Wild Tracks, one of Soho’s longest standing Pro Tools based audio post houses, has been forced to close due to a lack of work and falling rates.
The Greek Street facility, established in 1987 by owner and managing director Paul Headland, shut its doors on 18 June and has appointed liquidators. All 10 employees will lose their jobs.
Headland had already reduced staff levels through redundancies and natural wastage in an effort to adjust overheads. He had also asked the remaining employees to take a pay cut.
“It’s a tragedy for the staff,” he said. “We tried everything we could to save the company but looking ahead in June the volume of work was appalling and my gut feeling was that July and August were going to be rotten too.”
Only last year Wild Tracks had installed seven ProTools HD systems and 12TB of server storage at its Greek Street studios as part of a£250,000 upgrade to the facility which also included a Sohonet Fibre connection.
Mike is Pro Tools genius and an award winning ‘audiomeister’, defined as ‘a person of great skill and authority in sound’. His vast array of credits include music (from classical to rock), drama and documentaries across all the BBC Radio networks, as well as audio post production for video and TV, ‘new media’, live sound, commercial CDs, DVDs and podcasts, helping clients tell their stories with sound. He has been described as "an oasis of calm in a stormy creative world"; "quick, creative & easy to work with"; "always going the extra mile"; and "invests himself in the success of your project"’.show me less content in the footer
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Seven radio producers – all based in the north of England – have joined forces to launch a new co-operative venture – ‘Radio Wizards’. It’s equally remarkable that their aim now is to work together on every kind of sound production... except radio!
"It’s taken over a year to get to this point," says ‘wizard’ Mike Thornton, "but now we’ve got a viable business plan, we’ve launched our website and we’re already starting to attract commissions. As a facilities provider we decided to facilitate this partnership and set them up with a web site to help kickstart this excellent partnership."
