Kevin Paul Welcome to the Sound On Sound people and music industry podcast channel with me, Kevin Paul. Today's guest is Danton Supple. Danton is a London based record producer and mixer with almost 40 years of experience in the studios, with a diverse and successful range of artists as engineer, mixer and producer, including work on three Grammy winning and five Grammy nominated projects. Having trained as a recording engineer at the legendary Psalm Studios under producers Trevor Horn, Steve Lipson and Julian Mendelssohn, he moved into Westside Studios to work with Clive Langer and Alan Wynn Stanley. Projects he's worked on include Amy McDonald, Coldplay, Ian Brown, Kylie Minogue and The Doves. Recent projects include Alabama 3, Skinny Living, The Horn, Oh Baby and Waiting for Smith. It's a great interview with a really great guy. I hope you enjoy it. As I said in the intro, you started at Psalm. Can you tell listeners a little bit about your journey and how you've got to be here? Danton Supple Hearing you read that back, uh, I kind of realized how long it's been, all those names popping up. I was just, I was very fortunate to work. With all of those people for good periods of time and also to go through the training back at some studios in in the 80s. Run by Lola Widener as she was then. Psalm was this was the studio to be in when I actually got into this business. Uh, I've started over at Strongroom, actually, just as it opened up. And just before that, very briefly, at a jazz studio in Hoxton Square, called Wave Studios. Um, yeah, it's now a very different place. It used to be a jazz club downstairs. I mean, it was a great location. But Hoxton Square was far from a great location in those days. Is that where the old Blue Note, or where the Blue Note is? Uh, well, Bluenote used to be the studio beforehand. Well, it was, it became Bluenote later, and then became a restaurant. But in those days, Hoxton Square was just full of rubbish. It was mainly prefab buildings around the side. There was certainly nothing glamorous about it. In fact, quite a few people have said, Why didn't you buy? It was like, because it was rubbish at the time, you know. There's no way out of border plates there. But got into the business. In those days, you just had to apply everywhere. There were a lot of, a lot of London studios at the time, and then just looked at where do I need to be to get where I want to be in this business? And Psalm was the place. And luckily I worked with an engineer who was working at Psalm at the time, but he came and worked at Strongroom. And, uh, he said, you've got the right attitude. At least I was working hard and wanted to go places. And he got me a job at Psalm. Now, a job at Psalm in those days, The only access point to getting to the studio was to do night reception. And that didn't matter where you came from. It was a studio policy, and a great one in lots of ways, because it grounded everyone. Everyone knew how the system worked and how the building worked. But when I was on, uh, reception there, it was myself and then another person had been a, um, engineer at a mining company in Africa, I think. Another one had been an officer in the Merchant Navy. So it was a real mixture of people, but all sitting there doing the 2am to 9am shift. So I was there, and then Psalm had quite a journey. You go from night reception, you go into the tape store, and then you go into assisting. And it was very easy to get fired at any point along that route. The turnover there was ridiculous. I mean, a lot of people didn't get past reception. That was the first point of the filter. Is that through just the sheer commitment of it, like? It was the commitment was one thing, but also, you know, any studio had so many applications that they could be quite fussy. So, the things that were important to how the studio run and how Psalm, you know, worked as Psalm did, a lot of it was attitude and character. So, I'm sure there's a lot of really able people who unfortunately, for them, Just were just didn't fit the mood, you know, it was easy You can imagine when you're doing night reception You change the light bulbs and the loo rolls and thunder bins to say, you know, I've had enough of this But if you push through it, you know, you had this portal into a really great place to work How long did you have to stay on? I was quite lucky. I did about three months. I think four months in the summer I was in the summer as great as well. So I work all night fall asleep in the Sun all day So it worked out reasonably okay. Um, but then you have to wait for someone else to die before you can move on to the next stage. So I went from there to the tape store for, I can't remember how long. Um, Steve Fitzmaurice, you know, obviously the legend that he is now, he was on reception for about a year I think. before he managed to slide on up. But a lot of people came through there. Um, Tom outburst was there later on a number of people who I still see around today. Uh, and then I was very lucky. I got into assisting. I was working with some really great producers and mixers like Julian Mendelssohn, Steve, and, uh, Trevor, obviously getting on his sessions. And then I managed to get in with Trevor and Steve Lipson and ended up assisting them, you know, just constantly on different projects, which was, you know, ludicrously hard work. I look back at photographs at that time, and it really looks like I've been dug up. I can't imagine being that weight now. I was that nine stone skeletal and everyone there was pretty ruined because the hours were, it was a very different culture was regarding hours and work in those days. Um, it often. Be carrying gear out as your client's turned up for the next day and just have to start again. Yeah. Those legendary 36 hour days. Yeah, it was, it was crazy in lots of ways, but it was, it was very, there's a lot of discipline there. You knew that you were constantly competing and even minor mess ups could get you out the door. Um, it keeps you on your toes though, doesn't it? It does, but also it was a studio, which was, we had. Four studios, you could have a day where you'd have Madonna in one, Queen in another, the Pet Shop Boys in another one. Frankie goes to Hollywood. There's just a churn of great artists constantly. And with the artists came great producers and engineers. And so the people you were learning from each day were diverse and all really good at what they did. You could learn a lot of different things. If you really watch what was going on, you could pick up a lot. It felt very much like an education there. And it really was, we had four maintenance men. This was a different era of budgets and, and the student and the music industry. And on days when there was downtime, all the assistants would be in a room. You're given a huge book of all the bits of gear in the building when you started and you'd be a maintenance guy would lecture about a piece of gear or an engineer would tell you about a system so it was a real learning experience almost like a almost like a like an educational establishment I mean now that it feels more like some of the uh I mean it was quite unique though in its way, in that way at the time. Yeah, sure. But also all the other assistants, you knew you could rely on everybody because they're only there because they were, you know, they were putting the hours in and they, they dotted all their I's. You know, nothing got left off because even trivial things got you kicked out. So you had to really be, there was competition there for, I mean the most ridiculous things between the systems. In what way? Can you think of anything specific? I mean, it went from things like, you know, handwriting on tape boxes, to how well you made the foam curl on a cappuccino. I mean, it became, everything was competitive in that building. Yeah, but competitive by the sounds of things in, and In a respectful way, not a kind of cutthroat kind of way. No, I mean everyone wanted the two kids. No sabotage. No, there was no sabotage at all, no. And anyone who came along where that was hinted at, I don't think lasted. So it was competitive, but it was great. And I was there for about four years with, uh, working with Trevor. And Julian Mendelsohn, who was another great person to work with there. Uh, so you just learnt a lot of different tricks and So apart from Learning how to make a nice cappuccino. What what what else did you learn there? Well, is that that obviously is where you had your your technical training. That was the the technical training I mean, I think when you first walk into studios, especially Big studios as they were then I still remember walking into studio to looking at an SSL and a room full of gear And you're thinking how do you