rehearsal rooms

[john_the_bass]

Well last night I went to Quad in Leicester with my band

Jee-zuss - talk about quality, the place is in a huge old textile mill, with a massive front of house area carpeted throughout with nice rugs which stop the sound bouncing off shiny floors and crucially, despite the fact that they've got 8 (full) rooms you couldn't hear a thing out in the big lobby area.
The room we had was completely acoustically treated with a small scale version of the stuff on the Albert Hall ceiling and all the walls had been acoustically damped and again with the rugs on the floor and the mic cables routed underneath them so you didn't spend all evening tripping over them
The gear - BIG Mackie PA, crystal clear and with SM58s that didn't smell like a dogs @rse - Ashdown Peacemaker 2x12 guitar amp and a cornford hurricane 1x12 (lovely) and the bass rig was Mark Bass 410 and SA850 or something (I didn't pay much attention other than it sounded excellent!!)
I was properly blown away by it. 15 quid an hour seemed expensive but i think it's worth every penny - that's precisely the sort of feel that i would want to go for if i could get the space.
Yer man who runs it also had a proper spares shop selling tubes, strings, straps, picks, proper attenuating earplugs etc (although 60 quid for a 5 string set of elixirs is a bit pricey!) + a proper cafe

just sharing!!

[Machines]

Fatback Studios in Birmingham has about 14 rooms, all with sameish kit. That being Peavey TNT 115 bass amp (not quite enough without extra cab), Marshall/Ibanez/Laney heads/410 cabs for the guitars, and random bits of drum kit.

Don't often have gear issues - if it is then its just the guitar speaker cabs.