New Studio Gives Artists Hope

By Elvis BasuddeKampala City’s recording scene is set to get a major boost following the establishment of a ultra-modern studio, No End Entertainment, located on Mulago Hill, off Mawanda Road. The sh100m project, which started operating a month ago, belongs to the US-based songstress Halima Namakula and her rapper son Hemdee Kiwanuka.Halima and Hemdee have vowed to revolutionise the music-recording scene in the country by offering something different from others in the same industry.“Everybody seems to be doing the same thing,” Hemdee says of local producers. “People should be creative and try something different.”“We do not take money from the artists. All we require of an artiste is his talent, his ability to compose and sing. Then we sign him to our label (No End Entertainment). We create his image, produce him and release his work and market it,” Hemdee says. He adds that they have come mainly to help the upstart artists who cannot afford studio recording expenses. Hemdee says that whenever he came here for holiday, he would see something lacking in the recording industry. Local artists would approach him and ask him to help them with money for recording.At the studio, the management gives a vocal test to a new artist and takes him for audition. If they find him good, they sign him and embark on producing him and the recording procedure.After all the work is done, the artist gets a good percentage from the company. Otherwise, in normal circumstances, it would require over sh1.8m for an artist to rent a recording studio and get his album recorded: “Lack of money for recording facilities has for years hampered the growth of the music industry in Kampala because most artists are poor. So you can see we have come to uplift the talent of poor artists in our country,” he says firmly. Citing South Africa as a country whose recording industry has advanced so rapidly, Hemdee says Uganda cannot afford to remain rigid for so long.“ We are still far away but things have to change. We have to be innovative and adventurous. People should not be scared by the digital (computer systems) because anything can easily be learned,” he says. The 97 digital 8 Bus mixing board at No End Entertainment studio is the standard equipment being used today in the best recording studious in Europe and America so Ugandans need not travel abroad to record in search of good facilities.Ends