Birth Of A Studio

Origional article: September 1999.

The Birth of a Studio: It was January 16th 1991, Will Millar and John Ellis were down in Will’s cabin overlooking the rocky shores of his peaceful little sea cove. It was a place of nature and tranquility. Inside those cedar walls we planned sweet music to soothe the wounded soul, old forgotten Celtic melodies seeped through the cracks of the drafty cabin that had now become our own private little world. Will’s penny whistle cried out like a mournful bird to create our first CD titled, “The Lark in the Clear Aire” and I recorded every mournful passage onto my old four track Porta-Studio. We had prescribed for ourselves some harmonious medicine for the soul and it was working.

We didn’t know it at the time but our studio was born…. There were many changes to come after our cabin turned out to be not quite the secluded spot, when a freighter dropped it’s huge rusty anchor into the peaceful bay one evening, leaving it’s engines running all night. We never could get our instruments is tune with it…. So it was back up to the main house and with all the pickers that were to stop by we soon outgrew the Porta-Studio. Then there was the eight track, we outgrew that almost immediately. We even tried on a sixteen track for size, it didn’t fit either. Eventually, or should I say, “at the moment”, we have a twenty four track with all the trimmings. Jack Richardson, well known for his works with The Irish Rovers was in the studio back in 1992 producing their popular album/CD “When The Boys Come Rolling Home” and he said, “don’t go any further than this boys”, this recording lark is an endless pit and there’s no end to it, you can do everything you want from here”…… Thinking back at that time I have to agree with him, all this new technology is traveling faster than the speed of sound itself, frequently overlooking the artists vision……

Time has moved on since those shaky beginnings and much to our amazement there are eighty plus album projects to our credit and life is good. We’ve recorded artists with familiar names and others we hadn’t heard of yet, all a pleasure to have worked with. We have traveled the world wide, to places with names like Ballymena, Northern Ireland and Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East, and we are proud to have been part of this eclectic mixture. So let your ruffled thoughts drift away, along with the melodies and lyrics of the music created here”, it’s a beautiful thing you know, and you can never predict what comes next through the surprised results of our chance twiddling…...

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