low volumes, which I like. I will often spend a long time working on very sonically dense tracks, and you can’t crank the speakers too loud all the time when you’re working like that.”

From his earliest work, Moulder has had a reputation for producing great results when tracking and mixing very full arrangements. “It’s true!” he reflects. “If people have massive track counts, they come to me. I never seem to get minimal stuff to work on…! But that means I need speakers that can give you detail. With the twotwo.8s, you still get the full picture, even at low levels… the response is consistent at different volumes, and you can still hear the bottom end in full.”

Moulder’s twotwo.8s were installed in his studio at Assault & Battery in the early summer. His first sizeable project with them was premixing tracks in August on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s soundtrack album for the smash success film thriller Gone Girl, released in October 2014. The mixing on the soundtrack was completed on the PMCs at Reznor’s studio in LA.

Special price for Lisson Grove

The Unity Audio Lisson Grove R-X24 vintage style tube compressor can now be snapped up at the special price of £2,099 +VAT from Miloco Gear.

The R-X24 is based on the classic Altec compressor that was used intensively in the 60s. However, it has some modifications. Some of which are in the circuit and some functional. The quality of each component in the unit is of the highest possible standard, and the unit is hand built from top to bottom.

Contact Miloco Gear to demo the R-X24.

Ben Jackson on Kele – Trick

Partly engineered by Ben Jackson, Kele’s new album Trick is out now. Kele mostly went into The Bridge to record the album. Read a background interview with Jackson here.

Where did you start working on Trick?
I’ve worked with Kele for quite a while now. Kele always comes into the sessions with ideas, so the first thing I will always do is programme a beat and play in a chord sequence for him to vibe to based on what he describes. So technically Kele started work pre sessions, then we got into The Bridge and started making his ideas tangible.

What were some of the technical considerations when recording the album?
I wanted to make sure Kele’s vocal was clear and full. Recording the vocals and dynamic range is key to making an artist feel comfortable and creative during the session. I used compression on the way in and got the compressor to only react and kick in when Kele hit the loud notes so as not to distort to tape. Using a fast release setting it made the compression much more transparent and levelled the signal without overly colouring the sound, essentially limiting. Recording guitars was important to achieve a full body guitar sound and give the guys plenty to work with in the mix. Synth/bass/drum programming was done within Logic, each sound carefully chosen to keep in line with the overall sound of the record and Kele’s vibe. Most of the recording was done to give Kele, Alex [Epton, producer and engineer] and Tom [Belton, producer] as much to work with as possible in the production/mix stage.

What was the vocal chain setup?
For Kele I found a Neumann U47 into an API 7600 channel strip worked very well. The 47 matched Kele’s voice perfectly. For one session we couldn’t get the 47 so we used a CMV 563. It wasn’t the same vibe, but I have to say I was suitably impressed. The API channel strip is very versatile with buttons to change the configuration easily. The preamp sounds great and the compressor is extremely responsive which helped when limiting and taming the vocal to tape. Plus personally I’m a huge fan of switchable EQ to dial in the same settings each time.

Were there any challenges or special technical skills you had to rely on during the sessions?
Kele likes to work very fast. Sometimes we would work on up to eight songs a day using Logic Pro and Pro Tools. We would also have a vocal chain, guitar chain, bass chain, MIDI keyboard, and piano setup in the room and would bounce between each setup. It was quite challenging to stay on top of everything!

What was the atmosphere like during the sessions?
Fantastic. I always enjoy working on music that I would listen to at home.
Kele is a very inspirational person with an incredibly strong work ethic. The setup in The Bridge made us both feel very comfortable when working and I feel that always makes for the best product. This also helped when doing long days (up to 14 hours!). One major reason I personally wanted to continue using The Bridge is the monitoring. When working on the tracks I had full faith that what I was listening was true and would translate when I left the room, making creative, engineering, and mix decisions easy to make. I’m a big fan of committing early on to decisions in terms of sound and mix, it helps to capture and keep the original vibe being created.

New booth at 123 Studios

Producer, engineer, and mixer Brett Shaw recently put in a new booth at 123 Studios.

The south London recording studio is now more set up for live recording with bands that want to track everything at once.

One more booth with sightlines to the existing two may be installed in the future.

The Bunker Studio adds BAE 1084 modules

The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, New York just added eight more channels of BAE 1084 to the preamp rack in Studio A.

The rack now holds 14 1084 modules, two BAE 1073 modules, four channels of Rupert Neve Designs Portico 5012, and four custom REDD.47 tubes.

Four API 512c preamps have been moved to the compressor rack, and four more custom REDD.47 tubes are now in portable racks.

NASA shares space sounds

A collection of NASA sounds from historic spaceflights and current missions have been uploaded to NASA’s stream on SoundCloud. You can download the roar of a space shuttle launch; Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind”; the memorable words “Houston, we’ve had a problem”; and more.

Each sound has been made available on a Creative Commons licence, meaning you can use them for your own compositions or soundscapes!

For sound file use policy, please see here.

Kele on the making of Trick

Produced and engineered by Alex Epton with additional production and engineering by Tom Belton and Ben Jackson respectively, Kele’s new album Trick is out now.

Kele mostly went into The Bridge to record the album. Watch a behind the scenes interview here.

Interview: Miloco’s Nick Young

Fast-and-Wide interviewed Miloco’s Nick Young on the reopening of The Church Studios and the history of Miloco’s recording studios.

While centre stage belongs to studio and mixing console, the story behind the refurbishment of London’s iconic Church has an all-star cast – from new owner Paul Epworth through studio designer John Storyk, and the Miloco group that handled the build and will manage bookings, to the specialist techs who lent unrivalled expertise to the many aspects of the project.

MD Nick Young offers an insight into Miloco and the path to The Church.

The company was established in 1984 by Queen bass player John Deacon and the band’s tour manager, Henry Crallan. A tour specialist who had “built stages all his life”, Crallan wanted to get into recording. He bought a building in Hoxton Square, when Hoxton was rather a remote suburb of north London, and opened Milo Music. The 1980s were generous to the recording industry, and Milo set its sights modestly.

“I would say that, back then, Milo was top of the Championship in recording studios, rather than in the Premiership,” Nick Young says. “It started off with an Amek Angela console and Studer tape machine.

“I don’t think John had much to do with running it, except being a financial partner at the beginning and then being slowly bought out. I arrived about five years later, making tea and wanting to be an engineer. I worked for a couple of years as an assistant, then became an engineer and ended up in the office because Henry was always away on tour.”

It is unlikely that anyone within the fledgling company, nor any observer, could have predicted the decimation of the traditional recording studio business that lay just below the horizon, or the almost prescient working model that Miloco was soon to establish. The company’s initial steps gave little indication of either, but that began to change quite quickly.

See more at Fast-and-Wide.

Sam Smith wins MOBO Best Album

The MOBO Awards came to an end yesterday evening and Sam Smith won Best Album for In the Lonely Hour, partly recorded at Assault & Battery with producer Stephen Fitzmaurice, producer and engineer Jimmy Napes, and assistant Adam Durbridge.

As well as Best Album, Smith won Best Male, Best R&B/Soul, and Best Song for his UK No 1. Stay With Me.

Together with his four MOBO awards, Smith picked up Q Best New Act at the Q Awards earlier in the day. “5 AWARDS IN 1 DAY!!!!” said Smith in a post on Facebook. “I am completely emotionally drained and thankful. Thank you to the Mobos and the Q awards, but most importantly THE FANS. I’m a little bit in love with you all…”