BBC Maida Vale

Along with some music students we took a day trip to BBC Maida vale, the BBC recording studios. We arrived at 1pm and were introduced to our guide. The first place we visited was a radio drama studio and watched the actors, engineers and producers work on a new Radio 4 play, 'The world as it is now'. It was really interesting to see how the team worked together. I was particulry interested in the sound recording engineer who showed us the recording software he used and the many sound effects at his disposal. A bit later the director was asking for suggestions for names of 'bad boy' footballers to include in the script, I suggested Paul Gascoinge as a joke but it got in!! I will have to claim my royalties and make sure I get my writing credit.

Next we visited the famous John Peel studio - I have listened to hundreds of bands that have recorded here so I was quite interested to see the studio. The Zutons were in session for the Zane Lowe radio programme when we were there and we got to watch them as they polished off the recording they had done earlier. I was suprised to see they only recorded on 24 track Digital tape. Because of the huge turnover of bands that recorded there, it was important to have only the basic facilities so bands didn't ask for lots of overdubs saving lots of time!


We briefly saw Mark Lamarr record his Radio 2 show. He had a band in from the US and we watched from the control room as he interviewed them. The last place we visited was the BBC archiving room. The workers were busy loading old reel to reel tapes of BBC programmes and backing them up on to computers.