ever learn this? It's just myriad buttons and dials and faders and it just looks beyond But you realize very soon into your career that In fact, that's got nothing to do with it. That's just something, if you leave a monkey in that room for 14 hours a day, it's all figure it out eventually. And it's so much more about the peripheral things, dealing with people. Um, that about sums it up, dealing with people, watching producers and engineers over the time there, you saw what worked and, uh, what worked in different ways, what worked for the artist, what worked for the songs, uh, what worked for the procedure of making the records. So you can kind of grasp. bits from all of these people. But I think on the technical level, it was great to have that established thing there. And on that side of tech, you never stopped learning. That's the reason which I think I'm still as keen now after 35 years is that I learn stuff all the time. We'll talk about it, I'm sure, but just traveling around now over the Uh, last year trying to get further out in the world and experience different places of work and literally every day you learn something. Yeah, well, we were talking about that. You spent the last year like you say traveling. Yeah, where have you been the last year? We were I did various projects in Colombia. We were in Montana for a month Tel Aviv Holland Where else have we been? Well, you were out in the Far East. Oh, I was in China. Sorry, yeah, I've been to China a couple of times, which I love. I mean, it's a mixed bag, actually, but I love working in Beijing. It's an incredible work ethic there, and just an exciting place. You know, there's a huge real hum to the place of energy when you come to Beijing. Yeah, there must be quite a contradiction between creativity and the social aspect of it. There is, um, That must be quite a contradiction. It's, uh, I mean, I think just out of the creative side, just socially, there's a huge sort of spectrum of how things work. It's not just how you imagine a communist country to imagine, you know, it works from your, your history books and the news. It's like being in any other capital. Most of the time you wouldn't think of it as being any other system other than the one you live in here. Um, but creatively it is different. It's, uh, it is very different in this way. People look at music and look at performing their influences. That was the main reason for traveling around actually, is you realize that, you know, we, we think of LA, New York, London. But it's going on everywhere and everyone's doing it with a slightly different twist. Yeah, and we mentioned before we started, the world's a much smaller place now, so everything's connected. There is no time delay. No. In And when you listen to a piece of music, you don't know where it comes from. You know, Spotify, Lisp passes you by. They could be from all over the planet, and you don't know. But coming back, we were talking about Psalm. That was a great place to be. And then moving on from there, uh, I went to Westside. Now, Psalm was just a hugely popular song. Tech driven studio. We had like an amazing Sinclair system. This is also crosses this, the big part of my career, which was half was analog and half is in this new age of digital. So most of my time at some and before it was always on tape machines. Although some had synclavia, bear in mind the cost, our synclavia system, which, you know, you could hit a snare drum and that was about it, and a few other bits, it was like a quarter of a million quid. So that was coming in, but when I moved, and it was very much pop music we were doing there, but when I went to Westside with Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, The great thing for me about that transition is every day you're recording a drum kit. They were doing very much acoustic artists, so bands who had drum kits. They did Madness, didn't they? They did Madness, but Elvis Costello, lots of, a lot of other artists, Tim Finn, we did an album with there, but you're recording all day long. So the whole use of mics, although there had been a lot with Steve Lipson at some, being with Alan Winstanley was a real, and the other engineers that came through, was a real Push as to just mics and how you record, go about recording things and your, you know, instrument to tape journey and what, you know, what you could do with things. So as digital crept in, I was still at Westside and so it was great. Good having that very much analog background, which really does not just about the mechanical where he gets something from A to B, but your approach as to how you record and how you mix when it was purely an acoustic medium. You know, all engineers in those days, when you watch people working, they had that thousand yard stare out between the speakers, where you can tell their eyes are basically turned off. They're open, but turned off looking into the distance into the void and you're just listening. And then we gradually over the five, six years after that moved into this visual age where phrases like that looks late, that looks early or whatever started to creep in. Which is a very new thing, and uh, I think having a big part of my career where it was really just about listening, was very important for me. Well, I mean, ultimately, people just listen to music, people don't Once you get to the other end, that's all they do is listen. I mean, you've got, you know, obviously you've got MTV and videos and stuff, but I think more and more Most of the time you just listen. You know, everyone wears headphones. Yeah. Like, everybody. And if they're listening to something which sounds right, they have that same look. You know, they're disconnected visually, they're just in the world of listening. Do you think the um, the role of the engineer is underrated at the moment? Is being diluted? I think it's being diluted and lost, to be honest. Even now the producer is also the engineer. Yeah. And also the writer is now the engineer. And the writer is now the producer. Things were very delineated when I started. I mean, there was the budget to build for that to happen. You had an assistant, you had a runner, you had the engineer. Sometimes you had a second engineer. Then you had the programmer when that first came in. Yeah. And so everyone was doing their own tasks and doing them very well and purely focused on that. So engineering was a real, that's right. To be honest, when I started, I wanted to be an engineer. I love this technical. Subject where I love music and I love tech and it was this perfect combination of the two Trying to capture things through you know, this recording technique and process. Yeah, that was the same for me That's what drew me to the studio actually was the role of putting things together Plugging stuff in. Yeah and seeing what you could do it. Yeah, and before I've just been I loved records and Bands I realized when I got into studio, that's what I've been listening to. I've been listening to certain records where friends would say, why do you like this? And it was actually, I said, actually, I don't like the song, but just listen to the way they've done this. I didn't know what was happening, but I just loved what I was hearing. Yeah, being the sound of the world. And I didn't know how it happened or how they went about it. So the whole production thing, I kind of got an understanding of after coming in and wanting to be an engineer. But this, this blurring of the lines is. Just become more so over the last decade for sure the people who've come through working for certain producers who come from this background I know you've spoken to like flood and Alan Where we all started in studios and that what you might call traditional route I think the good thing about you know The people we can bring through as our assistants and engineers is still trying to get that into the system and that the colleges are still teaching That to a certain degree, because the opportunity to do it in a studio is becoming harder and harder. