Let's be honest, there are still cheaper studios around than Cheap As Chips. They tend to be lone little rooms mainly doing a good job. But what happens if you need an urgent edit done whilst their only engineer is in session all day? Or a set of files urgently FTP'd to a US client? Here you have the back-up and support of the team at The Sound Company.
The CheapAsChips studio was originally the small non-attend back-up studio for The Sound Company - designed to match the voice quality of our main studios but with only basic functions. Following requests from a number of clients for a cheaper and more basic studio, we re-equipped and refurbished it - launching it as CheapAsChips.
Located close to Oxford Circus in the heart of London's "medialand", our bijou (hence the price) professional speech recording studio is of course digital - with Pro Tools, ISDN, Skype & normal 'phone patches, blisteringly fast FTP uploads - and, of course, human know-how with our excellent studio engineer Will Tidman.
Low prices - high quality! The studio is mainly designed for single voice, "wild" (not to picture) recordings & ISDN. Full studio rates are on the right below our contact details.
No frills, no unnecessary fancy toys, no client sofas, no expensive egos to maintain. Designed mainly for remote client participation via Skype or landline phone, client attend should be limited to a single seated person. For multi-client attend, multi-voice recording, or to picture - visit our sister studios The Sound Company - you can email The Sound Company bookings from that site, or email Cheap as Chips from the link on the right.
HOW TO BOOK?
To make a booking - or just to have chat - call or email us - see grey panel on the right. For this price we must have payment by credit card (not American Express I'm afraid). If you really need a 30-day account, then the rate is £80 p/h + VAT. Scroll down for more info...
At the bottom of the page are some UK voice agents with online voice samples
ATTEND - OR PRODUCE BY PHONEPATCH?
Being in the heart of London's West End, we're ideally placed for top talent voice artists (see the local Voice Agents list at the bottom of the page). Clients normally attend if locally based (London, W1), & can use our main client reception. But there is no problem at all setting-up a phone patch to (or from) anywhere in the world so you can produce/direct via your home, office or mobile. If we originate a call we'll charge at BT rates + 20%. If you are SKYPE enabled - that's cool too - and FREE, or just call our Skype landline-style studio number from any phone. By the way, it's usually far superior to a normal phone patch!
DELIVERABLES
If you are attending you can take your edited or unedited recording away on an audio or data CD (£5), or copy it across to your USB flash drive or disk. Otherwise we can FTP the files to you. We have our own FTP sites, where, if you are behind a firewall, you can also fetch via HTTP. Slow FTP uploads at domestic ADSL speeds are free. 10 x faster uploads are £20.
REFRESHMENTS
Coffee, water, fruit & biscuits are available for self-serve in reception. Approx. 21 types of tea are available. You can order meals, but these will be charged to you.
EDITING
Generally, using Pro Tools, we "rock 'n' roll", i.e. we go back over stumbles and re-record over them. At the end of a recording some editing/cleaning may be required to reduce/remove obtrusive breaths or mouth clicks. Many clients have their own editing facilities, so if you want us to edit and provide you with a finished "clean" recording - please allow enough time. The amount of "cleaning" can depend on the voice artist, the weather - or a badly written or laid-out script!
FILE TYPES & CONVERSIONS
This process is usually non-client attend. Depending on the type of job, this could involve just cutting the script into manageable chunks, or every sentence (or word) could be a separately-named file. We regularly convert to many file types, and only use professional file conversion software. In fact we have a USA client who records languages all around the world for various diverse projects - the files are often sent to us for conversion from all the individual studios. This ensures the client always has consistent results (for their client) across all languages.
