About
I loved the vibe at Sansom Studios. Olly and Elliot’s enthusiasm and love for the music are infectious and will transform every recording session. Also, a great instrument like their Yamaha S6 grand piano doesn’t hurt. I’m looking forward to my next opportunity to work at Sansom Studios.
Sansom Studios is a recording studio located in Birmingham and run by two brothers, Olly Sansom and Elliott Sansom. The studio features a beautiful live room with amazing acoustics which is also home to our Yamaha S6 grand piano.
We believe nothing beats the experience of getting a great band/artist in the studio and capturing the energy and emotion of their performance completely live. However, we are equally comfortable in layering and overdubbing to build a song from the ground up.
We capture the depth and character of your music with a range of dynamic, condenser, ribbon and tube microphones, recorded through high quality pre-amps, compressors and EQs. This allows us to commit to a great sound at the recording stage, rather than trying to 'fix it in the mix'!
If you'd like to know more about us and how we got started, here is a brief history...
First and foremost, we are both musicians and our approach to recording has always been led by our experiences as musicians. We spent most of our early years playing in bands with friends and ventured into recording when we were trying to capture our own compositions.
Our first studio setup was born in the single garage of our parent's house while we were both at school. Most of our evenings and weekends were spent cramming into the "studio" to play and record into a two channel interface, some secondhand monitors and a rusty old SM58 (which I've kept hold of for the memories!).
It wasn't too long before we had outgrown the garage and started recording bands on location. Olly then studied recording engineering whilst also working for studios around Birmingham. At the same time Elliott was developing his playing and began his studies in jazz piano at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.
As we both went on our different paths, we realised that we missed having our own studio space. So after many exciting conversations followed by meticulous planning, we started the project to build our studio in 2015.
Fundamentally, we wanted the studio to be a creative and inspiring space in which musicians could feel comfortable in their surroundings, with everything they need at their fingertips. It was important to us that bands of around 6-8 musicians could all be in the same live room, without being separated into isolated booths. We love how having everyone in the same room maintains the connection between the musicians and instruments as they interact all within the same space.
The live room was designed with 3.5m high ceilings so that instruments have the space to breathe and sound as open and full as possible. There are also no parallel surfaces in the room as the ceiling and all of the walls are angled, in order to avoid standing waves causing room modes. We have plenty of acoustic wall panels that we can use to deaden or liven up the room as well as moveable screens with windows so that we can keep some acoustic separation without compromising sight lines between musicians.
We have a separate control room equipped with some incredible Focal monitors. This room is ideal for listening back to takes critically and of course for mixing and mastering. As well as those rooms we have a comfy sofa room with TV for chilling out as well as a kitchen and toilet facilities.
We have plans for another two live rooms and they are in the early stages of building, so we're looking forward to opening those up in the future.
If you're interested in the building side of things then we've put some photos up for you to check out. Click here to follow the link!