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, colleges are performing a well, a vital service because they are teaching a technical thing. Yeah. But this, this approach that you're speaking about, which is one of creativity, that for me, I think is the real problem at colleges. Yeah. There's, there's not enough creativity being taught. Well, the practical side is even just when you jump from assisting. Where you're watching as much as you can to actually jumping on the desk and plugging things in yourself and seeing in sort of real time what this movement has as an effect on what you're doing or what that turning of a dial when you're really locked into what you're doing. That's when you're learning curve shoots off. Of course. Um, so I mean, it's like the hands on side of it is so important. Then the other thing about this, of course, is when I started in studios in London had 50 odd big studios. And it still had a ridiculous number of applications per, per day almost, whereas now we have, I mean, it's been decimated and yet the number of people studying to do this as a career is up tenfold. So it's a real, it's, it's going the wrong way. Something has to balance out as to how it all works. So what you're getting is, I mean, this isn't necessarily criticism. I love the diversity of music we have nowadays from people creating stuff on the basic system at home. And there's some amazing projects that come out of that. Yeah. But just as an art form, as the creative process, the recording process, I'm really hoping we can try and retain that. There's a lot of places now where they have one mic and it only ever gets used for vocals. Nothing comes out of the box. You know, it's not just because, it's actually a really fun process, and it gets you to a very different place, you know, acoustic recording with microphones. And so, I really hope that there are still plenty of people learning it and teaching it. Well, I mean, I think if you look at the United States, and I mean, they've got a very different music scene over there. They've got obviously a big hip hop, R& B, um, culture over there. Which is Mainstream music and for years that's been one microphone for a preamp, but even they started seeing and appreciating the analog world because What that allows them to do is to be different because everyone's got the same plugins Everyone's got the same presets and for many years records have just always sounded the same, but now I think I'm hoping that that art of engineering, processing sound externally, I think that could or should come back into the fold. I think it is coming back. I think everyone wants to try and have a unique sound. And as you said, with everyone having, you constantly hear presets popping up on tracks. Yeah, of course, yeah. That's kind of lazy, but the people who are doing well are just Producing extraordinary sounds. And a lot of those are things which they've taken from the real world, from an analog world, and then processed into some extraordinary place. I think, but also I think that, uh, within mainstream pop music of that kind of narrow bandwidth of what's very successful on radio. It's not just the R& B, hip hop scene, which is a lot of it's amazing as well from now, but it goes right back to PWL. If you go back to that transition in the eighties to all of the hits they were having, you were hearing exactly the same sounds on every set. They have the one microphone. at PWL Studios. So, as a mindset, it's not a new thing. Um, and yet, around the edges, there have always been those that have been pushing the recording sounds and, uh, trying to just be a bit more adventurous with the sounds that they're creating. Yeah. When you're working with a producer, not necessarily as a producer, but when, when you were still up and coming and you were working with the producer, Yeah. what, what, what's your role in that situation? How do you see your role supporting the producer? Um, It's been a long while since I've been in that position, but when I was working as What are you looking for as a producer from, from your engineers? Well, going back to when I was an engineer. It was very much, uh, you're sort of a facilitator for that producer. Quite often producers then weren't engineers, maybe. And it's trying to listen to what they're asking for and what they want to do. I'm being a bit ahead of the game with regard to being set up and trying to sort of translate what they are describing into actually getting that from the sound source that you have. So that was a big part of it and just keeping the flow of a session for me as an engineer, it was just being really on top of what was going on. So you're listening to the conversations, you're always slightly ahead. So it's ready to go the whole time. There wasn't a trip up whilst you set things up. Things were just going on in the background. I passed that on to assistants who worked for me. It was like, listen to what the conversation is. I'll often watch, you know, the good assistants who I had long term, you know, I'd be chatting and I'd just see them out of the corner of my eye sticking a mic up and then the conversation would change and they'd take it back down again, but they've been going ahead of the game, which was great because then things just happen. And for the artists in the room, it has to be almost a bit of an invisible process. You know, it's not about telling them how great you are, what you're doing it all the way along. That just has to happen in the background almost. And so as an engineer, it was just being very efficient. Everyone heard, you know, in those days, you had to worry about everyone's fold back from different setups on the desk, all the different inputs coming in. I mean, I had some crazy sessions back then with like 96 inputs coming in, everything live and jumping around and just being on top of an awful lot of stuff going on. When you see some of those people talking about being an engineer, and I said, I didn't realize you're an engineer. And what they mean by that is they've recorded something. They've patched from this to that. And it's like, well, to me, engineering is so much bigger part than that. It really is. You walk into the room and it's your job to get everything that you can see in there, set up everyone comfortable, get it all. Recorded sounding great and in a very organized manner and, uh, although I don't purely engineer now, I do miss the energy of it was very exciting, just trying to keep on top of it the whole year for sure, and you had to be that, you know, quite an old analogy that sort of swan with the legs going crazy underneath and trying to be calm on top. Cause there are a myriad of things to be thinking of when you're recording big sessions. How did you cope with all that? Uh, at the time, I think basically by just being internally ill and then just stressed out. I was looking calm on the outside, but, uh, it's just trying to make sure the producer's job. Also understanding where you sit. I think that's the reason I work well with some of the producers you mentioned. Yeah. Is that I think, you know, and I've had it as well, where an engineer has to understand that they're the engineer on that gig. We've all got great ideas about how we're going to do things, but you're not the producer. And I wasn't the producer on that session. I might be sitting there thinking, I'd do that slightly differently. But that's not what I'm getting paid for. I'm getting paid to do what that producer or how that producer wants to go about it in the best possible way. So making sure actually one producer described it as a triangle of. With regards to engineer, producer, artist, um, the artist has to deal with them and then they'll deal with me. They can talk to us, but the engineer does not start having the artist conversations. That's a producer conversation. And, uh, there's, there were times when I wanted, I had a disagreement, surely, but I was being employed in a certain way. And that was the gig. Now I'm producer. I can say everything I want to say, but, uh, And engineers will, you know, who work with me, have been very close. They've, I've had them for long periods of time. Yeah. And so there's an understanding. They know when, uh, it's time to have an opinion and when it's time to, you know, ask me. I think when you know that, it makes life easier for everybody. You've worked on some very successful records. Both in sales and critical acclaim, although the two don't necessarily match and they really do How do you see your role as the producer in those not not from a technical point of view? I mean you might have already touched on it a little bit But how do you see your role as the producer within those? productions What is the producer? I say you, because I'm speaking with me, a producer, my personal view is a producer that enables an artist or a writer to take the song that they've thought about and take it from the start and bring it to conception in a way that They are happy with that. They've, you know, you kind of bring this out. The idea that they have as a song, it materializes as a recording in a way that they are super happy with. It brings out the elements of what they were trying to bring out of a song, um, out of a performance. It's about enabling them to make that record and then pushing them to perform it at their best. With regards to the sales, sales to me are A byproduct of something that's good, you kind of, if you just aim to make, you know, these