Hiring Apple studios
Rare records dealers EIL continue to scrape the barrel for lots of Apple ephemera. Among the latest batch is a press pack for Apple Studios, built at great expense in the basement of 3 Savile Row. Famously unfinished in time for the Beatles’ 1969 Get Back sessions, the studios were eventually completed in 1970/1971, and offered quite substantial recording and mastering facilities, which many recording artists took advantage of (hence the large number of Apple acetates in circulation).
The seven sheet press pack EIL are selling for £150 details the rebuilding works undertaken at 3 Savile Row, including the contractors involved and the costs of the building and equipment. The work was a difficult engineering task that necessitated ‘floating’ 3 Savile Row in the air to build the basement studio. It took eighteen months, and resulted in not only the recording studio, but also a special natural reverb room, and full disc-cutting facilities, with a mastering suite which could cater for mono, stereo and quadraphonic recordings.
Interesting to learn that, in 1971 it would have cost £37 an hour to record to 16 track, £29 an hour to mix to stereo, and £12 to cut a 12″ master!