A couple of minutes walk from Euston station in London's NW1 is where you will find the Beat Factory, a 24-track complex which just opened in March of this year.

The studio is designed and built in quite a novel configuration: the control room is more triangular than rectangular in shape and this feature was used to the designer's (Peter Henson) advantage to provide quite consistent acoustics throughout. The studio area is a long rectangular shape accessed via sliding glass doors between the main monitors of the control room.

In addition to the control room and studio area is a programming suite called the Brain Room. In it you will find a huge array of keyboards and computers, a mixing desk and a small window looking into the control room.

Run by Graeme Holdaway (Chief Engineer), Marijke Bergkamp (Studio Manager) and Tom McLaughlin (Programmer and 'Clever Chap'), the Beat Factory is possibly most noteworthy for this vast quantity of outboard equipment and keyboards. As permanent fixtures there are three digital reverbs (AMS RMX16, Lexicon PCM60 and Yamaha's R1000), three DDLs (Roland's SDE3000, SDE2000 and ADA's S1000), not to mention a whole host of flangers, aural exciters (two EXR EX3 Exciters, two EXR SP1 Exciters and Roland's Dimension D), four Drawmer gates and four Drawmer compressors and four MXR Limiters which sit proudly in a mobile-ish rack next to the mixing desk.

The mixing desk is a custom Alectron mixing console with 28 inputs used in an In-Line configuration, routed to eight groups. Both the group modules and the input modules have a very versatile four band parametric eq section.

The multitrack machine is Lyrec's TR532 24-track with remote control and two track mixdown is onto a MCI JH110 (in addition to which there is a Revox A77 lurking in a corner).

The monitoring is quite interestingly a Tannoy-based system, although the cabinets themselves were designed and built by Graeme himself, with added HF driver and powered as a three way system. There are also a pair of Auratones which float around the place in addition to a couple of Technics mini-speakers.

The Brain room's range of keyboards include a Waveterm with 16 bit sampling along with both PPG's 2.3 and 2.2 keyboards, a Jupiter 8, DX7 (with CX5M), Oberheim OB4, Moog Prodigy, Oscar, Roland SH-09, Moog Series 12 and Roland's 100M studio system with 20 modules. Sequencers include two Roland MC4-B Microcomposers with OP-8 interface, MSQ700, and Simmons' SDS6 which is mainly used with the SDS7 brain. There's also a LinnDrum MkIII, Simmons Clap Trap, Roland TR808 and Roland Vocoder all routed through a Seck 24:8:2 mixing desk which can in turn be routed back into the main control room once the programming of the sequencers is complete and ready to be committed to tape.

The studio rates are separated between the main studio and the programming suite, as it is quite possible to have people programming away whilst another session is in progress. For a 10 hour day, hiring of the Brain Room will cost £200.00 plus VAT, and the studio itself will cost you £350.00 a day.

For the facilities available, the rate is undoubtedly very attractive, especially to the majority of today's bands who are aiming for the chart sound but don't have the vast array of keyboards, samplers and other goodies to get it.

The Beat Factory (Contact Details)