New business, Lamp House Music was this week granted formal Planning Permission to open music rehearsal rooms in Haddington.
The former railway building (‘The Lamp House’) in Station Yard Industrial Estate, off Hospital Road, will contain three professionally equipped and acoustically engineered rehearsal rooms, available for hire by the hour seven days a week for professional and amateur musicians. In addition, Lamp House Music will offer music classes for all ages and abilities as well as Guitar Club, Rock Dad and Mums and Tots classes.
Work at the site begins immediately, as spokesperson Callum Maguire explains,
“Now that the Council have approved and supported our plans, we have signed our lease and are cracking on with the work required to make the rooms acoustically sound, this ensures that sound leakage is of an absolute minimum externally but also creates a fantastic sound within the rooms for the musicians using them.
We plan to be open for rehearsal hire in just three weeks time – Friday 20th April, and will be having an Open Doors Day on Saturday 28th April for members of the public to come in and have a look around. We really want Lamp House Music to play a central part in East Lothian’s music scene and we think that the facilities we will provide and the amazing top of the range equipment we are putting in, should make the rooms very popular.”
Callum Maguire saw the potential for music rehearsal rooms in East Lothian when he moved to Haddington eight years ago. A semi-professional musician himself he quickly realised there were no facilities in East Lothian rivalling those available in Edinburgh. He says:
“I was travelling in to Edinburgh for band practices every week and soon got frustrated that there was nowhere locally for rehearsing. I thought it would be great to have somewhere that was of a professional standard, clean and welcoming but also closeby – that’s when I came up with the idea of setting up my own, however it’s taken this long to find the ideal building.”
Now joined by business partners Martin Simpson and Roz Maguire, Callum’s convinced they’ve got the optimum set-up:
“Having found the perfect building, I wanted to make sure that Lamp House Music also offered the best service, thus I decided to involve my wife and best friend who both have extensive experience in areas different to my own – our skills all compliment each other and together we form a brilliant team. We aim to make Lamp House Music a friendly place to use as well as being a professional music facility, we’re really looking forward to opening our doors soon.”