things when people say about success, they want to be famous, they want to be that their byproducts just do something well, and those things will follow on. I think that's a very modern thing as well about wanting fame, but then saying, Oh, what do I do to have fame? Whereas in the past people just did a particular thing very well and as a result became famous Yes, for sure. It's not when people say they're looking for love. You don't get that you get something else Then love is the thing that comes from it but uh, so for me, it's It's all about the artist. I was at the end of a project I want the artist to be really happy with their song whether that then becomes Sales success obviously great if it does and it has to support everyone We need to make money from this and they need to have a career But I want them to be really happy with what we've made. How do you facilitate that? Well, it's the conversation starts very early on I mean, when we're talking about How early? Like, not, not the morning of the studio? No. For me, there's a real process to stuff and it has to start well before we get into the studio. Because so much of what we do and that makes production successful is very little to do with the tech side of things. It's all about interaction with the artist and also everyone else on the session. It's the, I mean, I've talked about this a few times recently when asked to speak at colleges about the psychology of sessions, because you do realize hopefully early into your career that it is all about that. You can't sit there. And I have seen this in people who have been very good, but have been short. Just being that one person. You have to be a bit of a chameleon who reacts differently with everyone you work with in order to get the best out of that person. And when you're in a band situation, you're dealing with every person in that band differently. And so the reason it starts early on is I'll meet people way before recording when we just talk about the songs, you know, what songs we're doing. Do they like previously? What visions do they have for the songs? How do they imagine the album sounding? Cause you can go off anywhere, you know, and also who is that artist? What have they done before? You can push their boundaries, but you can't suddenly go off at a tangent necessarily without Without permission without permission for starters, but with a lot of artists It's their record and they have to be that artist. I don't necessarily want it to sound like my record I want it to sound like a good version of what they do And so that's always been a An important thing to me that I'm making their record as best I can. And when I've seen arguments in the past, when I was engineering, I kept like saying to the producer, it's their record, man. You know, just, yeah, you have to let it go. It's their record. And so unless it's a destructive thing now, and unless I can sell my point with a valid argument, that's something which I'll always remember is, you know, their record. When it comes to me and the band, if we're arguing about a certain point, You know, it's your record, fine. I've tried to sell why I'm doing this, and as long as it's not a destructive thing they're doing, then, uh Could you possibly give me an example of something like that, but maybe not with a specific name, but Uh, there's been an overdub in the past where, I mean this just sounds very specific, but it was where That's going to destroy everything that we're doing here. It's just, there was someone who was slightly self destructive within a project, and wanted a part, which was basically just going to make the song unlistenable, but that was kind of what they wanted. Um, so that was something where you had to argue the point for a while. Also, it's a process. I am more than happy when someone says, Oh, can we try this? To go down an alleyway, go down a route and try it. I will never just say no. You know, I'll just say, well, let's try it. See how we go. If it's better, I'm more than happy to be corrected and we'll go down that route. But I'd rather we try it and then come back out. But also conversely, if I want to do that, go with me for a bit and I'll be the first person if it's not working to say, uh, maybe not. How does that equate with budgets? Because obviously when we started making records, You could spend three months in a studio. You'd be lucky if you get three days. This is why I'm saying it happens before the studio. For me, pre production is really, really important. Um, for a number of reasons. It's the psychology of it. You get to hang out with people, whether you're not burning studio time and money, you're in a pub, you're in a rehearsal room, you start to watch how people play, because obviously with a demo, I've got no idea how that came about, so you'll either see them live, which is always something that's going to happen most of the time, but then you get into rehearsals, and so once I'm in rehearsals and we're just chatting and playing through stuff, I'm actually just watching how people play and how they go about what the dynamic is of the band as well. Often you'll see a band and you assume, Oh, maybe the front man, he's the linchpin is the decision maker. You get into the room and it's actually that quiet drummer who is the final say on most things without maybe necessarily being pushy. And so you start to realize who you need to kind of direct things through or discuss things with once you actually get into recording. Also, some people need to push as people need. To be very gentle with some people, you may be more firm with and others, but just your whole way of conversing with different members of a band will vary. And you learn that in pre production. So it must take quite a while for you to, from conception to actually getting in the studio, what's the lead time, that could take months couldn't it? Well a lot of that's hanging out, but you know, it'd be amazing how quickly you can pick things up when you're in a rehearsal room and you're doing, and then you're in the pub. You know, a few pints is a good way of balancing a lot of things out. Yeah, loosening the But also just, you get a chance to talk about, you know, what influences them, how they like going about things, you explain also about how we're going to work. So there's no great surprises. Do you change your way of working? Between artists? Definitely. I mean, on the technical side, it's probably going on the same in the background, but the way we'll go about the day to day will change for sure, depending on who they are, but that is normally worked out in pre production. And also you just take the pressure off, you know, the whole studios, red light fever, maybe not a phrase you hear so much nowadays, but you always used to. I can never understand why we had red lights in studios. It's just like completely the wrong color. Basically, everyone ready? Okay. Panic. Hit that button. Whereas, uh, so all of that stuff we get out in rehearsals, just in a very relaxed manner, being able to work out parts, especially between say drums and bass, sort out tempos, try different tempos, whether we, okay, we might be happy, but let's just try it. It faster it might be happy with this structure but this is smashing it up for a bit and see if we can surprise ourselves with where we're going to go also it's just fun everyone's very relaxed and you get to know each other I will then prep sessions before we go into the studio from the rehearsals also record rehearsals constantly just on stereo yeah so any little ideas that people noodle in the background I can just chop out and remember for me get into the studio okay so it's a day one when we get in there. The drummer's relaxed. He knows what he's going to play. Um, you don't just get all your ideas set up beforehand. There's a template, isn't there? There's a backdrop, isn't there? Yeah, the whole beauty of studios is the way a song can meander off and go off at tangents. Yeah. But you've got a good starting point, and you've got a conversation about how you're going to go forward. And so, you normally get into things much quicker. And also, once I'm in the studio, I'm recording from when the first mics go up. Yeah. It's not a case of get up, get sounds. You know, we're just in record. So when we're running through stuff, when we're getting sounds, we're constantly in record because you can get things in those moments which, uh, you know, you might not get later on. And that whole thing about red light fever, I don't tend to have, okay, go button. Now we're recording. We're kind of, I'll be out in the room quite often. We'll be chatting about the tracks, running through things. Let's try this, do a couple of takes whilst we sort this out. There have been times