Westwood Studio is unusual in that it rarely caters for music recording. This well-equipped 8-track studio specialises in recording the spoken word, a facility that begs rather different requirements from a music studio.

Westwood Sound is a delightfully situated property on the edge of the Cotswolds near Stroud, owned by Michael Wood. By nature of its peaceful location, the facilities on offer, and the high quality of the finished product, the studio attracts such actors as Michael Horden, Richard Briers, and other household names to work on the productions.

Have you seen those children's adventure cassettes that are popping up in all the supermarkets: Super-Heroes, the A-Team, Superman, Charlie and the Chocolate factory? Westwood Sound are behind all of these and more. In fact to date they have over 500 titles. To find out how all this started I spoke first to Michael who, in addition to owning Westwood Sound, produces, directs and administrates the day to day running of the studio, leaving the engineers to cope with the recording technicalities.

My brother, John Wood, set up his studio in London with Patrick Allen about 15 years ago. He operates in Broadwick street as a facilities house and runs no fewer than seven studios up there. Six years ago, he encouraged me to start up this operation, principally because of the opening up of the ILR (independent local radio) stations and the likelihood that there would be a lot of work producing radio commercials. We're situated close to several local radio stations and it was originally estimated that they would carry something like 80% local advertising and 20% national. In the event, it was almost the other way round, so there wasn't the volume of work originally anticipated. We next became involved in A/V soundtracks and four years ago we were approached by Pickwick to experiment with children's story tapes. Pickwick, at that time were importing a fairly indifferent product and that was selling in the shops for £2.99. Pickwick got together with Ladybird books and we got the job of producing the original work in English. Subsequently we added Rainbow Communications, EMI, Multiple Sound Super Tempo and Victoria House to our list of clients and I'd say that about 70% of our current work is in the origination of children's story tapes. We provide the masters, and the publishers handle the duplication, packaging and distribution.

Super Heroes

We also produce some American versions, for export to the States, using American actors living and working in London. We began last year with Super Heroes, Superman, Spiderman, Batman and so on but we also do more conventional works such as, The Wind in the Willows, A Christmas Carol and Enid Blyton stories, for both the British and American markets. Some of the English tapes need American voices too as the American accent is often associated with the original story, particularly ones based on American films or TV.

For example, if we're doing four units of The A-team, we'll buy out artistes who'll come down here for the day and do the four in one session. With single plays, this may not be so economical in terms of either money or time, so we record in my brother's studio in London and then the mixing is done back here.

The mixing side of a spoken word production is more intuitive, so we spend more time on it than would be commercially viable in a London studio.

Words and Music

Strictly speaking, we are a production house, and are responsible for concepts, casting, recording and mixing. The music, we commission through our colleagues at DB studios because nearly all these items require original music as the original film music is invariably too expensive for the publisher to acquire. We brief the musicians and they produce the music on their 8-track system at home and then it is mixed here. They bought our Brennell Mini-8 recorder and mixing desk when we reequipped, so the tapes they produce are compatible with our new system, centered around the Soundcraft 1" 8-track. This working relationship has enabled us to build up a custom-built music library which we manage exclusively for the benefit of our clients, not only in the children's book and tape market but also for commercials and the increasingly sophisticated demands of the Audio/Visual and video soundtracks market, which forms the balance of our business.

Do your requirements for recording this type of work differ much from those of a music studio?

In some ways a multi-voice production is more difficult to record and mix than music. A spoken word studio operates at a higher fee level than a music studio as there are fewer of them and the work is both more specialised and demanding. However, the equipment is not unlike that found in any other studio, except for the fact that we only need eight tracks, not 16 or 24.

We use the 8-track principally for laying down our stories. The dialogue is recorded directly onto a 2-track machine, in stereo, with most of the treatments added in real time. This is then transfered to two tracks on the 8-track machine while other effects may be added on the next two tracks. The reason that we don't record the dialogue directly onto the 8-track is that the timing inevitably has to be modified to fit in with the sound effects that are added later on the other tracks. With the children's stories, the production has got very complex as they have come to expect sophisticated special effects, so each piece of work is literally assembled piece by piece. We usually end up with two tracks for the stereo dialogue, two tracks for the ambient effects, two tracks for spot effects and two tracks for the music.

We mix the finished tape onto analogue rather than digital because there is often still some final editing to be done. There may be blips caused by drop-ins from the cartridge effects machines that have to be cut out, pauses to be changed in length. The client might even want to replace a whole section. In reality, it's impossible to tell a good analogue master from a digital one by the time it gets onto cassette, even a good cassette, but because the spoken word is more critical of background noise, we use DBX noise reduction when required. We'll consider digital mastering if and when there is a requirement from the publishers but because of the need to edit, a simple PCM F1 wouldn't really do the job.

Ambisonics

We have experimented with surround sound. We had ambisonic equipment here for several months and the results were incredible. Even straight stereo recordings sounded considerably enhanced when processed through it. However, it takes longer to lay down a piece of work using ambisonic techniques, because you have to consider foreground and background, and things like sounds going over your head, but it's ideal for children's stories. The clients though, while enthusiastic, did not feel able to consider paying the extra production costs at that time.

Control

At this point we climbed the stairs into the small, but well laid out control room to talk to the resident engineers (Hugh Shewring, Mark Anders and trainee Peter Wilkinson). The acoustic treatment is not as extensive as might be found in a music-only studio but is nonetheless effective. There are purpose-built panel absorbers in the ceiling space and the odd strategically placed Illsonic acoustic tile, as well as the more conventional screens. The panel absorbers in the ceiling use a roofing felt membrane with a rockwool backing. All this design work was the doing of Michael's brother, John.

