My First Time Tracking at Castlesound

On Friday the 13th of November, I had the pleasure of tracking at Castlesound Studios with Chameleon Lady. We were in the studio recording the first song of 3 singles and a 5 song EP which will start being released in mid-December. Although I have sat in sessions at Castlesound, I had never recorded or been involved directly with the sessions there.

I spent the whole day in the control room (unless I was recording) trying to keep up with the pace of Stuart Hamilton tracking each take. Everything he was doing was precise and accurate. He wasn’t necessarily doing anything that I could not do, it would just take half the amount of time for him to do anything at all. This secured the concept of ‘time is money’ in my head. If it was me tracking in my bedroom, the same session would have taken double the time to record.

It was not only the speed of ProTools, but also the speed it took him to patch in the hardware and get amazing sounds in minutes. I’m about to start mixing in this session and it makes the job that much easier already having an amazing sounding base to start off with.

In a recent Q&A with Garry Boyle (owner of Slate Room Studio), he said that Stuart had told him that sessions were not simply to record, but also, they needed to feel like a ‘luxury experience’. I understood this when I arrived. I spent the days before stressing out about carrying myself in the correct way, however on arrival I didn’t feel the intimidation that I was expecting, and I felt like we were in control of what we wanted to do.

Spending the first day has inspired me to improve my ProTools speed and to also tackle hardware with more of an open mind. Normally outboard gear terrifies me as it tends to use up half of my day trying to figure out how to patch everything in, but hopefully with practice this will become second nature as it is to Stuart.

I would highly recommend sessions at Castlesound. There’s a reason it is still one of, if not the biggest commercial studio in Scotland. Stuart has done a great job of making the feeling of recording in such a prestigious venue a special one whilst driving us forward without procrastination.