In Pictures: Miloco Studios, London

With clients including everyone from Oasis and Razorlight to The Chemical Brothers and Florence and the Machine, Miloco Studios’ Leroy Street complex in London is one of the most successful recording and mixing entities around.

Last month, London’s Miloco held a party to celebrate the refurbishment of its successful ‘Pool’ studio. The huge recording room – measuring 20 x 10 metres with a lofty 6-metre ceiling - now boasts a large isolation booth for increased flexibility.

Every effort has been made to maintain the ‘one room’ feel which is so important to producer Ben Hillier, who runs the room with Miloco. The newly designed control room looks out through large glazed doors to aid communication and the creative process.

Ben’s collection of rare analogue gear contains this Bruel and Kjoer mic pre, pictured here with the famous Binson Echo.

Miloco’s Engine Room studio has also undergone extensive refurbishment, giving the place a warm, fresh feel. The monitoring is still as exceptional as ever, based around customised Munro M4s and Chevin Amplification calibrated regularly by acoustician Nick Whitaker.

The Engine Room’s arsenal of outboard continues to expand, the latest addition being the Chandler Zener Limiter. The impressive range of toys includes the very best from GML, Summit and Tube Tech.

Along with the newer outboard, Miloco still provides all the staple gear engineers have grown to love. Pictured here are Urei 1176s and 1178, the Summit TLA and the beautiful Ear Limiter.

The Engine Room is one of three Neve VR60 mix studios to be run by Miloco. The warm sound of the Neve and superb monitoring makes the Engine Room one of the busiest rooms in the group.

The Pool has a unique selling point in that the control room can be disconnected and relocated into the live room for producers who want to work in a ‘one room’ situation, thus creating a second large room for recording drums.

The Pool, while based around boutique mic pres, still has a conventional desk. Pictured here is the vintage EMT A100 30 channel console, which offers a very clean signal path and crisp EQ, and also allows multiple headphone mixes via its eight sends to the studio’s hearback system.

The Pool’s new control room has been fitted to ensure maximum comfort for clients, and features brand new air-conditioning, Sky TV and stylish lighting and décor. There are additional recreation rooms elsewhere in the building, including a large lounge/kitchen, and reception area with pool table.

The men behind the success of the Miloco group are Operations Manager Nick Young (left) and Technical Manager Pete Hofmann. It has taken them nearly 20 years to expand their operation from a single 16-track room in Hoxton Square to running 16 of the world’s finest studios.

Since opening its doors as a commercial studio complex in the mid 1980s, the Leroy Street building has produced countless hit records ranging from Enya’sWatermark to Oasis’s Be Here Now. Albums recorded and mixed here in the last year have included Florence and the Machine’s Lungs, The Enemy’s Music for the People, Razorlight’s Slipway Fires and Jordin Sparks’ Battlefield.

The Chemical Brothers have made all their albums at Miloco’s Leroy Street site. They have been quoted as saying, "The sound of Miloco Studio's Engine Room is really important to the sound of our records".