| Coach house studio @Ford Park | History Please Read me | Vintage webcam clips | Hello and welcome to music from The Lake District 1995-2002 |
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Lakesounds.co.uk was born in 1999 in an ex bombshelter in Ulverston
Cumbria, that had been the home of Southlake studio since 1990. Run by
Colin Williams the studio had recorded most of the local bands
throughout the 90's. Way back then the internet was in it's infancy and
the idea of having a website where you could listen to music online was
a novel idea. Most people who owned a computer were still using 28K modems and so listening to streamed music was a very stop start affair. Even with a 56K dial up connection, unless you logged on at a quiet time, you would be lucky to hear 3 minutes of music without the dreaded buffering. Never the less we thought that this was the future, and we wanted to use this new medium to create an online community of local bands. |
We
encoded all of the music as Realplayer files as these would stream
quite well on 56K modems even though we had to compromise on quality.
MP3's were about but they were big files back then and you had to wait
until they downloaded so we went with Realplayer.We also got ourselves
a webcam and started making films of some of the recording sessions.
Because these files were very big we had to run them through some compression software that pixalated them to a very high degree, but what the heck, it was all new and exiting, and we put up with the lack of clarity, cause we were there in cyberspace. Bands from our little studio in Ulverston could be heard and seen around the world and we were there on the cutting edge. Now looking at these videos it's a bit like looking at early silent films. |
So
this site is really a bit of an antique, a slice of internet history.
It's also a history of bands from the area that were strutting their
funky stuff back in the late 90's. Some of the music that we
put
up on the site probably goes back to about 1995 as we had a lot of
stuff in the archives that made it onto the site besides the bands that
were around from 1999 to 2003 when the site was highly active. Late in 2002 Southlake studio closed, and Colin went on to develop a new studio at Ford Park community centre, in Ulverston, Coach house Studio. The live band scene had gone very quiet and apart from some recordings of Colins' songwriter nights at the Hope, little new music made it onto the site. Lakesounds was in a backwater, waiting for a revival of the local Rock n Roll scene. Now in 2006 there's a new vibrant music scene, and lakesounds is here as a legacy of what was. |
Access to all artists
will be back soon