Facilities

Studio resources

There are a variety of studios and equipment available for Reid School of Music students.

Current guidance, notices, equipment documentation, and user guides are available on our studio wiki.

Alison House Studios WIKI

Electroacoustic music studios

Music has a number of professional standard resources for creative music technology teaching and research which are accessible 24 hours a day, all year round. We have a suite of Intel-Macintosh based studios equipped for live recording, MIDI composition, stereo and surround mixing, and sound for picture editing. As well as the Reid Studio,The basement of Alison House houses a suite of six purpose built studios, including a compact recording facility, and in addition to these there are two multi-user music technology laboratories. The studios are well sound treated, have their computers remote for minimum noise pollution, and have high-quality monitoring based on both ATC and Genelec technology.

The Reid Studio

Hardware and Software

In general, the studios are based on Macintosh computer hardware (currently all G5s with dual monitors) and Digidesign sound interfaces (Digi002 and MBox), although alternative/additional sound interfaces are also installed in some studios (MOTU, Focusrite and RME). All studios have access to basic applications such as MAX/MSP, ProTools and a diverse selection of public domain software, but some have additional access to more specialised software such as CLM, jitter, Nuendo, Logic and Sibelius. There is also support for programming languages such as C, C++, Lisp, etc. Both DV and digital image editing is made possible through the availability of Final Cut Pro and Photoshop CS.

Equipment

In addition to the studio facilities, there is a wide selection of supporting equipment available for studio users to book. There is, for example, a good selection of microphones, including:

Neumann KM120, KM130, KM140 and KM184
AKG 414 and 451
Rhodes NT2 and NT1000
and a selection of contact, tie-pin, and boundary-field microphones

The studios also have an extensive collection of playback facilities, including those for 5.1 and 8-channel work, as well as a 20-channel sound diffusion system. Finally, a miscellaneous assortment of other equipment is also on hand, including MIDI microphones, portable recording equipment, cables, video equipment and useful computer peripherals, such as a Wacom drawing tablet. For special projects, studio users can be provided to access to central University facilities, for example, the high performance computing resources of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. All studio computers are networked using 100Mbit/s Ethernet, and there is wireless access within the studio complex. Studio users also have access to the School’s server, xenakis, which provides, among other things, file storage and a web service.