where it's been, Well, there you go. That's it. Isn't it? Yeah. Oh, we haven't started. Yeah, we have started. That was it. It's brilliant because no one's thought about it. And it's not that stress of, Oh God, I'm in record. Everyone tenses up and it's just been part of the flow of a day. But is there not maybe an expectation from the artist to say, you didn't really do much. We did a demo and it was done. Yeah. Well, no, that's the thing. That's why I was saying we can try it again. I'm saying brilliant. Okay. All we have now, we have that in the bank. Yes. We've all sat in the room and gone, actually, that's great. Do it again, you know, that's not going anywhere. So then you can really relax and often things will come out from then on. It'll be a slightly different version. It will be better in a different way, but you've broken the ice and you've taken the stress out of the whole thing by going, we've got it in that form. Let's see where we can go from here. Is that what makes a good producer in your eyes? I'm not sure what makes a good producer. I know how many great producers I've worked with. I know people enjoy the process. I know, you know, making records has got to be fun. It can't be, I've been through some anxious records when I was working as an engineer. But you know, the process was, I saw people writing against each other and I really hope that sessions are a lot of fun. I mean, I'm quite disciplined in the sense that, you know, I break the day up, you know, bands, especially young bands who maybe have rocked up and they've got 15, six packs on them as they walk in. It's like, I'm That's all very well, but there's work to be done as well. Don't, you know, I'm the last, you know, I like parting as much as the next person, but there's certain parts of the day where let's, you know, let's get things done. And then we can relax and we can do things again later or we can try this or we can go off and, you know, when everyone's out of their mind, I don't mind that as long as we get parts of the day where we're focused and, and, uh, we're doing things a certain way. You know, you get special moments from the kind of crazy days in studios and you get very special moments from the very. Regimented days, it's just a case of going between them and knowing where you're at You've got to have a good mind in terms of organization to realize the project. Do you see the project way down the road? Or are you you have to have an end vision for it? Otherwise, you're just splashing around Yeah So there's a an end point But it's being relaxed to steer away from that as things improve and that end point is guided by your conversations It's by guided by the conversation. It can happen. Also, it can change completely from one overdub You can be doing a track and then all of a sudden someone will do something. It'll be, hang on a second, what the hell was that? Okay, this track has now gone over that direction. Yeah, sure. And although we still have that original direction in mind, let's go down this route for a while because that's really thrown it. When you say a while, is that hours or days or? It's normally hours. It won't be days because we don't really have days nowadays. Yeah. I have had all extremes of pain. Time and budgets from, uh, being told, oh, there's no time or budget to worry about at which point I would say, no, that's not going to happen. I want a budget and I want a timescale when you get into an open ended thing is really not good for anybody. I think that doesn't focus your mind. A deadlines focus of focus minds. Absolutely. And even when we've been with bands who really haven't had to worry about that, I still like to say this, this, this is our, you know, our sketch of time period. Of course you can move out of that. Yeah. But this that's aim for that because it focuses you a bit of panic at the end I have been it's been said to me by an assistant or two in the past of clearly generating a little bit of Anx at some points in the session just to kind of focus minds and squeeze something else out of a project But on the whole I want it to be that it's hard working you're feeling pushed but at the same time you're enjoying it There's a couple of records that you've done that I really like. The Coldplay stuff being one of them. Um, how did that all sort of come about? Well, the Coldplay stuff. The original introduction with them, because I'd done work for Ken Nelson, who produced a number of their records. Did he do, uh, Brush Your Blood and, uh, Parachutes before that? Yeah. I'd done a lot of projects with, with Gil Norton, um, here and in the States. The second record, they'd come to, uh, the end and they were mixing, and they tried out a number of different mixes, I think, um, in the States and here. And for whatever reasons, uh, it wasn't working out. And then I got a call back, will you come and just help out? Just a few mixes on a few tracks that were air and they were set up. And they went well, and we all got on, I mean, as a band, they're a really great group of people to be around. And so that went on from there, and ended up doing a lot of the mixing on Rush of Blood. And then when it came to what was becoming X& Y, I don't think it had a name at the time, there were a little, I think there was a sense that they were kind of doing a similar thing to Rush of Blood, it wasn't really, uh, going to, off somewhere different. And then I got a call from Chris saying about, not mixing, do you fancy producing a couple of tracks? Which of course, you know, I'm excited to do. Busy that day. But I went off and did those at Townhouse. And they liked those. And so it's like, well, let's do another couple. Then it just kind of rolled on from there. So we ended up going through it. And then next thing I know, we've done whatever it was, 10. Yeah, finished the record. And I mean, that was great. Huge amounts. There's all kinds of stresses making a record for. I mean, I've been there a number of times before, but not necessarily in a producer position. You know, things like worrying about outside influences, like delivery dates and share prices and Oh, really? Really? Was that intense? Yeah. Because we overran. And I remember sitting in the bath actually reading, uh, EMI share price crash or whatever Oh, that's right. Because that was almost around the time of Non delivery of album. And thinking, God, as if there's nothing else we need to worry about. But with all admiration and credit to Chris, um, and the discussions have, it was like, no, let's, let's get it right. And then, uh, That leads me nicely on to mixing. Yeah. That's for me, the part of the process that as a engineer, I feel that I can add the most value. Right. I mean, some people love recording, some people love production. I like production, but I love mixing. I love that finishing off the record. And also I feel that's where I can be the most creative. It's a great part of the process. Yeah. I love it all in equal measure and for different reasons. Yeah. I'm quite a social person. I love making records with bands. I love the whole interactive, creative side of it. The discussions, the arguments, the laughs, the partying. For sure. The whole process to me is a really fun process. Um, But I love the finalizing, as you say, the, and I've been very fortunate that for a large number of my projects, people expect me to do both. So I do have that joy of literally from pre production in a rehearsal room to finishing off a mix, handing over, you know, a piece of work that embodies hopefully the ideas that they had as an artist. And on the times I hand over to a mixer, I find it quite difficult sometimes because I've had that vision in my head of how I want it to be. I, you know, I do mix and therefore it's, uh, prepare the songs in a certain way that certain things are right. You're gonna have to do that whether you like it or not. I'll print certain effects or a certain way of going about things. And on the whole, I'm, I'm very pleased with what people do when, you know, I will send a monitor mix of where we're at. So they get an idea of sort of where the images of where the song's going. Uh, on occasion I've been, um, really, that's just not what I had in mind and it's not. There have been ones where it's not what I had in mind, but it's, it's great. It's a, it's a really good place and I'm happy with that. But it is difficult to hand it over. But I also understand being on the other foot as a mixer. I get other people's feedback. Tracks come in and I know how different my mindset is there Because what the main thing is you don't have any of the emotional baggage of the recording And what I mean by that is I have a multi track come in to mix. I'm pushing up faders. That's working. That's not