Matt Heap - Music Producer At Suff Studio

Super proud of my pals in The Losing Score for reaching 50k plays on Spotify. Its a banger!

I'm going to be away a fair lot this year so thought I'd hire out the studio in the meantime. Perfect for bands and/or producers wanting to do a bit of DIY recording. You'll have access to my room and all my gear - absolutely everything to make a record (minus my computer).
I'll also offer mega decent rates for any producers who don't feel comfortable with the mixing side and want me to do it when I'm back.
It's also available to book out as a practice room.
... Give me a shout if you're interested in anything.
All gear info and that at www.suffstudio.co.uk
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Super dry splatty snare sound for @ryan.jarvis yesterday. Duncan mentioned the Peripheral Vision album by Turnover as a reference. It has a really sharp attack with absolutely NO ring, with the bottom snare mic being fairly high in the mix. To kill the ring while retaining a lot of attack we cut up an old snare skin up, cut a big hole in the middle and placed it on top of the top skin. We paid a lot of attention to the tension of the snare wires too, playing around with it until the decay was just right, not too choked but not too buzzy. I also used a condenser under there for more sizzle and detail. Splat confirmed.

Super cool tune off the album I mixed for Branch To Root. This was one of my favourites to mix because there was a lot of space to go wild with reverb and delays, and some of the tones they provided were great. If I remember rightly there's a 12 second reverb snuck in somewhere creating a sort of 'pad' underneath the verses. Slightly wild but I tried my luck and they digged it!
Also... Best dudes!

Almost 9 Years since I recorded a band for the first time. I had a focusrite pro 40, a rode nt1 and hired a cheap set of mics. I had no idea what I was doing and we didn't quite have stuff like Nail The Mix then, Just a load of people arguing on Gear Slutz. I learned by doing lots of crap recodings for years and I guess it's eventually paid off. I have my forever home at Suff Studio which was custom built by me and some pals and I'm pleased to say 'I make records for a living' now.

I have enough space in May for making an EP or a few singles. Get in touch for last minute slot filling special rates!

It's been 3 years in the making but I have finished my mixes for the @jbearandthegiants album. Here is a sneaky peaky of all 10 tracks. You can clearly hear all the detail that's gone into it. #blues #noiserock #layers

I'm putting the finishing touches to the J-Bear And The Giants album this week. We recorded this album over literally years so there's a hell of a lot of different tones throughout the record. It really works for this kind of music (edgy blues rock) but I have struggled to make the record sound consistent. To add a bit of consistency but regain the different flavours I used the new THU amp simulator from Slate Digital on the dry DI signal and mixed it in with the original tone on each track. It's really glued the album together as a whole while keeping the movement of vibes throughout. . . Also, I never love amp simulation but that one has absolutely blown me away. It really does sound like a bunch of real amps. Shame it doesn't heat the studio up an give me a tingly feeling in my pants like a stack of real amps does.

Nice one Blanchard for the signing to Society Of Losers. A perfect fit! I've just worked on an EP with them and it's awesome!

My pals in Heathens just dropped this absolute banger. I spose it could be best described as 'shoegaze post-hardcore', which is basically my tastes in a nutshell! Get your ears round this if you wanna be able to say 'yeah I was a fan before they got big'.

Here's a stoner rock / doom track I recorded. I'm super pleased with the vibe we got on this, you can literally hear the sound of the American desert.
I don't usually get the opportunity to use as much saturation on all the instruments as I did on this. I used lots of parallel distortion using the soundtoys devilock to give me some grit without loosing clarity and punch.

Cool session with Fail The Enemy over the past few days. These are all the microphones I used. Just an arrangement of colour, unlike this photo. #filter

Guitar cab microphone shootout. I always gravitate towards the same mics on cab so thought I'd try a few different ones this time. A mixture of Sennheiser 421 and Aston origin sounded best, though if I had to pick just a single mic i wouldgo with the AKG C414, which is somehing i often do.

JCM shootout! 900 deffinately lost in this instance. It's so easy to make that amp sound shrill (sometimes it works though!). . 2000 isn't as highly regarded because it's not vintage but it can sound so damn good. 800 just about won though. You can get a bit more presense out of it without it whistling. . I heart Marshall.

Sennheiser 421 are the most overrated piece of shit on toms. So I switched it up a bit today and I am stoked with the outcome. I shot out a ton of stuff but landed on AKG D112 which is the most overated piece of shit on kick drum but owns on floor tom... And a Beyer m201 on hi-tom which is OK on lots of things but absolutely rocks on toms.

NGD. Got myself an @astonmics Stealth and of course I shot it up against my shure SM7B. A bit darker but also smoother up top. It certainly compliments my own voice better but both will have their uses of course. SM7B still rocks, but so does the Stealth!

Before and after: One of the many cool stuff I put on a track for my mate @craigdugdale
Pitch shifter AFTER reverb, trust me, it's wild! Going for that Lorde / pale waves / 1975 'scream instead of a crash cymbal' vibe.

Having some fun mixing my noisy pals in Blanchard who don't have a bass player. This is both a curse (because I can't do my 'go-to' things) but a blessing because it's a new challenge and I can do things I wouldn't normally do. Here's what I did on one of the main (super super fuzzy) guitars.
First up, my buddy Oeksound Soothe. This has become a desert island plugin for me. It essentially finds all the little resonances in a signal and pulls them out as they peak. In this app...lication it just smooths the harshness out, giving you more freedom to boost the mids/highs wihout it ripping your ears off.
So... then I could eq the thing without using as many bands. I just gave it a little boost in the high mids for some note clarity while pulling out some of the super honky and papery low mids. I'm also taking off the unusable top and super super lows that just eat up headroom in the process.Sounding good already!
This guitar has an octave pedal in the chain, which while giving us some lo-end meat, it does get a little 'flabby'. Compressing it hard with a full band compressor just makes it flat and boring, so I fired up a multiband compressor to pin that low end down. Not only does this solidify the meat, but it gives allows you to boost those frequencies without the odd low note setting your bowls off. I'm really not missing the Bass guitar at this point!
Last but not least, to sculp the guitar into the mix, I pulled up Slate VCC, using Stress to level out the peaks a little, the api style EQ for a a little more frequency shaping and the Revival to bring in a hair of top end saturation to give things a little more bite.
The second guitar had similar treatment, but as there was no octave pedal in this chain, I gave it some subtle low end harmonics using rbass by waves. This doesn't really give it an audible 'note' like an octave would, but you can feel the rumble and it makes the low end of the mix feel less lopsided when both guitars are panned separately.
I have a little time for recording an ep/few singles this month and next month. Holla if you wanna hang!
Www.suffstudio.co.uk
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