21/08/2024
Episode 2
Tom and Lauren take care of a baby - or a puppy, depending on who you ask.
Hot Banana Studio
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Post-production sound services for film, television and video production. Location recording available for music and film sound recording.
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Our Story
The story starts in 1998 when I bought my first home studio kit. I had been playing bass in a few London bands and was living at Chester Court, Camberwell with a number of other musicians, artists and songwriters and I wanted to start recording music with the various musicians that I had befriended. I hated the low quality of domestic analogue cassette recorders so I bought a Tascam 564 digital Portastudio which recorded to MiniDisc Data discs (basically MiniDisc RAM) and synced up to an old Atari ST computer running Creator. I bought a stereo DBX compressor and a Zoom multi-effects unit and mixed down to a Philips CD recorder to maintain quality. Word got around and I started to get the occasional paying client.
At the same time I had started working in the VT dept of Channel Four Television where I developed an interest in sound and picture restoration using the DVNR and CEDAR tools that the broadcaster used to clean up noisy sound and grainy/fuzzy picture.
I moved to Harlesden in 2000, bought my first PC and started recording to Cubase VST24 but was never happy with the trashy-sounding results. After relocating to Greenford in 2001 I decided to go on a music production HNC course at South Thames College. The course was mainly a complete joke but the research that the course led us to do taught me that my entire system needed a total upgrade - a new 24-bit multitrack soundcard for my PC, new mic, a better mic preamp and some professional monitors. It was a lovely little setup and for the first time ever I was getting recordings that I was truly happy with and getting more repeat clients.
By 2007 I had a growing family and we had to move out of London in order to afford a place of our own. We moved to a house on Abbey Road, Aylesbury with a lovely big garage that I decided would make a fantastic project studio, and I was right. In 2008 my architect wife helped me design the conversion of the garage into a warm, usable, habitable space and in 2009 I started laying the new floor. Builder, electrician and plasterer were hired and laboured through the summer to get the walls, roof space, lighting and powerpoints all perfect and I built bass traps and acoustic panels around the mix space in order to get the best environment possible for recording and accurate mixing. It was beautiful - a magnificent man-cave with a music workstation at one end and a cinema screen with projector and 5.1 surround sound at the other. My employer - Viasat Broadcasting - donated a sturdy and very useful section of transmission desk for me to customise and with its rack spaces, cupboards and patchbays it formed the heart of the new studio. The only problem was that it was now too far away from my London client base and very few of the musicians in Aylesbury were interested but it did come in useful for a filmmaker friend of mine who needed someone to edit and score his productions.