that's doing this That's not and you just and you go for it like that. Whereas you can't help sometimes And you do have to get past it Is that, you know how much effort that overdub took, and it's gonna, it's gonna get in this mix whether it likes it or not, but it's, it's the wrong attitude, you know, you have to sometimes, and I'm much better now at going, you know what, that just doesn't work. isn't doing his thing. Just go, it goes. And that, going way back, the person who was great to learn that form was Trevor. It was Trevor. You could do three months of work and have fucking philharmonic orchestra on it. And God knows what else. They'd be like, no, let's start again. And he would know, he'd just go in there. It's not right. Let's do it again. And, uh, You do so much work there, and you'll just be going, and it was quite a difficult thing. You're so tired, and emotionally you have to go, seriously? But it's so right, it's, you know, it's either right or it's wrong. Let's talk about you as the mixer, where you're not working on projects. Yeah. Um, I send you a load of multi tracks and stuff. What's your first thing? What are you doing? How are you approaching? Well, again, because to me, it's very much about the artist. The first thing would be trying to have a conversation with them about, you know, what do you want from this? Why is a, why are you getting someone else to mix it? Why am I mixing it? Well, you know, there must be decisions or must be some kind of thought process there. So finding out more about that. Yeah. Asking, obviously, for a monitor mix in the same way I send one. So that you get an idea of, okay, that overdubbed, It means this to them, you know, first pushing everything up blind, maybe it's not such a key part, but clearly is now for where they're at. Cause often it's a jigsaw. You might have three different parts to a song until you hear them in the way they intended them balanced. That final picture doesn't make sense. Plus there's those. You know, as you well know, when sometimes there's parts which don't really exist, but they're just interference almost between three other parts. And so until you hear that balance, you go, Oh, that's what I'm hearing there. I've searched around for an overdub, which isn't on a multi track. But it's actually a combination of three things, yeah. It's actually a combination of things which create some third thing, which is So it's having a conversation with them. And it's just then trying to push that song in a way that has, you know, the dynamics and the openness and the colors that they're trying to get from a track. Do you have a particular style do you think of mixing? I'd like to say no. I know that's not the way mixers should work, but the thing which links most top mixers is they have a formula of working. I've saw that so many years of assisting top mixers, you know, they have a setup of effects and returns, often have a set setup of compression for the similar sounds and it goes into the machine and bang it's up and they're half, they're kind of half set almost from when they first pushed the faders up. And, uh. I think it's maybe slightly low boredom threshold, but I, I don't, I kind of almost confuse myself with each session by setting things up differently so that I actually force myself to play around with things and try stuff. There'll be certain go to effects for sure. Of course. Yeah. Starting point. But I, I tend not to have a real sort of, there's my matrix for doing mixing. Uh, it's more about the songs because I think you can start making things sound very similar if you do that, which for a lot of people has been there. Career and their success, you know, it sounds like us that person that's exactly what everyone wants. That's why you're going there that thing about, you know, process and different that applies to recording as well in the days of, uh, labels and say, what desk do you want for recording? I really don't care as long as it's functional and it works and it sounds good being thrown into rooms with a whole load of different my camps and setups just makes you push things a bit. You don't start just doing the same thing every time. Yeah. Which is very easy to do, if you're in Yeah, it's a very If you go to an SSL at the same time, it's very easy to go, you know, because you drive it like a car, you're not thinking about it. So being forced to play around with a different toy, does push you as to where you go sonically. It's more of a familiar space, I think, when I come to mixing. As long as there's a room that you know well, it doesn't have to be a system I know well. Do you have a certain pair of speakers that you'd always use well i've been on 1031s for years and ns10s it was for years which i still have a you know i don't know i knew why we had ns10s but that's if you grew up if you grew up in the 80s that's what you just had and it's just familiarity also aura tones and avan tones when i'm working quietly i find balancing just for me you know what they kind of do we had to balance the mids within the track which is so much of the information They're great, but don't jump around a lot. And now, of course, everyone's listening on your little systems a lot of the time. So, you know, if you look in here, there's little systems around. There's a little speaker, little Bose thing here. There's another radio speaker over there. I also bounce down and listen on, uh, headphones. Because that's so much of, you know, mixing on a pair of big speakers. That's about 2 percent of the audience. You need to make it work in so many ways. It has to pay off for that audiophile who's invested in their hi fi. But at the same time, it has to work for someone on their Apple Pods, um, earbuds. So it's switching around between all those systems. What are you looking for from your mixes? Like, you say it has to work. What does that mean to you? Well, there's two sides to it. There's the sonic side. It has to be pleasing and have all the It also has to convey what that song was about. So it's all very well having a balance, which is sonically pleasing, but the actual, the intention isn't there. So, um, it's trying to balance those things, how you actually articulate how you go about that. I don't know. But, um, we're in a very vocal driven age now, I think also. There's a conversation here, which I honestly wanted to write about this, because how, what we listen to music on, drives the music we listen to. In the sense that Chicken and egg sauce, you know. It is. If you look at stuff which is very successful now, there's nothing going on, and nothing sounds better on your ear, you know, your little earplugs, than, uh R& B, hip hop is an amazing sounding vocal, a beautiful sort of melodic sound somewhere in there, bass and drums, and that's it. As soon as you start adding drum kits and guitars and distortion, that's not so pleasing in little earphones. And so what's kind of, you know, I think there is a real interaction between what we listen on and what we make, the kind of music we make. Yeah, sure. Yeah. What, um, what have you got on your mix bus? Do you have the same thing? There is something, I do have a pretty similar journey there. Um, On the analog side, it's actually, you haven't said that now, with UAD, it's pretty similar on the, in the box side. Uh, SSL compressor tends to go in there first. Doesn't go in there early on, but it goes in there once it's got to a certain point, it goes into the mix way before the end. Yeah. I'm pushing into that. You mix into that, you mix into that. Yeah, that's been a habit since way back, you know. That's a common thing. Yeah, especially a lot of people that grew up on those desks. Um, 2500, which again, uh, the, uh, API, the API, the, uh, the compressor, which is just doing a little bit of work in a very different way to the SSL you do that in chain, like the other, um, just a little bit of work, bit of glue really going on there and then a bit of an EQ, which, um, will vary really as to what they are, there's some great things out there. Um, there's two things here as well. There's one, which is my mix, one, which is my final mix. And then there'll be a bit of toy that goes on. For listening versions, you know, a bit of extra limiting. Yeah, sure. Um, there's a lot of great limiters out there, which make it all very exciting, but what I want, you can't really pass that onto your mastering guy because you've got nothing to do or nowhere to go. Um, but those are the things, both analog here. My manly will go in doing a similar thing to the 2, 500 with regards to attack and release and ratios. There's things, which there's a dangerous EQ, which I put on, especially working in digital nowadays, there's things which are different. Um, Hayden