You’ll find beautiful spaces and a lively creative atmosphere at our professional family-run recording studio.
We offer the highest level of customer service with highly skilled staff who care about what you want from a creative project.
Quality recording equipment for any genre
We have the mics and outboard gear you want from a professional studio.
A vast suite of plug-ins for quick, easy mixing, hybrid or digital.
Mics including Neumann U87 and Coles 4038s, plus a choice of vintage valve amps guaranteed to get you the best sound possible in our professionally sound-treated suite.
Tim Greaves
Tim is our head of production/guru and has been playing, touring and producing fast technical punk and hardcore for over 20 years. Self-taught in the DIY underground, his clients cover various genres from hip-hop to metal, indie to folk, and singer-songwriters to world-renowned theatre companies. Tim’s considerable media skills cover audio, video and music production, mixing and mastering, so you’re guaranteed the best possible results. He’s also the most patient man alive, so whatever your skill level, he’ll make you feel welcome, relaxed, and prepared to give your best performance.
Tim’s earlier clients include The Royal Shakespeare Company, Armoured Flu Unit, Horseflies, Kontakta, Big Finish Productions, Harker, Barking Poets, Personal Best and more.
Andy Macleod
Already a tour-hardened guitarist, TikTok sensation and bedroom producer before joining the Southsea Sound team, Guilford ACM graduate Andy is our apprentice. He’s also a skilled composer and professional session musician in his own right. Whether producing beats or melting your face with his riffs for hire, you’re guaranteed excellent service from Andy.
El Morgan
Our in-house vocal specialist El has been a singer and performer for over 20 years. Previously touring all over the UK and EU, when not running the studio, she now works as a trained vocal practitioner and guide, which can be hired for lessons or at your session if you would like to help warm up, get the best from and preserve your voice. El can also be employed as a session backing vocalist, plays by ear and is a mezzo-soprano.
It’s not only bands we work with!
Recent customers include The Royal Shakespeare Company and Big Finish Productions who produce the Dr Who and Torchwood audio dramas.
We use Cleanfeed to capture high-res live audio and are set up for ADR and voice-over work too. Audio to picture work is no trouble at Southsea Sound.
On the music side, we’ve previously worked on recordings for…
Based in Portsmouth, a historic seaside city, we’re easily accessible by rail from London and Brighton.
Our studio can be found in the heart of the artistic district with theatres, venues, tattooists, piercing parlours, vintage and vinyl shops, Speakeasy bars and restaurants (including vegan-friendly) alongside accommodation too.
We have a secluded backyard getaway so you can relax mid-take or why not take a short stroll to the beach just a few minutes’ walk away.
There is free on-street parking in the surrounding area, please get in touch to find out the sweetest spots!
8 hours: Analogue hybrid – £300.00
4 hours: Analogue hybrid – £200.00
1 hour: Analogue hybrid – £70
Audio recording choice and mixing and mastering plus £150
Many other studios charge mixing and mastering fees ranging from £200 to £300 per track. We understand that investing in your music can be challenging, especially for emerging artists or bands on a tight budget.
We wanted a more affordable start rate so we’ve set it at £70 per track, our hourly recording fee. This includes a desk mix and two rounds of edits. We want to ensure that you are completely satisfied with the final result, so we offer you the opportunity to provide feedback and make adjustments at no additional cost.
We are able to charge this little because we charge for fix editing separately, also at £70 per hour. This approach allows us to focus on providing exceptional value to those artists who have adequately rehearsed and prepared to record their tracks. By not including these additional costs in our base rate, we can offer rehearsed bands the opportunity to save money that would typically go towards quantising, fixing mistakes, and autotuning.
To enable bands to prepare to record, we provide demo building and pre-production services to help refine and solidify what it is you want to achieve. You can collaborate with experts to elevate your sound, fine-tune arrangements, and polish your ideas ready to capture in a professional studio.
