Astoria (recording studio)

Astoria Houseboat from the river

Astoria is a grand houseboat, built in 1911 for impresario Fred Karno, and adapted as a recording studio in the 1980s by its new owner, Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. It is moored on the River Thames near Hampton, Middlesex. Gilmour purchased the boat in 1986, because he "spent half of [his] life in recording studios with no windows, no light, but on the boat there are many windows, with beautiful scenery on the outside".

Early history

The boat was built in 1911 for impresario Fred Karno, who wanted to have the best houseboat on the river. He designed it so that there could be an entire 90-piece orchestra playing on deck.

The boat is framed in Mahogany, and has Crittall windows.

Gilmour era

I just happened to find this beautiful boat that was built as a houseboat and was very cheap, so I bought it. And then only afterward did I think I could maybe use it to record. The control room is a 30-foot by 20-foot room. It's a very comfortable working environment--- three bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, a big lounge. It's 90 feet long.

—David Gilmour

Gilmour bought the boat after seeing it advertised for sale in a copy of Country Life magazine in his dentist's waiting room, just a short while after admiring it while being driven past its moorings.

Parts of each of the last three Pink Floyd studio albums, A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987), The Division Bell (1994), and The Endless River (2014), were recorded on the boat, as were parts of Gilmour's solo album, On an Island (2006). His most recent solo album, Rattle That Lock (2015) was mixed and had partially recorded there. It was also used for mixing the Pink Floyd live albums Delicate Sound of Thunder (1988) and Pulse (1995) as well as the Pulse film (1995), Gilmour's Remember That Night DVD/Blu-ray (2007) and his Live in Gdańsk (2008) live album/DVD.

Bob Ezrin has mentioned, however, that the floating studio posed a few problems when it came to engineering guitar sounds for A Momentary Lapse of Reason:

It's not a huge environment (...) So we couldn't keep the amps in the same room with us, and we were forced to use slightly smaller amplifiers. But after playing around with them in the demo stages of the project, we found that we really like the sound. So a Fender Princeton and a little G&K amp became the backbone of Dave's guitar sound for that record.

— Bob Ezrin,

A video of Andrew Jackson, sitting at the mixing console of the Astoria Studio, is available online.

Dara Ó Briain, Griff Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath visited the Astoria while on a trip down the Thames for the BBC television programme Three Men in a Boat.

Equipment

According to an interview with Phil Taylor (Gilmour's guitar technician), the Astoria was originally equipped with a DDA AMR 24 mixer console and UREI 813 studio main monitors with Phase Linear amps. The UREI 813s were replaced around 1990 by ATC main monitors. Customized ATC SCM150ASL active speakers are used for the main left and right channels with a standard ATC SCM150ASL active speaker used as the centre channel. The centre channel sits above an ATC SCM0.1-15 subwoofer. The surround monitors are two ATC SCM50ASLs. A variety of near-field monitor speakers are used including Yamaha NS-10s and Auratones depending on who happens to be working at the studio. The acoustic design was done with the assistance of Nick Whitaker, an independent acoustician, and much of the equipment was recommended by James Guthrie and Andrew Jackson. Nowadays the Astoria includes a Neve 88R mixing console, as well as three Studer A827 multi-tracks and Ampex ATR-100 tape recorders, which were modified by Tim de Paravicini, Esoteric Audio Research's (EAR) founder. The conversion to a studio also required 23 kilometres of cables, which were sourced from Van den Hul cables of Holland. There are various compressors from Pye and EAR 660 tube designs, as well as EAR 825s for EQ.

See Also

• Garrick's Temple to Shakespeare (neighbor)