Mighty Atom Move Into New Premises.
7 November 2000

Work has been progressing on the new studios at Mighty Atom. The studios are situated in Alexandra Road in Swansea, about 200 yards from Swansea train station. The building, named Dylan Thomas House, was first built in the 1850s but was partially rebuilt after bombing in the second world war. It is a pretty classic bit of architecture and a great building to be in. All this has been possible as a result of a policy of centralisation at the BBC with the all programming now produced from Cardiff. Dylan Thomas House is now only used by the BBC for local news reporting and remote interviews.

The Mighty Atom studios are sited on the first floor of the building and comprises a 17' x 17' control room attached to a 17' x 30' live studio room. Additionally we have a 20' x 20' multimedia room which also houses the chill-out room (TV, Playstation, video, etc.) The multimedia room comprises the video editing suite and the MIDI/media recording facilities as well as multimedia design and development. The control room and studio were originally used as broadcast studios by the BBC, and have been accoustically treated, however, the sound isolation properties of the studios being designed for voice broadcast don't quite cut it for modern band recording, so we have a major job on our hands to isolate the studio prior to opening. You can read more about the ins and outs of this here. Once the control room is isolated we will begin on installing all of the equipment.

The Mighty Atom equipment list is now very extensive (see here for a full list) which has been augmented with a hook up with Black Mountain Records to provide Soundtracs Jade desk, Otari MTR90 24-track analogue and Soundscape Red 24-track digital coupled with ATC monitoring. You can read more on the Black Mountain collaboration here.

Back in the multi-media room, the video editing suite now comprises two video editing PCs using the Canopus DVRaptor with Adobe Premiere, Boris FX, Hollywood FX and After Effects. This is coupled with another Soundscape 4-track for audio processing as well as DVD production tools (DVD Authoring, AC3 encoding, etc.) The MIDI recording facility is again based around yet another 12-track Soundscape coupled with Studiomaster Series 5 8-bus desk, along with Cakewalk and various synths and soft synths. Additionally, this is being set up for 5.1 surround sound mixing and production for DVD. The final small amount of space in the media room is dedicated to multimedia development using tools such as Macromedia Director, Flash and Dreamweaver as well as Abobe Photoshop running on PC and Macintosh to allow cross platform development of websites, eCD, CD-ROM and DVD. To top all this off the sudios all have web cams set up to allow streaming of web cam footage to our web servers over ISDN. Bands working in the studio can be webcasted out to any internet site as required.

As of November 7 we are two weeks into the sudio build, and we plan to be finnished by 26th November. The media room is now pretty much complete and the bulk of our remaining work is in the main control room.

If your interested in recording at Mighty Atom studios check out our introductory price rates here which will be available for a very limited period. These include recording only package deals as well as eCD packages, video packages, etc. If you'd like further details see our contacts page and get in touch. Your also welcome to make an appointment to call round and see the facilities as well.

Also don't forget we run an independent record label, so feel free to send in your demo tape/CD. We listen to evrything we get sent, and just maybe we can help you get started in the industry.