As the studio and control room are built into what is basically a loft space, there are very few parallel surfaces and this conspires to create a naturally useful working acoustic.

The control room overlooks the adjoining studio via a large control room window and there are further windows to the outside world in both the studio and the control room which convey a sense of light and openness and undoubtedly contribute to what appears to be a thoroughly pleasant working atmosphere.

Chief engineer Hugh Shewring takes up the story.

Equipment

Being mainly a voice studio, the first link in the recording chain is obviously the microphone. Our main mics are (surprise, surprise) Neumann U87s. We also have U77s, and some old Uvista U47s; they've got a bit dull with age but they're still very good. Also in the locker is a selection of AKG and Shure mics, both condenser and dynamic. We set up the actors in the studio area and use movable screens to achieve the necessary separation.

Our only reverb is the Klark Teknik DN780 which is absolutely brilliant. We also have the new software. With voice work it's vital to get the right sort of ambience and the Klark Teknik does that easily. The gated and reverse settings are very useful in creating vocal effects, especially the more unusual ones for the children's adventure material. It's very important to select an effect which sounds dramatic but that doesn't interfere with clarity of diction.

I tend to select a preset and then modify it rather than store specific settings, because there's always some adjustment I want to make when it comes to using the effect. It isn't often that we would use more than four mics at one time and we try to record everything as dry as possible and then use the reverb to recreate the necessary ambience. I really don't know how we managed before we bought it.

In the compression department we have an ADR Compex limiter, which is a standard piece of equipment for voice work. It's a bit dated but it's fairly comprehensive with switchable attack time and fully variable release. It can also be used as a limiter, like our MXR unit which we patch through a Drawmer dual gate to keep things quiet. Compression and gating is always applied on record, as all the voices go directly to stereo and we tend to use as little compression as we can get away with to minimise the side effects. We try to get the most natural sound we can (unless of course we're creating a special voice for the super-villain).

Which console and multitrack do you use, and how does it suit your specific needs?

Our Soundcraft Series 1600, 16:8 desk is a standard split console with 16-track monitoring and as such is very easy to work with, but it would benefit from better faders (such as Penny and Giles conductive plastic ones); the standard issue faders aren't the best. We have a full patch bay and this combination gives us a nice production desk. The EQ's good though the desk does suffer from some crosstalk problems.

Our multitrack is a Soundcraft Series 380 1" 8-track. Strangely, we get a bit of a drop-out thump on this machine but it only seems to happen on the odd numbered channels. In all other respects it behaves very well. It's very reliable and there are some useful facilities on the remote.

In addition to the Soundcraft, we have five 2-track machines, one of which is an Otari MTR12: a lovely piece of equipment. That's our main mastering machine; we manage to get a tight edit running at 15ips and sound quality is fine.

We also have the old Ampexes for dropping in links or effects but we'll be replacing these with new Otari's indue course.

Sound Effects

For dropping in effects we have a rack of instant-start cartridge machines and we produce the effects cartridges ourself. The advantage here is that the sound starts instantly at the touch of a button and then it sets itself up ready for the next time it's needed. It also enables you to loop ambient effects, such as a country atmosphere with the singing birds and the like, but it is just as often used for things like slamming doors or gunshots.

For monitoring we use Clearwater speakers, and these suit our work very well; there are two pairs, one for the benefit of the engineers and one for the clients. They are active units and it's probably true to say that they lend themselves more to our sort of work than to rock music. I much prefer them to our JBL 4311s, which I think have to be driven hard to get them to perform to their best.

Do you mix to give you the sound that you would like to hear coming from your monitors, or do you make adjustments to compensate for the fact that the end product is going to be on mass-duplicated cassettes and played back over cheap systems?

We have the old Hacker radio on the wall to check how things will sound over a typical radio and we mix slightly on the bright side but we have no control over the way in which the cassettes are duplicated and so the quality varies a lot. The high speed copies often seem to gain top and become sibilant, I don't know if this is due to them over-compensating at the duplication stage.

With the need to drop in effects at precise locations, have you considered going over to working with a timecode-based system such as SMPTE or even MIDI?

Effects are always a problem, but it's not so much one of timing as sound quality. Some of our effects come off library records, and by the time they are transfered to cartridge, they have deteriorated noticeably. It would be useful to use DBX or something on our cartridge machines to keep the noise down but we must also think about getting a cheap analogue synth so that we can make up our own sounds.

It's a different matter in the film industry where you do really need to automate the effects syncing, but on the scale that we work, it doesn't really give us any problems. If a mistake is made, you just drop the section in again until it's right.

We have Klark Teknik graphics but we use these for special effects rather than room equalisation. Also from Klark Teknik is our analogue time processor which we use for ADT, phasing, flanging and extreme vocal effects. Bearing in mind the amount of our work that's taken up with the children's adventure tapes, you can see that special vocal effects are high on our list of priorities and one problem is to make sure that these effects are repeatable and that they're consistent between episodes or series.

Having heard the results from this studio it's easy to see why they were the ones approached to do this work. Their work is thoroughly professional, from the scripting and acting right through to the recording and mixing. The working environment is conducive to creativity with none of the distractions of city life to intrude on this magical world of Super Heroes, wicked witches and general galactic domination... now if only I could talk like Darth Vader, they might give me a job.

Further information is available from: Westwood Sound Productions, (Contact Details).