Mission
To bring the solo and chamber works of under-exposed contemporary composers to a wider audience. To release the lesser known repertoire of established composers and Jazz musicians.
Download Info
Our albums are available for download as 192 kbps Variable Bit Rate encoded AAC files (MPEG-4), which provide excellent sound quality at modest file sizes. Once you have payed for the album via Paypal, you will immediately be emailed a download link. Click this and you will download a 'zipped' folder, which you will need a (freely available) programme like WinZip (PC) or Stuffit (Mac) to unzip. All MP3 players (such as iTunes) will play the AAC files, which are free of any Digital Rights Management (DRM) and better quality than MP3s. Feel free to burn your own CDs from these files, but we would humbly ask you to consider our artists welfare and not distribute the albums to people who have not purchased them. Email us if you would like the album artwork & liner notes sent to you as a PDF file.
CD Availability
Most CD copies of the albums are available direct from us by sending £10 per album and £1.25 p&p via Paypal to payments@music-chamber.com. Use the contacts page form to specify which album you want and your shipping address. CDs can also be bought from Amazon.co.uk in Europe and CDbaby.com in the U.S.
Artist Community
At Music Chamber artistic freedom is paramount. Musicians have the ultimate say over all aspects of their recording. All artists profit equally from sales with the label after production costs. Any work with Music Chamber is non-exclusive, enabling artists to record with other labels. Most recording is done on location, such as at Church recitals. If you are a soloist or part of a small ensemble and wish to record contemporary music - or a composer looking for public exposure - please get in touch.
Production for Hire
If you want your concert or an album recorded - we provide an excellent yet affordable service. All production elements are offered - recording, photography, graphic design and CD duplication or replication. Source material and rights remain yours - whether you want to sell CDs at your concerts or give them away for promotional purposes or as gifts.
Recordings are made with a single source extremely high quality stereo ribbon microphone - the Royer SF-12 - whose detailed and warm characteristics faithfully reproduce live performance. Sampled at rates up to a future proof 24 bit/96khz rate on a Sound Devices 722 machine, recordings are then dithered down to 16 bit for CD release without significant sound quality loss.
Costs for recording at a Greater London venue, a half days post production, mastering of the material, and four CD copies will cost £150. As a price guide 100 CDs including cases, cover and back photographic inserts with track listing, artist notes, and individual shrink-wrapping costs £500 or £5 per CD. Discounts are available for larger numbers.
'If you want an unobtrusive, recording engineer to record your concert with enthusiasm, precision, dedication and offer you a personal service for the right price, Music Chamber's Richard Carruthers is your man! I can't recommend him enough.' Soprano Una Barry, whose CD is shown here:
Founding Father
Richard Carruthers is music lover with tastes ranging from to Bach to Bacharach and Steely Dan to Shostakovich. Trained in news and current affairs at the BBC, he left the Corporation after three years reporting the Balkan war in the mid nineties and moved to New York. There he learnt to trade stocks and play poker, which are still two principle sources of his income. Back now in his hometown of London, he is focusing on his skills as a recording engineer to produce music.
Richard with his Pug, Arthur.
Portrait by David Cobley.