Musicians – amateur and professional- sought a creative outlet in the social vacuum of the pandemic and with live performance in the deep freeze the home studio offered a safe haven for musical expression and experimentation. As a result, there have been a plethora of pandemic recordings, many of which will never see the light of day. But for some commentators this highlights a further decline in the fortunes of small independent places of commercial music production. De Dios Cuartus (2021, IASPM Journal 11.1) documents the accelerated post-covid delocalisation of music production from studio to transnational networks and emphasises the designification of the recording studio within a geographical music “scene” However, absent from existing scholarship is a focus on the potential post-covid benefits for small independent commercial studios, particularly in terms of increased interest from home studio musicians seeking validation for their efforts, and the provision of additional professional expertise to elevate these efforts. The author was one of these musicians who made a home recorded album but had the added benefit of being the co-proprietor of La Chunky, a well-regarded Glasgow recording studio that just survived the pandemic. In this presentation the author will deploy an ethnographic analysis of the album’s creation and its migration to the professional studio environment to address the viability and value of physical music recording spaces in the post-covid milieu. This analysis will be closely contextualised with case studies of nascent recorded outputs that had their origin in the times of the pandemic but came to fruition inmedium format studios after most restrictions had been eased. Home recording technology has always been a threat to the viability of small independent commercial studios but could this recent surge in home recording expose the inherent limitations of non-professional recording environments and provide a lifeline to the independent commercial studios that survived the last few turbulent years?

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