What were your early dips into recording, and what got you interested in wanting to pursue it as a career?
When I was a teenager I was playing in bands and trying to be a guitarist. I was convinced that that was what I was going to do, but I didn't have any plans. When I finished school, my folks were keen for me to go to university. They were unsure about me trying to pursue a career in music. I ended up doing a degree in music technology. It was a Bachelor of Science degree, so it was very technical-based. I came home after my second year and realized I needed to get some hands-on experience in the studio. I started knocking on doors, and I had a lot of doors shut in my face. There are always more people looking for work experience than there are opportunities available. I happened across this rehearsal space that I used to rehearse in with my bands when I was a teenager. It was this incredible project called Base Connection. When we were kids, you could go in and rehearse in there for one pound a night. There'd always been a recording studio of some description in there. I called up Pete Abbott, the guy running it at the time, and asked him if I could potentially get some work experience. He said, "No, there isn't work experience available." Fortunately, because I knew the guys who ran the center from earlier years when I played in bands, they said to him, "Hey, you should meet Geoff. He's all right." Pete and I developed this friendship; we're still friends to this day. He would let me come in and sit in on sessions with him over the summer. He had this parallel career going at the time, where he was doing monitors for a band, and they were going off on tour in September when I was going back to university. He said, "I'm probably going to have to close up the studio whilst I'm on tour." I jumped in and said, "How about letting me run the studio for you?" He was pretty unsure about it at first, but he let me run the studio. That was fantastic. I managed to finish my degree via distance [learning] while doing this. It also meant that I was doing what I was really going to university to do. I could bring in bands from outside of the youth music project, but there were all these young bands that had rehearsed there that had never been in a studio before or, if they had, it was a very limited experience. I was able to learn with them. There wasn't necessarily the pressures or expectations that you had working in a commercial studio and having paying clients come in, expecting you to get incredible results. I was learning on the job.
Was the studio fairly well-equipped, or were there pretty limited resources in terms of gear?
This was mid-2000s. At that time a lot of the studio's around us, operating commercially, were still tape-based and had been run for years by people who didn't necessarily have any interest in changing from that. Pete – being a younger guy and familiar with the technology – had an [Apple] Mac G4 with a [Digidesign] Digi 002 and old Alesis ADATs hooked up to that. We were able to record 16 channels at a time. We had a Soundtracs desk and a couple of small bits of outboard, like some Behringer and TL Audio compressors. It was basic, but it was functional. Once I got confident with the gear and the routing, what was brilliant about it – and very appealing to the bands in the local area – was the fact that they could use gear that, at the time, was relatively advanced. They'd come in, lay tracks down, edit, and achieve a quality in a quicker amount of time than they could previously. That gave me a niche in the local area.
Do you hear anything now that you enjoy in your early work?
The control room was a small room – it sounded terrible. But the live room was a reasonably good size. I stumbled across some recordings from that time, over the last lockdown period. I found some drum recordings that I did, and I made my own samples from them. A lot don't sound anywhere near as bad as I remember. When I learned some new technique during that period, it felt like such an advancement. Like grouping drum tracks together and learning that you could "tab to transients" in Pro Tools and cut tracks up. That was super rewarding. I listen back to some of those recordings and cringe a little bit at how they sound, but equally they also bring back memories of, "Oh, yeah; that's the first time I recorded the shells of the drum kit without the cymbals or recorded the cymbals over the top." I have such fond memories of that place, and of the experience.
Was your next step to start working with Spike Stent?
I'd been running the studio in Salisbury, in the south of England. This other producer, Neil Kennedy, was running a small studio in the next city over, Southampton. We got to chatting via MySpace and decided that it made more sense for us to join forces and build a studio that we could both work in. Build something that was better and more functional than what we each had. I was at the point where I felt I needed to do my own thing. We took over a farm building outside of Southampton and built a studio there [The Ranch Production House]. They're still running it. It's an amazing place. We built that over the course of the five years I worked with Neil there. We built the initial studio, and then we built a second studio so that we could both be working at the same time. Then we eventually built this 80-square meter live room so that we could record bands live; this huge space in a barn. That was brilliant to link up with somebody who had a different approach than I did. I certainly have always felt throughout my career that every time I work with someone else, they provide some mental shift. With Neil, I learned an awful lot of different recording techniques and approaches. He's a total gearhead. He's always buying new bits of equipment and wanting to try something new. We went through every mic preamp under the sun, and every mic, and we lived off cheap fast food to fuel our equipment habit. It was brilliant learning. Then, from there, that's when I started working for Spike. A mutual friend of Spike's and mine said Spike was back in the country and needed somebody to help him out for a little while. I jumped at the chance, because he's an absolute legend and incredible talent. It was a great opportunity to learn from one of the best.
You worked on some huge records with him.
Oh, yeah. His discography is immense. It's always nice to work on something you're proud of, but it's even better to work on something and know that people around the world are listening to it. That was one of the most gratifying parts about going to work for him; working on these projects that were reaching the masses, and feeling I got to play a small part in it.
You'd been running your own show and your own studio, and then you were the assistant again.
Yeah, absolutely. If you want to learn and progress, you've got to be willing to take a step back and relinquish control, understanding that there's a great opportunity to learn. That's worth its weight in gold. Before I went to work for Spike, my understanding of mixing as a process and an art form in its own right was completely different to what it is now. Up until that point, I very rarely mixed something that somebody else had recorded or produced. It's a totally different mindset. When you're working with local bands and artists on small budgets, everything has to be done very, very quickly. The mix process, before working with Spike, was something that I was doing as we were going. Yes, you can get good results, but that understanding – mixing is a separate process – was revolutionary for me.
When you start with something that you did not record or produce, how do you find the center of the mix? How do you begin?
My compass is always trying to listen with the artist's and the producer's ears. That's the most important thing for me. When I get a production mix, the first thing I'll do is sit down and listen to it several times to understand who the key players are within a song or a piece of music. [I want to] understand where the direction is and what's being achieved already. Or how can we make it do that more, or understand where they want this to go and how do I get it there? I like mixing most of all, because it fits with my creative mindset. I like being in the box that I'm in when I'm mixing, because I can't be too radical, but I've also got to push the envelope a bit. I make sure that there's a channel of communication open right from the get-go. I want to make sure that if I send them a first pass and they don't like it, or I send them a pass and there's something essential that isn't there, they can come to me and we've got a good rapport to get it to where they want it to go. Mixing is very much about facilitating and being a fresh pair of ears to take songs to that next step.
Has there been a time where you totally missed it on a mix?
They're the ones you learn from most, when you don't hit the nail on the head first off. I did a song for an artist about two years ago – the song came in, and the production mix felt fairly basic. When I heard the song, I thought, "This sounds like a pop smash to me." I pushed it to be that way. But what they were going for was much more lo-fi, and something much more rough around the edges. That was a learning curve on how important it is to have a creative conversation before we get going; to understand peoples' intentions and where they want to go with it. I heard the production mix, got excited, and went for it. That first pass was not how the song ended up. It was much more lo-fi, and much more closed in.
Do you ever do multiple mixes? One that matches the rough, and a "this is what Geoff would have done" mix?