(via Cleanfeed) for interviews, audiobooks,
voice-overs, radio plays etc. £200pd/£140hd/£45ph
Podcast – 1-hour audio-only recording – £35 dry, £45 with engineer
9 am to 4 pm – 8 people max – £800
(Lunch, tea and coffee included)
Deals can be done on more than five consecutive days booked; please get in touch with us to discuss!
All technical details and equipment specs can be found here.
Please read our cancellation policies to avoid disappointment.
right, cool, so a bit of a breakdown of some of the kit we’ve got from a recording perspective here in the control room. So behind me, we have our trusty Cadac console. This one’s from the late 90s, I believe. A lot of history behind this guy, but firstly, weighs a ton, as you would expect from this old analog console. But the history of it is that it was made by a company called Cadac that actually did a lot of work for the National Theatre, and Andrew Lloyd Webber went to a show at one of his theatres and said the sound was awful, and so tasked a chap called Anthony Waldron to come up with a better solution for consoles for theatre and performance, and he designed and built this guy. So they’re actually quite rare and hard to find now. We went for it because it does sound awesome. The preamps are great, the EQ section is great, and it’s just a beautiful thing. So we’ve got a 16, sorry, 18 track console here which we use for tracking everything in the live room.
From that we can break out into loads of analog equipment.
Many things are great about this console, one of them being, it’s modular which means that even when it’s on, you can remove a channel strip if you need to, get it repaired or replaced or anything like that. But some of these are monos, some of them are dual monos, some have different eqs and you can just configure it to however you want to configure it which is a great feature. But what I mainly use the console for other than tracking is, you can probably see these faders lighting up here, it allows us to do something called analog summing. I’ve also seen the videos; some people say analog summing is a myth. I, however, can hear the difference, and in the future, we’re going to put up
some videos doing some A/B comparisons between the two. In a nutshell what analog summing is, yes, we’re recording into the computer and we might have 100 tracks on the computer. Then, if you render out that track to wav or MP3, it’s the computer which is turning all of those tracks into audio going 0 1 1 0 0 1 1, but what we can do with the console is send all of the groups from the computer back into the analog console, so all the analog circuitry puts that into a stereo file and what that does, it gives you a warmth and kind of a 3D texture, which you might not be able to get with digital. So that’s another great reason why we love using this console. A little bit of nerdery on some of the individual bits of analog kit we use here at the studio. First of all, it’s the Neve 1073 mic preamp and EQs. We’ve got two of these racked up. Those that know, know. The Neve 1073 is like the classic mic preamp. Common in a lot of the studios you’ll see in around the world, it’s also got an absolutely wonderful EQ section which is really broad and you can make some really broad sweeps to really change the sound with the Neve 1073.
Absolutely fantastic preamp and EQ. Next up! For us this was pretty much one of the Holy Grail bits of kit that we wanted to get in the studio and it’s called an LA2A optical compressor. Optical compressors are glorious things because they’re dead easy to use for one. How they work is, there’s no attack or release settings or anything like what you might find with what’s called FET compressor or something like that. It reacts to whatever’s going into it so you get a real smooth warm compression. It’s fantastic on vocals, it’s fantastic on bass, it’s just a real nice gluey warm compressor. We love it. Next on The Hit List, we have a pair of Empirical Labs Distressors. So again those that know will know. Absolutely wicked pair of compressors. As soon as you power these guys up they default to what’s called the ‘nuke setting’ which will give you an idea of what they’re trying to do here. It does everything from gentle compression to blow-your-face-off compression. Typically, I’ll use it on drums, sometimes I use it on bass, to smash the living hell out of them and it sounds wicked. What’s really good, these ones also have what’s called the Brit Mod, so you can smash the hell out of stuff, even more. Then, moving it down towards the bottom, first of all, we have our Bantam patch bay which allows myself and other engineers that might want to use the space to patch in and out of all of this outboard gear in either a hybrid or analog or whatever way they wish to. But below that, we have our converters. So this is what turns the analog into digital to go into the computer and send it all out to all this equipment. We use the Universal Audio Apollo setup. Absolutely fantastic AD conversion. Very common in a lot of studios and, touch wood, never lets down and sounds great. All right. So next up, we’ve got what’s called a buss or a stereo compressor, but I call it a buss compressor from a company called Heritage Audio. This one’s called the Successor. Typically, I’ll stick that on the end of the mix just to glue the whole mix together. It’s also got transformers in it which warm up the sound similar to the Distressors, though you can max it out to get some pretty gnarly sounds. Also, it can be used for either subtle compression or gnarly compression. Next up we have a mono compressor from Universal Audio, this is called the 1176. Really cool compressor this one, tend to use it on vocals or bass or any sort of mono information.
