A student sits behind a drumkit in a music studio

Music technology facilities

State-of-the-art technology and access to industry-standard equipment and archival pieces.

A group of four students poses for a group photo while holding their instruments

Cutting-edge facilities

We recently completed a £2.5 million investment into our music facilities in the Compton building, which has been in the works for several years.

Our new spaces, called The Arc and The Hive, provide students with state-of-the-art tech and access to industry-standard equipment and archival pieces to learn, explore and perfect their work.

A person sits in front of a large cinema screen — Introducing The Arc

The Arc

The Arc is a new audiovisual and sound design space built with top-of-the-range sound proofing, speakers in the walls and ceilings, and a large cinema screen.

This room is designed to allow students how to integrate sound with media; for instance, for film scoring, foley sound, music production, and so on.

All light and sound is fully synchronised to allow deep audiovisual analysis, and the Dolby Atmos rig within this room is one of the very first in the UK.

A student stands in a dimly lit recording studio — Introducing The Hive

The Hive

The Hive is our vintage-inspired recording studio, complete with a wide array of instruments and musical equipment. It is fully sound-proofed and designed with audio optimisation in mind, and home to cutting-edge equipment and archival pieces, all available for students to use including:

A custom made, specially designed Rupert Neve sound desk, the only one of its kind in an educational institution in the UK. Equipment similar to this was commonly used by the Beatles, Aerosmith and Nirvana.
An organ that UK-based band Rudimental recorded their last album on
An original LinnDrum sound mixer (only one of 5000 ever made)
Replica drum kits modelled after the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and more.

Close up of a person on an Apple Mac keyboard

Mac labs

We offer Commercial Music and Creative Sound and Music Production students priority use of three Apple Mac labs with up to 50 workstations in our main presentation lab. These offer a full range of industry standard hardware and software including:

ProTools
Logic Audio Pro
Ableton Live
Max/MSP
Numerous plug-ins and processing software including Waves bundles, Native Instrument suites, GRM tools, Lexicon reverbs, MacDSP, and surround sound encoders.

We also support visual and media based work with current versions of applications such as Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Jitter and a full range of multimedia authoring packages.

A music student leans over their guitar in a recording studio

Recording studios

We have five high quality studios running Pro Tools HD systems. These are used for our Commercial Music students for their album projects, and Creative Music Technology students for Audio Post and other high-end production projects.

Rehearsal rooms

We have five full-band rehearsal rooms, all equipped with PA, guitar/bass backline, high end drum kits, amplifiers (Mesa Boogie, Orange, Ampeg and Vox) and Nord Keyboards. The facilities are mainly used by Commercial Music students to support their tour and album modules. Two of the rooms have tie-lines into our Pro Tools HD studios.