Bendel said to me once. I was working on 96k sessions that he had the dangerous EQ on with a filter at 72 kilohertz, and I think it's 12 or something. I come up the bottom end of it is 16 hertz, but I put it on there and there's a discernible difference. I was like, why? Because I think when we're working at 96k, um, there are a lot of artifacts going on. Which is not necessarily hearing, but they're definitely interfering in some way with what's going on. I find myself filtering, you know, and it's not just me, I do this blind with my assistant sometimes. I filter off a vocal at a certain point, right high up, and go, what sounds better, this or this? And they don't know what I'm AABing, it's like, well, that. And they're always right, I'm just chopping off everything above 20 kilohertz. Oh, really? Um, It just narrows the field and just very subtle because you listen to it all day long, but there's obviously something going on outside our direct hearing range, which kind of obviously has harmonics within it. So there'll be a bit of EQ on there. I love regards to limiting the L2007 Massive. Oh yeah, I've used that for many years. I've had that for years, yeah, since early days. It's just, you know, we use that term musical, but it really is, it just kind of does its thing in a very, yeah, just. Turns up the volume. It turns up the volume. It's really simple. Yeah, and it doesn't really mess with your mix. Yeah, absolutely. And there's a bit of widening nowadays because there's so many toys coming on. I remember the first time was sort of widening was actually on Mastering Desk when I was out at Sterling in New York. Yeah, that's right, yeah. Well, there's various ones. Within Ozone there's one, but also within the, uh, EMI plug in now there's a little widening pot. Yeah. Which just, some, I'm not going crazy so it's, you know, you get phase issues, but just a slight pull out left and right. 10 percent or something. Yeah, and it just, Brings out the track. Yeah, just brings it all to life a little bit. Things we used to play around with back in the day of, you know, a couple of channels panned in different directions and phase and pushing things up a little bit to kind of get the image to change. It's like the old Sonic Maximizers, isn't it? The old BBE. You've got to remember when that first came out and destroying a mix because it was like, you know. Well, everyone was having fun with it, weren't they? Yeah, yeah, loads of it. And then you go back the next day and go, Okay, no, calm that down. The mastering engineer goes, Yeah, that's the other thing about having all this time so many of the toys we have now digitally which are amazing and lead to so many amazing sounding records when you listen to young artists putting stuff out or bedroom producers putting out these extraordinary sounding records, but a lot of those. I've grown up with the original analog processing that we spent ages patching this bit of gear into that bit of gear up this channel with that phase switch to get something to happen. And now it's just a, an algorithm, you know, plug in within a piece of software. It's great, but I like the fact that I know where it's come from as it's sort of, it's archeology almost. Yeah, sure. It gives you an understanding of what's going on. How long does it take you to do a mix? It could go on forever, couldn't it? They could go on for the rest of your life, mixes, sometimes. But normally it's a day, and then a day tweaking in the morning. Go home, listen to a different environment, come back. Would you say a day, eight hours? Eight, ten hours? If you actually add the time up, you're at the desk. I could do a lot of coming back and forth. Because you know, your ears just get tired. You come back, go away for half an hour, come back and it's like, oh, it sounds different. A bit of lying around on the couch with the track in loop sometimes. Yeah, yeah. That was an old Bob Clearmountain thing from years ago. Even if you're not listening to it, you're on the phone or I'm doing some work. So in the 15th time it's played. You suddenly jump up and go, that's what it is. It's that guitar. You know, it's something to bug you or whatever. And then you have a bit of time, but when you had to commit to half inch, this is going back in, I was a very late dropper of committing to half inch, it was kind of done. Because we can commit to things, don't have to commit nowadays, trying to know when a song is finished is only really when it comes out, because until that point you can, you know, you could get a call about any slight adjustment to a mix. Do you feel that permanent revision mentality is good or bad? It's bad. Uh, okay. Do you get to any kind of perfection? Is there perfection? What is perfection? You know, it doesn't exist really. And when people are really obsessing about certain things and I've said, look, you've told me what your favorite tracks are. Have you actually listened to that track? They're all over the shop. There's this, if you actually listen, the thing that almost gives them some longevity is that every time you listen to them you notice a different mistake or you notice a different weird chord or a different little clangor here. You know, there's some of my favorite songs I've listened to for years and then you suddenly notice like, I don't know, just a different pair of headphones, you think suddenly you hear some weird, I don't know, voicing or a fret noise or something. Yeah, totally, yeah. Um, Yeah, or something in a room, or a little bit of something which has clearly been cut out in the past, but there's a bit of residue from something else, or crosstalk, you know, which obviously you don't get nowadays. But that idea of refining, refining, and refining is often going down a route that you'll later regret. So the idea that you had to commit, and also when we did a recall back in the day, if you go back to, you know, there'd be a meeting at an A& R company, then you do a recall, but it meant you had to book some for a day. So that's grand in for that, do the recall, which had all those variables of a physical system. So the margin of error meant you weren't going to do a recall to turn a hi hat up one dB because the variations in the recall would be more than that. It had to be. That vocal needs to come up a lot, or we need to redo that part, or we need to lose that part, or pan that part somewhere else. These minuscule recalls now, where sometimes, you just have to say, Look, relax, no one cares about that, it really isn't going to affect the song. And no one else has listened to it as many times as you have since we finished, you know. Yeah, I worked with an engineer once, and I said, Should I do a recall? He went, no. And I was like, really? He said, yeah, if they want me to do it, if they want a change, I'll just do it again. I, I've been, again, all ends of the spectrums, which is the joy of all these years in this business. Nowadays, with this refinement and minute details, I was very lucky to work with Phil Spector. And if you want to see the other end of that, Recall spectrum. It's him. So you record for a day, you've done your backing track, drums, bass, guitars, a guitar, maybe a couple of some piano chords, bounce it to stereo on the analog, then wipe the rest of the multi track. And then you start day two, doing the next stuff to your stereo vocals and stuff. And then you do a few other jobs. Then you do. So when you've done the last overdub, because the next day you do the same thing, bounce it to stereo and wipe the rest of it, that's your mix done. There's no going back on anything now. That freaked me out so much when I first, because I hadn't engineered for a while, I was asked by a label, you know, would you engineer, I was like, well, I haven't done that, they said it's for Phil Spector, it's like, yeah, sure, yeah, and also the artist I was with at the time, I'd never step off a session for something else, but they were like, come on, you've got to do that, it's Phil Spector. But I was so panicked by that. I actually set up a protocol system in the back room running silently without him being aware. So that when we were getting rid of stuff, I was actually, I, and it later came back as a, as a bonus for various reasons. But, uh, he was saying later on, Oh God, if only we could have just done, I said, I can do this for you. And he was, so I remember running around the back, offsetting this vocal, doing a different thing, bouncing it in. He's like, how'd you do that? I mean, he thought it was like black magic. I don't know how I, how I'd actually done it. You just had a simple, uh, redundancy system in the back. Yeah, but he was just, this is amazing. That's brilliant. But I did love the decisiveness. And another person