Cool thing about this compressor though, was, there was a British engineer who discovered that you can press in all of these ratio buttons at the same time, and it’s known as ‘All Buttons In’ mode, and it was a mistake, well, it’s not meant to do that, but they figured out you can do that and if you do that, you create some crazy sounds and it’s awesome. Next up is this Beast. Not many people are too aware of this company Oram. So it’s a guy called John Oram who actually I think, back in the day, was associated with Vox the guitar amplifiers and was involved I believe in the Vox ac30 which is like a classic guitar amp which all the Indie bands used back in the 90s and stuff like Suede and such bands, but he went on to do audio equipment, and this is a, I guess it’s a mastering EQ hard to find this one I believe is from 2001. I spoke to John about it actually because I’ve got a hold of him on Facebook and he’s a really knowledgeable Chap and he likes talking about stuff. The reason this unit is so special, not only is it a great sounding EQ, but it uses something called ‘group delay’ which is where if you push the low end or the high end what it does inside the unit is actually delays the low end and the high end by like a millisecond. All analog circuitry an that again creates width and depth you just can’t get really within a plug-in. It’s a really cool bit of kit. And then to wrap up the analog showdown, we’ve got the SSL Fusion which is by a company called Solid State Logic. What the Fusion does, it’s like, well, it’s a master of all tricks really because what you can do with it, you can push saturation and harmonics into it that can go into a really nice EQ section. You’ve also got a high-frequency compressor in there which kind of mimics tape compression. You can also narrow or widen the stereo image of your mix with it, but you also have a transformer button which gives it a bit more vibe to the sound. I pretty much put every stereo mix through that just to give it that little extra 10 per cent.
So a little rundown on some of the amps and things we have available at the studio. I’ll start at the top. We’ve got what’s called an Orange OR15. It’s only a little 15 watt Orange valve head but it packs a hell of a punch and a little history on that actually, El, the owner of the studio and Studio manager, she’s played in bands for donkey’s years and that’s been around Europe a fair few times with El and come back and now lives at the studio. Next up, we have the Kelly. Now this is a bit of a, what’s the word, garage find? barn find I think they call it. So this is a relatively new amp to us, but a very old amp from, we think it’s mid 60s to late 60s so that is an old amplifier. Kelly was a offshoot from Selma who were quite a famous amp manufacturer so it’s a Kelly treble and bass. You get really nice plexi tones out of that with all the valves and transformers in it. Next up is a Carlsbro 50 Top so for any metal heads out there, this might be one you wanna, want to have a look at because you have gain, and then you can have MORE GAIN. So yeah, it’s just a crazy amount of gain you can add to that, but you can dial it way back and still get a classic kind of Marshall crunchy tone as well so that’s a really cool amp. Then we’ve got this one which is a Marshall JMP from the late 70s. So this is your classic AC/DC kind of vibe, classic crunchy Marshall tones and beneath that is actually my own personal guitar amp which I used when I was playing in bands all those years ago, and that’s a 1985 JCM 800. Not gonna lie, I got it because Billy Joe from Green Day had one in the ‘Dookie’ era of his career and it was my dream amp and I and I finally got it, and it’s quite a rare one with the basket weave on the front there, but these are just the heads. We’ve also got a whole bunch of combos. We’ve got a Music Man combo from the 80s, we’ve got Fender DeVille combo, loads of acoustic combo amps, we’ve got a Vox AC30 combo. There’s a whole bunch of combos we use in the studio as well, but this is just a rundown of heads we have in the control room.