More links and resources The Official Hollies web site ARC System features

One of the great British bands of all time and one time stable mates of The Beatles on the Parlophone record label, The Hollies continue to record and tour up to the present day and regularly fill stadiums in Europe and the Far East.

We recently talked to bassist Ray Stiles (slightly older readers might remember him as part of 70's glam rock band Mud!).

Ray told us that SampleTank and AmpliTube were heavily used on The Hollies last album, Staying Power (IK even get a credit in the sleeve notes). He recently began using ARC System in his home studio where he has been producing the brand new Hollies album "Then, Now, Always".

Ray told us:
"Once all the recordings had been completed, I took the final recordings over to Abbey Road Studios for mastering with engineer Peter Mew and the sound was excellent.  
As you know, the monitoring system at my home studio is not on a grand scale BUT it is accurate. This is down to the fact that I have ARC on the stereo output during all stages of recording and mixing. Peter remarked on the overall sound quality in terms of even-ness of tonality and was even more interested to know that I did the whole thing on two 4" speakers with a 6" sub-woofer tagged on - total power was just 20 watts!
Some people may scoff at this but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so to speak!  - Let's face it, there probably aren't too many places you'd sooner go to check out your mixes than at Abbey Road. 
There were absolutely no 'surprises' at the mastering session – the mixes that I took in with me were what I expected to hear, and after Peter had made his minor artistic tweaks, the results were excellent.  
Monitoring is, for me anyway, the most important single aspect in a recording environment. It must be reliable – ARC puts that reliability into the chain. It's fantastic!"

Ray has also started using T-RackS 3 Deluxe, so we look forward to his comments on that shortly!