What got you interested in the technical side of production, as opposed to being a consumer or a songwriter?
As a teenager I played in a variety of bands, mainly as a drummer, and I was always interested in fiddling around with a guitar amp or PA. When you're a 12-year-old kid, you like to figure out how things work. I remember asking my mum if she could buy me a PA for my birthday. I guess it went from that into early forays of 4-track cassette tapes and playing in bands in my parents' living room, making a racket with two or three mics. I didn't really know what I was doing – I just thought it was interesting.
You didn't want to pursue being in a band to its fullest extent?
I used to play in orchestras and really enjoyed that. Then I went to a residential summer school and found a percussion teacher who taught at Wells Cathedral School, which had specialist music funding. I got totally immersed in it, but I also saw loads of brilliant musicians and thought, "Wow, it's going to be hard to make my way compared to them, yet I'm also interested in this other side." That's when I heard of the Tonmeister course, which had an emphasis on recording technology. It sounded perfect for me, so I chose that rather than going to music college and trying to be a proper musician.
You had a placement year at Abbey Road Studios while you were taking your degree course?
It was a four-year degree course, with two years studying at university and then an internship for a year. The course was really good at placing people in the industry and I wanted to come to Abbey Road. There was one job up for grabs that I didn't get, but they had a classical editing department, and somebody was going on maternity leave. I spent most of that year learning to edit classical records, and at the tail end of that time, I spent a couple of months as a runner. I finished the degree and got a job at Abbey Road almost straight out of university, which was really lucky.
Indeed, because runners can literally spend years waiting for an opening.
It can be a really slow career path and it's hard to maintain the focus and energy if you're not getting paid a lot, working long hours and not getting to do the thing you want to do. It's little wonder that people often drop out. I managed to circumvent that, partly through luck and partly through having the right attitude. I was lucky that a couple of engineers at Abbey Road saw that I was enthusiastic and willing. It's that classic thing of, "If you can't manage to do something yourself, who do you recommend?" Thankfully I had a couple of people on my side that helped get me through that progression.
How are projects divided up at Abbey Road, and is there a stampede to work on certain things?
The dynamic regarding how those come about is quite funny. A lot of artists or composers will have existing professional relationships with an engineer, so they'll quite often bring someone with them that's not exclusive to Abbey Road. If you're an in-house engineer, bookings are dealt with by the studio manager and bookings team. They look to see what's required, the best fit for that project, and who's available in the diary. As I said before, when you present a willing exterior to do anything technically it creates more opportunities and makes the position of whoever's choosing to work on a job easier to allocate.
Would you go as far as to say the client relationship comes above any technical service you provide?
That's the most important thing, really. Doing the job is hard, to a certain extent, but for people who are coming up and want to start, it's about knowing how to create relationships with people who request you to record them. You want to give them a positive experience and be able to sit in a room with them for 16 hours in a day, not argue about stuff, and find a working practice. I do a lot of mixing, and that client dynamic is really important in that area. I'll usually request they give me a certain amount of time to get a mix into a shape that I'm happy with, then they'll come in, elaborate, and we'll get it to a point where they're happy. It's also a case of trying to manage their time so they're not sitting there all day getting bored. Those kinds of things are key to everyone feeling they've had a good experience, and that they got their opinions across.
Is the customer always right?
Yes, and I don't think I've ever refused to do something. If someone comes in and says, "The vocal's got to be up 12 dB," you'll have a discussion about that. And, whilst some engineers might say they're not doing it, if that's how the client wants it done then, as long as you've offered your professional opinion, they're always right.
Do you have to be a fan of the projects you're working on, or is that immaterial?
I think it helps. It's great working on things you love, but when you're open-minded you can get things out of projects that you didn't expect. When the music is of a good standard almost any genre's interesting, but when you're really struggling to get a performance out of someone you might wonder why you're doing it, and that can become hard work.
Will you research an artist you're not familiar with as an act of preparation?
You do have to get into their headspace. I was remixing an INXS record [Kick] a few years ago and knew a few of their hits but not much else, so I spoke to Bob Clearmountain [Tape Op #129, #84] who mixed it originally, to find out what gear he was using. That's what you need to know in order to do a project. I'm often remixing The Beatles catalogue, and we start from the view of replicating the effects and techniques they used to see if that's necessary or, for example, whether or not we can use a plug-in. We'll tend to go through all the possible avenues to see what works best.
Who have been the most inspiring people to work with?
In terms of inspiration, that comes from seeing people who have spent a lifetime doing something they're really good at and still retain their enthusiasm for it. On the film side, I was lucky enough to work with John Williams, who's done the scores for so many classic films. I was an assistant for one of the Star Wars episodes, as well as a Harry Potter film. Here was a man in his seventies who's done great things and could easily be retired, but is just happy being in the studio every day crafting with an orchestra. It's the same working with Paul McCartney and doing new work with him, or Mick Jagger, or Robert Plant who, again, could easily be living the high life on a Caribbean island. I'm sure they are sometimes, but when they're in the studio they're like a 20-year-old kid – they're still excited and want to move on from the past.
You've worked on a lot of The Beatles projects in recent years.
Yes, there've been a variety of projects. In 2009, we remastered all of the studio albums in stereo and mono. Since then, I've done a bunch of remixes, going right back to the multitrack tapes with all of the original instruments on and remixing from scratch. We also did the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 50th anniversary in 2017, the White Album in 2018, and Abbey Road in 2019. Those were new stereo mixes, so we had to ask ourselves how we could take the music and make it sound better. Not more contemporary, because we're not changing any elements of the music. But sometimes all the vocals are coming out of one speaker and the band another, so we try to centre things up in a way that people listen to music now, without changing the essence of it.
In what other ways does the sound need to be brought up to date?
When they were working in the '60s, stereo was a very new thing, so there's a certain amount of what we now consider "strange positioning." For example, I don't think anyone today would mix with a lead vocal coming out of one side, especially given that now almost everyone listens on headphones. We also try and put a "space" around sounds, because those '60s mixes can be very discrete. We try to widen the sound field to make it sound slightly more contemporary.
You say you're not changing the music, but you are making creative decisions regarding the placement of sounds, which must carry a sense of responsibility?
That's right, and you want to be very careful about how you change history. As we know, many people around the world love this music, so we're really careful about that. We always reference the original mixes by A/Bing to compare what we've done to the original, then we'll try to validate why we change things. "Better" is a difficult concept to grasp, but The Beatles did have certain technical limitations. On Sgt. Pepper's, they worked on a 4-track tape machine. They would fill that up, bounce it to another machine and carry on overdubbing on the spare tracks, which meant they couldn't change the balance of any of the instruments. They might do that process three or four times, so there are layers of instruments all mixed down to one track that they couldn't balance. When we dug up all those generations of tape, we had the flexibility to do things they probably would have done, given the opportunity.
Do you go as far as using the original technologies?
It's a mixture of both, really. The Beatles loved using Automatic Double Tracking (ADT) effects, which is a technique of using another tape machine with a varispeed to create different kinds of delays, or comb filtering effects, when you put these sounds very close together. A lot of those very '60s psychedelic-sounding effects were done in that way, and there aren't really any plug-ins that can do that the way they did it. We did recreate a lot of those effects by fiddling around with varispeed. We also used some of the original echo chambers and reverb plates, but then we'd sometimes use a plug-in instead.
Presumably, if one track requires a lot of processing, it's safe to assume all the others need to be balanced up to match it?
