With over 60 years joint experience between Kev and Andy,
there isn’t much we can’t cover.
From a Church Hall to Buckingham Palace, and everything in between – “One call does it all”.
With a phonebook full of trusted top-flight freelancers, we can organise all members of the audio team whilst our connections with production companies allow for complete control and flexibility of the package.
Imagine the work you don’t have to do as a PM if we can just provide everything on one itemised quote for you!
Do you have a huge orchestra or a reality show with 100 mics? Whether we do it as a derig fly-away package or turn up with one of our 3 trucks – we are very used to large track count records in some unusual situations.
We have many different flavours of hardware to record on and always record in a way that provides complete redundancy.
Literally thousands of hours of live television broadcast over many years.
We understand the best way to approach proper live shows and we have the best people in all areas of sound to make it work live.
The Zen Trucks are ready to tackle any live broadcast with the capability to provide many flavours of feeds across site.
We normally dub and deliver all our shows – but are also very used to taking recordings for just the post production stage.
There are two permanent audio mix rooms at Zen with ProTools and a mountain of plugins available. A further edit room allows for midi programming and tuning when both dub studios are in full flow.
We tend to work remotely into edit suites all over the country but are also very happy to welcome people to our base at Liphook if they fancy a few days in the countryside
Andy spent 20+ years as part of the Royal Marines Band Service and has a lifetime of military music experience under his belt.
He supervises, records, and dubs the Mountbatten Festival of Music. Alongside many BBC shows employing military orchestras, his knowledge in this area is second to none.
Whether in this country for UK forces or around the world, he is versed in recording not only standard orchestras but also the many types of smaller military ensembles, marching bands, and drum corps.
Getting us in early means that click track generation and midi programming can be done as part of show prep – saving huge costs for production who would normally have to get this done separately.
We can arrive at show with complex playback sequences ready to go and, because we have built them, it means we can also change them there and then onsite ourselves. We have saved several expensive records by being in control of this element.
Also if you have a project that needs some extra programming work we have extensive sample libraries from the likes of Spitfire, EastWest and CineSamples for orchestration.
We have run several bespoke audio training courses to take beginners and teach them about broadcast, pop, and classical music engineering. This has proved to be hugely beneficial to musicians who want to learn more about how to get the most out their instrument and ensembles. It gives the students the fundamental understanding of how and why they could record in a particular manner, based upon scientific principles.
We also run a more advanced remixing course for music work, which we built for people who had attended our first course. The theory covers the key elements of adjusting a sonic landscape, whilst the practical sees students laying up media from Zen’s own show recordings and building a mix which is reviewed along the process.
Zen has always tried to be a “one-stop-shop” for everything audio on your production. We know, from experience, it’s not only the best way to get great results, but to also cut costs for production.
We were trained, in a now disappearing world, in which the sound supervisor always dubbed and delivered their own shows after the record. By doing it this way we know where all the media is and how to fix things quickly.
When working with large music acts we can continue the relationship that was started at the live record straight into post – which hugely benefits in getting sign off from artists and management.
