Advision
83 New Bond Street
23 Gosfield Street London
The original Advision was in a basement on New Bond Street in Mayfair below a menswear shop. The building no longer exists having been demolished with its adjacent properties to make way for a department store.
It was started by Guy Whetstone and Stephen Appleby after taking over what was Guy De Bere Studios in 1954.
It was envisaged that the studio would be used for recording jingles and voice-overs but as the 1960s progressed it would attract top pop music recording artists on the back of a number of chart hits and albums.
The original desk was a 9 input mono valve design built by the technical director Andy Whetstone with simple treble and bass equalistion which was paired with a mono Telefunken tape machine.
By the early 60s the studio had upgraded to 4-track with an Ampex A300 and the first of a series of in-house built transistor desks.
In 1966 the studio had its first chart hit single with Crispian St.Peter's Pied Piper that went to 4 in the United States, 5 in the United Kingdom, and 1 in Canada.
The Yardbirds recorded their 1966 album 'Roger the Engineer' at Advision, the title taken from a cartoon drawing of Roger Cameron by Chris Dreja from the band.
In 1967 the studio upgraded with a new desk built by Dag Fjellner who would be responsible for supplying the studio equipment over the coming years through his firm Feldon Audio. The following year he would secure distribution of the Scully range of tape machines from the USA followed by JBL speakers, Quad 8 desks and then MCI desks and machines. Advision became a sort of Guinea Pigs in trials of new equipment being brought into the country.
Eddie Offord would join Advision as a trainee engineer in 1966 but quickly became one of their full time engineers alongside Roger Cameron and Gerald Chavin. He would go on to engineer a number of seminal works by ELP and Yes ending up as co-producer of the later.
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One of the Advision discrete outboard equalisers that can be seen in the rack in some of these pictures.
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In July 1967, The Move would record Flowers in the Rain at Advision.
The Dag Fjellner desk started in 1965, completed in 1967 then upgraded over the following years until the mid 70s when the tradition of in house built desk was changed with the acquisition of the Quad 8 console.
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Advision Studio Equipment 1971
By 1971 the studio had gone 16 track with the introduction of a Scully 2" tape machine.
In 1971 the mixdown suite had a Neve 20/16.
Yes at Advision in 1972
“We were on top of the world when we made Close To The Edge,” says singer-songwriter Jon Anderson, recalling the early months of 1972 when he and the band, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Rick Wakeman and Bill Bruford worked away inside London’s Advision Studios to record the follow-up to their breakout hit, Fragile, which was released a year earlier.
The group and producer Eddie Offord recorded "Close To The Edge" in piecemeal fashion, using heavy editing and tape loops . Keyboardist Rick Wakeman recalls one effects tape that was 40 feet long and looped into various sections of the song.
'At one point, a studio cleaning lady accidentally discarded some of the tape that was needed for the song, resulting in a frantic search before they finally recovered the sections.'
1975- Studio refit
The control room was completely refitted around a Quad 8 34 channel desk that Feldon Audio imported from California.
TBC