Hi. I’m Mark, the owner of the Mobile Studio.
I have been interested in microphones since I was very young. One day when I was about 8, my Dad made the mistake of showing me that if I plugged the headphones of our stereo system into the microphone socket, then I had my very own microphone and amplifier. He didn’t get a moment’s peace from that day on.
It was very important to my parents, both singers in a choir, that my brother, sister and I receive a musical education. For many years we attended weekly piano lessons and were always very involved in the various orchestras and choirs at school.
As the years went by our interest in music deepened and diversified. My brother decided to major in singing and is currently learning to become a cantor in America. You can hear him sing The Prayer for the State of Israel in the demos section. My sister learned the violin, then the flute. The three of us would often appear as a family at various community events and I started occasionally singing as cantor at our synagogue. Although singing interests me greatly, I was also drawn to the technical side of music, recording and preparing playbacks. It was this combination of the creative and the technical which captivated me so.
By now it was the early 90’s and we were in our teens. My brother bought a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder. This was the first time I was introduced to the idea of a recording that could be made in stages, first recording one track, then another and another and so on. I started making recordings where I would sing all four parts.
It was about this time that I began to get interested in the possibilities of MIDI which allowed me to connect a keyboard to my computer and use it to play an array of different instruments. What wowed me so much about the technology was that, just as with the 4-track, I could layer my recordings and record each instrument separately then play them together. I had a whole orchestra at my fingertips which allowed a creative freedom that I had never had before. I had always composed just for piano as that is what was available to me. Now I was free to experiment with a much greater palette. Combining the MIDI playbacks with the vocal recordings made on the 4-track made for increasingly professional sounding results as I experimented and learned more about my new craft.
In 1998 I came to live in Israel. My parents had both sung in a choir and I enjoyed singing so I made sure that one of the first things I did once I had settled down was to join a choir. We had the most wonderful conductor – Yair Sade, who inspired me with his combination of musical and technical knowledge. Once a year he would take us all to his home studio to record us singing from our repertoire for the choir CD. In the 12 years I sang with the choir I learned much from him. Above all I admired his choice of career combining the two things that I wanted to do the most.
Fast forward to 2010, after many years of improving technology, an income stream allowing me to gradually build up my studio equipment and 20 years of experimentation and experience, I decided to try and go it professionally.
There are many recording studios out there, so I had to ask myself what was it that I could offer that the other studios couldn’t. I was living in a small one bedroom bachelor pad at the time, not really the sort of place you could invite budding musicians into and make a good impression. Therefore necessity became the mother of invention and I decided that if they couldn’t come to me, maybe I could offer to go to them. I bought a laptop which would work with my studio soundcard and became the Mobile Studio.
Since then I have been to people’s houses to record them performing songs for birthdays, weddings, barmitzvahs etc., been to schools and kindergartens to record the pupils for their end of year concerts, been to offices to record interviews with people from all sorts of professions and worked with families and individuals who wanted to record themselves singing the music they enjoy just for the fun of it. Some of these recordings can be found on the Demos Page. Recently I also started producing video clips to go with the audio recordings.
