Metal Mickey

Does your voice sound like you’re feeding gravel into a waste disposal unit? Do you think Iron Man is more of a Pansy Girl? Do you regularly like to punish anyone who listens to you with a wall of furious burning metal noise? Then April is the month for you at The Crash Factory.

Any metal bands (and we mean real metal bands) that are tired of having their records sound like they were recorded inside a wet cake can book at The Crash Factory for any time in April and get 30% off.

Put another way, that’s almost £50 a day you’d be saving, and coming out with a record specifically designed to destroy any stereo that dares to play it. Check out our Audio page and get in touch to book your April session!

The xmas to end all xmasses…

The year’s drawing to a close, the cold is out in force, and I’ve been locking myself away: slaving over a hot mixing desk…

We’ve had some blinkin’ great acts in over the last while, from the sublime USA acousti-pop of Bjorn Franklin (and his superb black-vinyl rhythm section) to the dark’n'dirty trash-a-thon that has become Hellequin’s first EP proper, we’ve had some fun. It turns out that if you’ve got an ex-army drummer, you generally get a drum sound like World War III.

We’ve got some new sounds over on our Myspace, and there’s a few days left before SantaTime to take advantage of our dudey mastering offer, as well as booking time for our now monthly offers here.

What are you doing next year? We’re doing some stuff. From taking on a new engineer to fill in a few slots (more details soon) to having a bit of a studio re-vamp (and ACTUALLY doing it), 2009 is set to be the bestest. Come make a record with us, and we’ll make it the bestest for you too.

Mark

All I Want For Christmas Is My Record Mastered

Give the gift of noise this Christmas with our awesome mastering deal – for every studio day you pay for in December we’ll master a track for free. Get our 4-for-3 offer and walk away with a great sounding three-track EP. Actually, if you did that twice you could have eight days, six songs and save £180 on mastering alone. Maybe I’ll do that…

As the final cherry on our brandy-laden mastering xmas cake, if your session finishes by December 17th, we’ll guarantee your masters to you for Christmas. Ho ho ho.

November is Mixmebetter Month

So you’ve recorded some songs at home or at a different studio. It’s not sounding quite like you want; you’re finding it hard to get the drums and bass to knit together, perhaps the guy that recorded it just didn’t get your band, or maybe the guitars simply aren’t huge enough. We’d like to help!

Come in with your multitracks for an eight-hour day of mixing and we’ll sort your problems out. We’ll even tell you what we’re doing as we’re doing it so you can learn for next time. Better still, we’ll only charge you £120 for the day. Bonus.

October is Rocktober!

If your band has any kind of predilection toward rock and you want to make a great sounding record, October is the month: for every day you pay for in the studio we’ll mix a track for free! Get the four-for three offer and spend some real time on a three track EP.

Check out the Offers page and get in touch, including the word ‘Rocktober’ in your message, and let’s see if we can hook you up.

Not a bad plan, huh?

The Neverending Building

Hello there! It’s all go here right now. We’ve been doing some awesome rock bands – just finished a day with one of our fave Notts bands Ocean Bottom Nightmare – we’ve tracked everything for one song and it’s punishingly rock! They’re going for the ‘tight performance, trashy sonics’ sort of vibe that people seem to come to us for and they’ve got this great Refused/Reuben/Mclusky sound to them. I’m mixing it next week, so let’s see if we can make it even louder.

We’ve also spent a couple of days recently with Leicester’s Herra Hidro. The guys really like their Biffy Clyro/Reuben kind of british rock and we’re double pleased with the results.

Amongst other things, we’ve been locked away with the sublime National Poet Of Luxembourg working on his first full length album of roomy acoustic guitars, dirty drum machines and slightly unorthodox pop songs. He wrote me a letter when it was finished asking if I’d be his Nigel Godrich, which made me smile a lot.

Aside from recording, we’re jigging stuff around at the moment, trying to make the studio an even cooler place to be. We’re improving the acoustic treatment in our live room, building some speaker isolation cabinets to make live band recording a bit easier, and we’re expanding our selection of ‘real and not digital’ ambience with a new spring and plate reverb, and two reverb chambers so that we can attain a much more organic, ‘real’ sound with the greatest of ease.

Holiday in ‘Mexico’

I’ve just finished a mammoth run of studio days and it’s definitely time for a holiday! Before I jet away from this place for a short short while, come closer. Let me tell you what’s been going on…

Last week we spent a couple of days and nights with the very talented Lisa DeVille on her ‘Mexico’ ep. All manner of double-bassing, acoustic guitaring and footstomping went down and it turned out to be a really creative time. She seems to like it and hopefully we’ll make another one soon. Straight after Lisa, we did a massive run with old pal Jack Peachey who is now calling himself Gallery47 full time. If you’ve been keeping up with us, you’ll know that Jack likes to get things right, and we spent five loooong days tracking five jam-packed songs from folky picking and acoustical strumathons to full on noise onslaught.

This is the best stuff Jack has come out with yet, especially the song “I’ll see you again”; it brings me out in goosebumps whenever I push up the faders. He’s been making a video diary too, which shouldn’t been very hard to find on YouTube.

Summer Sons

So far the summer’s been great! We’ve had some really beefy projects to get our teeth into: Finishing Sons Of Itto’s ‘Bleach-cesticide’ themed debut album has been exciting – We tracked the album mostly live in two days and then spent the lions share of the time mixing, getting everything sounding just the right kind of trashy… talking of trashy and live, Grantham punk veterans spent a swift day with us tracking four GBH/Dead Kennedies-esque tracks(their first studio session in ten years!), leaving us to mix them afterwards. The whole EP is six minutes long and it feels like you’re being bludgeoned with a piece of wood. As a complete departure from that, we spent a week with Birmingham pop heroes Page 44 – three songs of pristine arrangements, massive drums and great vocals. They even called the EP The Crash Factory Sessions, which is nice.

We’re halfway through work on the first full length by Ilkeston legends DIP. They guys have been around as a band for about eight years now, and we’re really proud they chose us to finally make their record. Theyve been spending a number of weekends, craftily using a multitude of 4-for3 offers to lay down slabs of classic rock that will become the album. Thanks muchly to our pals in Patchwork Grace for recommending us.

We’ve got a lot going on in the next couple of months, with some upgrades to the acoustics in our control room and some really cool bands booked in it’ll be busy. we’ll tell you what’s going on as it happens. Keep ‘em peeled.