OffBeat - Pre-history
When my wife Kirsty McKinna and I started Offbeat as a music production company in a converted Edinburgh tenement apartment back in 1994, we didn't over-estimate our chances of survival in a notoriously difficult industry. We'd already run Sonic Studios from 1987 to 1992 and I had previously been in the recording industry since starting a 4-track analogue demo studio at Edinburgh's Southside Studios as far back as 1976.
Almost every year in the early period of the Offbeat studio business was tinged with uncertainty, and we never assumed we would still be operating the following year, never mind 30 years later, so we are allowing ourselves to feel quite satisfied having made it this far.
Back in the mid 1970's, my first recording studio, which I started with musician Richard Brown, benefitted from the newly affordable Teac A3340s, a 4-track multitrack tape recorder with new technology called simul-sync. Sounds incredibly basic nowadays, but the feature that made it such a hit was the ability to record each track in sync with each of the other tracks that had already been recorded. Something only very expensive studios could do up until that point. Musician Pete Waugh joined and we soon had two Teac machines.
It allowed the business an advantage for a couple of years, and then Teac created the Portastudio, another technological advance which brought recording tech into musicians homes and knocked us off our perch for a while. It's been a long journey ever since, with quite a few white knuckle rides along the way, negotiating the seemingly endless series of technological threats from analogue to midi to digital recording.
The initial reasoning for starting every studio I've been involved in was to make my own music. I'd been a guitarist in local bands since the early 70's. What I never seemed to factor in was, that to survive as a business and make a living running a studio, I had to record just about everything else instead.
At Southside Studios I was recording demos for mainly Punk and New Wave bands, including TV21, Freeze and The Valves to name a few. The original Rezillos line up also rehearsed at the studio, which was located in the old (since demolished) wash house in Simon Square.
As a child of the 60s and 70s, I wasn't initially a fan of the genre and I suffered a good natured insult from Scars singer Rab King by being called an old hippy during one the sessions with the band when I was just 21! Revenge is sweet, and he's now my next door neighbour and he's no spring chicken himself nowadays!
But there was an upside, some of the bands weren't that good, but then neither was I, so we rubbed along quite well while I learned the difference between a line-in and a line-out and how to set up sessions for bands. Technology was very basic and the only way to sound good on tape back then was to play and record well, and over a short period of time things drastically improved.
SIMON WHO?
My journey before starting Offbeat included being signed to a very young Simon Cowell in 1981 with the band Flying Colours (Simon's pictured below-left posing with my Fender Lead guitar at the Embassy Club in London before a gig). Nobody knew who he was. He was very supportive and encouraging but the band imploded when our very talented and lynch-pin drummer left to become a Jehovah's witness and I moved back to Edinburgh.
in 1982 I met Kirsty and we first appeared on an album together on a vinyl release of my first solo project Zed, which was mixed by Culture Club's live engineer Nick Atkins in 1984. I also worked as a sound engineer and session musician at Wilf's Planet Studios where I did sessions to pay for studio time before working on an ill fated Bay City Rollers re-union. That particular story is too long to tell here, but suffice to say just about every session I did after that seemed very easy going in comparison.
Photography & Art Concept by Nick Meers
Then followed a freelancing studio engineering job at Jon Turner's Palladium Studios before starting Sonic with Kirsty and two sleeping partners in 1987, which included John Edwards from local record shop Vinyl Villains. Using new MIDI technology we expanded our studio from 16 track to 32 track which allowed us to compete with much bigger and more established studios.
We spent the next five years recording music for major and indie labels, including Yoyo Honey, The Apples, the Impossibles and a re-union track with The Fire Engines. We spent every spare hour possible recording our own music with percussionist Dave Haswell under the name The Harmonics, before selling the business to Cava Studios in Glasgow following partnership issues. The sale nearly fell through when it was discovered we had never procured a change of use certificate for the premises, an expensive mistake as it turned out. In the end we nearly lost everything and extricated ourselves only by the skin of our teeth.
THE BIRTH OF OFFBEAT
When we formed Offbeat we literally only had an old acoustic guitar, a beat up fiddle, a basic 8 channel mixer and a DAT Machine. Thanks to our percussionist Dave, I managed to get the job of producing Mike Heron's first solo album Where The Mystics Swim for Demon Records which paid for the studio gear we needed to start the company properly. Soon after, I produced Talitha Mackenzie's Solas, a World Music hit in 1995 for Riverside Records & The World Music Network, which I also toured with as guitarist and MD for her band for a year or so. This was followed by another World Music hit album Akassa, featuring drummer and singer Hamed Kane from Senegal in 1999. It was hailed as "Majestic Senegalese Trance Music" by Songlines Magazine, and "Thrillingly Authentic" by Straight No Chaser. 
