Established in 1992 on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, our well equipped and centrally located recording studio continues to be involved in many successful projects. Do you want to be one of them?
Neneh Cherry and Mark Cousins
Award Winners
Award Winners include a No.1 in the Classical Charts and a Classical Brit Award, 2 top ten hits in the World Music Charts and The Stanley Kubrick Award for best Documentary at the New York Film Awards. The studio is also a vehicle for our own music production projects which regularly achieve National airplay.
BBC Approved
We're a BBC Approved studio and make regular recordings for BBC 1, BBC Radio 1 and Radio 4, and BBC Byte Size Online.
Self Production
You are most welcome to book the studio for your own self producting projects, or if you wish to bring in your own producer. We typically require advance notice for new projects.
Equipment
We operate a Mac based Logic Audio set-up using Metric Halo converters along with the amazing DM2000 mixer which boasts 96 channels and up to 96k bandwidth. Our equipment includes a range of musical instruments including Acoustic & Electric guitars, Electric Bass and Electronic and Acoustic drums. A huge sample library and a top class selection of plug-ins. Check out a full rundown of all our Equipment.
Control Room
Our spacious and comfortable control room has enough room for up to 10 people to sit in and take part in sessions. For recording and playback we have Neumann, Focus & Genelec monitoring systems.
Recording Room
As well as offering a range of Instruments to our clients, our recording room is acoustically designed to avoid unwanted echo and flutter whilst still providing a lively sound using state of the art diffusers and acoustic treatment.
Voice Over Booth
Our voice over booth has been in operation now as a sound to picture facility for major Broadcasters including BBC - Sky - Channel 4 - Turner Classic Movies.
Studio Pricing
It's not the cost per hour that's important, it's how much we get done in an hour!
Single Hour
for up to three hours
£65ph
includes engineer
Half Day
four hour block
£50ph
includes engineer
Full Day
10 hour session
£45ph
includes engineer
How To Book
We've put together a quick guide to help you determine the session(s) you'll need.
If you have written a song and need musicians to create and play parts for the song this can be very time consuming and expensive , even if you have your own band.
Save Money
We can work with a basic demo of your idea and develop it along the lines of your own preferences, influences and references to music you like which you think might fit with your song.
Save Worry
We create custom backing tracks from a wide pallet of live and sampled instruments, sound designed to suit a range of styles. If the budget allows we can also employ our roster of top class session musicians to add to your tracks.
You can take our recording as separate stems into the studio where you live and add your own parts there and mix to your own taste too if you want. Or if you live locally to our studio you could book into Offbeat to add your parts.
Studio Engineering
included in the studio price
Making sure the recording of musical parts are as good as they can be, it’s important that things are recorded correctly.
This is a huge deal. Studio engineering skills are crucial in blending sounds that need to work together on the same track. Remember, it's not about the cost per hour, it's about what we can do in an hour! And with our decades of engineering experience we will save you all the cost and pain of using inexperienced engineers.
And naturally we have the best tools for the job. That means a professional array of top quality microphones including condensers, valve and tube and ribbon mics, each of which will be chosen to match the characteristics of particular instruments.
Signal processing is employed at the recording stage too, so that the fundamental sounds that exist in the track are properly optimised.
Noise Gates, Compression, Expansion, EQ and of course recording at the correct levels are all instrumental.
Music Production
Having someone objectively working with you on your track can save a lot of time and money in the studio. There are so many ways to waste a recording budget and still not guarantee a successful result.
A good producer will work on a recording schedule with you, according to your budget, so that the sessions are conducted in a rational and logical way.
The project needs to be steered towards a final result which doesn’t waste time backtracking or doing the many recording tasks involved in the wrong order.
An experienced producer knows these pitfalls and can actually save you money by reducing studio time and organising musicians properly.
“Very enjoyable session at Offbeat – Iain got a great acoustic Dobro sound straight away with minimum fuss. The technology’s all there but equally important is the friendly vibe and comfortable atmosphere.”
LESLEY YOUNG
Canadian Singer/Songwriter
“This was the best recording experience we’ve had together to date! Always enthusiastic, Iain is a talented multi-instrumentalist”.
ALLIE FOX
Guitarist, Singer & Songwriter
“Iain has a genuine enthusiasm for his clients and patience by the bucket-load, and being an accomplished musician himself he adds enormously to the arrangements, both in terms of ideas & playing the instruments. The best pair of ears in the business!”
