With the trend at the moment to do a lot of work in home studios we have decided to offer our services to help you to...

a) Get the best recording possible on your home setup.
b) Help you with any pre-production.
c) Offer our services for any awkward overdubs or recording e.g. drums or loud guitars.
d) Offer to assist or do mixes and mastering for you.

We appreciate that some bands and artists out there, rather than forking out for studio time have invested in some recording equipment and are endeavouring to do recordings at home in their spare room, garage or even at rehearsals and practise rooms.  We started on a four track studio many years ago and know what it's like to have limitations, but the idea is to overcome them!

We have heard some people efforts at this and whilst some are pretty good - a lot are missing a bit of professional 'fairy dust' - for want of a better expression.

So we thought - why not help these people out with our professional expertise, experience and knowledge?

Here’s some ways in which we could help:

a) Get the best recording possible on your home setup
We will come out to your home studio and have a look at your setup.  We can offer any advice on positioning of equipment, monitors, and advice on using the equipment to its full potential. We will offer tips on the acoustics of your room, bouncing, recording vocals, using compressors, microphone techniques, use of effects etc.

b) Help you with any pre production
We can discuss your project with you (home produced single / album or just demo) and suggest ways of approaching this in a variety of ways. Programming tips, use of MIDI instruments, what to record first, last and where to record it. Plus ideas on how to plan ahead for any problems that may occur with the limitations of your equipment.

c) Offer our services for any awkward overdubs or recording e.g. drums or loud guitars
Obviously there are certain physical constraints on small home studio setups like; how to record decent drums, or loud guitars and bass guitars or even how to do backing vocals. Obviously with our set up here at Mad Hat we can cope with all these things and could effectively record material for you which you can then import straight in to your home set up so you can continue with your project at your leisure.

d) Offer to assist or do mixes and mastering for you.
When you have finished your recording then you will need to do a great mix sometimes home studios can be the worst place to do mixes as you can't monitor loudly, or the kids keep coming in, or the acoustics are wrong so we can either offer to mix it down for you or offer advice as to what to watch out for in your own personal environment.  Once the mix is done the final stage of the process is doing a great mastering so that the final product matches up to current release. We can either do this for you, or attend your set up and go through the process with you and your equipment.
 
If you are interested in any of these new services please contact us for more details. We will need to know some details of the equipment you have i.e. type of hard disk recorder/tape machine/workstation, type of mixing desk, speaker monitors, microphones, effects processors etc.
Please note that although we have a vast experience on many recording formats we are not all encompassing, we expect you to know how to do the basics, what we are here for is to turn your basics into a great quality recording

So how much is this going to cost?

We will charge £25 per hour plus travel costs to visit you. We will stay as long as you need us but we will charge for a minimum of 4 hours, but, we can stay for 12 hours if you like. Studio time here at Mad Hat to record overdubs etc would be as per our unsigned rates and would include, when available, any downtime deals.