I then worked with blues singer and actor Tam White, producing his solo album Hold on. Three of the tracks were featured on Norman Stone's multi award winning movie Mandancin' which featured Tam in a starring role.
Soon after this I discovered Jimi The Piper busking on the Royal Mile. We made three Celtic Rock albums together and put a band together with me on Bass and Kirsty on Electric Violin and Dave Haswell on Drums. We toured Europe and the UK Festival circuit as well as a series of gigs in Beijing, selling bucketloads of CDs before parting ways in 2002.
In between touring with Jimi we were invited to the Algarve to build a studio specifically to compose and perform music for an ambitious multi-stage show called Fulgor with musician and celebrated artist Beau McClellan. 75 performers from all over the World took part in an amazing one off musical and theatrical extravaganza. Working in tandem with the performers, we had only two weeks to compose, record and produce 45 minutes of original music after building the studio on a blisteringly hot hill top near Escargal.
A FATEFUL MEETING
When the Jimi McRae Band ended, due to the usual age old musical differences, we had badly neglected our studio business and had to build it back up from scratch again. Luckily, this coincided with the advent of X Factor, of course Simon Cowell was now much more well known, so we unashamedly created an experiences business introducing budding artists and singers to the world of the recording studio, which carried us along nicely through a very difficult period for studios. We were spectacularly successful in hosting hen and stag and especially kids parties too. Word soon spread on the playground that our studio was the place to record and over the next seven years we hosted well over 5,000 kids in the studio before Covid eventually killed of our lucrative business model.
One day though, back in 2015, we were recording a guys 50th birthday party and one of the guests seemed familiar. It turned out to be a fateful meeting with Film Director Mark Cousins, and soon after we were recording his commentary for a 15 episode series for Film 4 called The Story Of Film, an Odyssey. It was a big success and we ended up recording Mark's commentary for more projects including Stockholm My Love with Neneh Cherry, and The Eyes of Orson Welles which won runner up prize for Best Documentary at Cannes Film Festival.
In between this Yoyo Honey's Mani Shoniwa recommended us to Universal Records to record The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Classical Brit Award winning trilogy Spirit Of The Glen with producer Jon Cohen. Initially reluctant, due to my over exposure to loud bagpipes with Jimi The Piper, it turned out to be a very good project to be involved in and it gave Offbeat some much needed exposure both with the press and inside the business.
A NEW COMMERCIAL DIRECTION
Thanks to Mark Cousins, the studio began to veer more towards commercial voice over work which coincided with a steep downturn in the music side of the recording studio business. Mainly due to digital technology being much more affordable at high enough quality for musicians to produce themselves.
In 2015 I was asked to record an audiobook for BBC Go with ex Dr Who girl Sophie Aldrid. Then soon after, Canongate Books approached me to record a series of Tartan Noir thrillers. Word got around and we began producing more and more audiobooks for publishers like Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Profile Books and other major and indie publishers as well as self published authors.
Our own music took a back seat along the way, Kirsty had suffered a series of health issues over many years, including two bouts with cancer preceded by a debilitating back problem, but every now and then another song or instrumental popped out.
In 2020 we finally completed an album of our songs and reached no1 in the iTunes New Age chart for our debut self titled album Harmonic Overdrive. We also received airplay for the single You Inspire Me on BBC Introducing's show hosted by Tom Robinson.
In the last year we've compiled an album of songs recorded as far back as Sonic Studios days right through to the present entitled Along The Timeline to celebrate this special anniversary which was released on the Offbeat Scotland label on iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify and other digital platforms on 6th October. You can watch our video single Crystal Colour on Youtube.
(Album left) Artwork by Paul Wilson from a Painting by Shuna Anderson & Photo & Concept by Nick Meers for the current album (Along The Timeline).
In 2024 Offbeat Studios is now firmly established recording music, audiobooks, audio tours, ADR dubbing and voice commentary work, both locally and remotely with organisations across the world, which keeps the studio extremely busy.
The journey continues and who knows what the future holds, but here's a run down of some highlights of work we've done in the past year so far.
AUTHOR SARAH BERNSTEIN
IRVINE WELSH
- AS YET UNTITLED AND DUE FOR RELEASE IN 2025 -
EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL 2024
TILDA SWINTON
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
LIDLS INSTORE COMEDY