who's been very much like that in the past, which was, Great experience where it was Brian Eno. Same thing, making a decision and going with it and that's that's there it is It's done and it also makes it it's a bit more of a piece of art You know, it's not gonna be you don't have other forms of creativity in art where you can constantly mind you I guess certain painters will keep tweaking something coming back to it, but it gets to a point where it's finished Do you think we could get away with that in today's? Supposed no if I was to hand in Some of what we describe as our favorite songs of all time. Imagine with an a and r department or person who, their favorite records, if I handed that record into them now, they would just be like, what? You know, seriously, you did what? But also I've listened to my favorite songs and you put them in the studio and they're all over the shop. You know, sonically, they're not necessarily anything special. Yeah. But songs become what they are because of the song and the whole thing about it. And when people obsess about. A high hat or if that really, you think that's going to make a difference, then it's not there. That almost has to be something you're blind to because it's, you're being so conveyed and pulled in a direction by the song itself. How'd you come to that realization that you're just obsessing? When engineering was my main thing, I really used to be so obsessed about mic positioning, getting things right. I mean, it's always about the recording flow, but getting things. And then there's things where I've obsessed about something, come in, absolutely love the sound. Carry on recording got out and found the mic fell off the stand way early in the proceedings and so it's just like no it's just about the sound if it sounds good and you're enjoying it for me with the recording process i get a lot of stuff up in the room but then when i'm recording i tend to jump through mics so i might be doing the guitar i'll open up an overhead mic from the drum kit yeah sure a back mic from this or what is that oh that sounds good actually i like that mixture and then i'll look at it and go you Yeah, it is one side of the piano, uh, a snare under mic and the guitar front mic, but whatever's happening, that image in front of me is what I like. And what about when you're mixing, do you do the fairly similar thing? With my things I've recorded, I'll get a balance between mics on the thing I've recorded, which will often involve an ambience mic, various close mics, and they might be shifting around over the project, the balance between them. And if I find I haven't changed it for. Quite a few openings of the session. I'll just commit it to a stereo or mono track if what I'm in the mix I suddenly think actually I could do a little less of that ambience to put it in the place I want it to be now then jump back. Yeah to the session drop that ambience mic bounce it again pop it back into the mix I mean that is you're emotionally committing. Yeah, I think you have to And I do bounce down quite quickly as I get through a mix With the effects so hopefully by the time I'm getting towards the end of a mix. I'm almost in stems Because then you can be quite dramatic with your changes and also just having too many tracks on the page Everything about the amount of processing just my mind and I forget where things are But also there's a big thing about commitment here actually I want to say this When we were working on tape in the day when Trevor Horn does amazing productions, he only had 23 tracks a lot of the time. Okay, we went to digital and had more with the big Sony Digitals. So when you had a load of BVs, they'd be bounced to stereo always. And what you also committed there was the kind of chordal and melodic. Image that you wanted. You know, you're making a decision as a producer. That's the, the, the makeup of this kind of harm harmonic. I'm, I'm wanting to hear, and that is an important part of the production. If I get sent stuff now and there's 20 tracks of bvs, it's like, well, what image, what was, what were you trying to make it sound like I can make this chord sound very different by the balance. What was your. production decision here. And so I do try and send stuff off with committed pairs of like things like if there's a lot of strings, I always do a string bounce. I'll give them a quartet if they want to go back to it, but I normally deliver it as a quartet. Stereo, because that's the balance that I want to hear from the quartet. It's very easy now to, if you imagine, I can't do this with audio, but going towards a point of a triangle as you go through a process, rather than the other way around where your choices are becoming more and more as you go through a, uh, it should go the other way. It should be moving more and more towards the singularity. Singularity, yes. And that's a discipline that went out the window very quickly with the unlimited number of tracks. I think with more disciplined engineers that send me stuff now, it's much more organized with regards to a sensible number of tracks. For sure. We're coming to the end of the podcast. Do you have a particular process or piece of equipment? Or for want of a better word, a plugin that you use or try to use or is a go to. Is that something that you've kind of, okay, this is a technique that I've always tried and always or most of the time works? As a technique, I probably do have, I'm just not really sure what it is. But there are certain plugins I go to as, say, a choice of EQ or a choice of compressor. Um, With EQ, I love the FabFilter stuff. I think it's just, you can just really hear what you're doing. It's very musical, isn't it? Very musical and very, just very, I find it's very quick. I can jump on it and you find what you want to do very quickly. Compression, I love on vocals, the LA 2A and 1176 as a combination. I mean, it's a very old combination going way back to the 70s. So, just the mixture of attacks and releases you get between the two. Are you like slow attack, fast release? Yes. On one of them, and then a bit, you know, it'll be slightly different on the other. I mean, obviously with the, uh, LA 2A, it has its own behavior. And then with 1176, it kind of, it's somewhere around the middle. Um, this goes back to probably watching people like Julian Mendelssohn do vocals back in the 80s, and your brain just gets used to a certain setup. But between those two, you can kind of hold things in a certain place, which just works. So, I will tend to go with those quickly. There's certain delays I use a lot. The Sound Toys stuff I think is amazing. I use that a lot. Decapitator is just, brings in what you wanted to get from tape. For sure. But also, you can be much more of a lunatic with it as well. It's just, you can have a lot of fun with that. DBX 160, I've always loved on guitars. On the UAD? The UAD one I'm using now, just because the practicalities of it. And they all sound great, but in the studio I always used to love having those. Yeah. Just for a nice bit of punch and bite. You can use them on a lot of things. Again, you watch someone, I'll have an assistant doing something, I'd be like, what are you doing on that? And the normal thing is they get defensive. No, no, not at all, it sounds amazing, but what is it? And it'll be something I'd never have used on that. So that's the thing. You never, you know, you have your go to things, but I'll then change. I'll have a month then when I'm using something completely different, because I've been inspired by someone else doing something on a session. Someone was using a 160 on BVs, and I was just around, I was like, well, that sounds good, I like what they're doing, the way they're punching on this, on the track, what do you, oh, I wouldn't have normally gone for that, but, start using that for a bit, you know, you keep yourself interested by just trying different toys that come in. You have to say no at some point, with regards to plugins, every time I wake up there's a new advert offering me 20 percent off something which I don't need. And it has then appeared in the studio. So I've really, I've got more EQs, compressors and toys that I can possibly use, so I need to stop for a while. The final section is called Dither and Delay, and that's what you try to avoid doing. Well, both of those things, really. When I've got artists in the studio, I want to be playing and recording. So I very much structure the day and the organization, which has to, you know, I try and make it invisible to them. So the engineer and I, myself, we know what we're doing with regards to set up and stuff. So the day for me will be me in, catching up with bits and pieces, going through what I've done, and then the artist comes in, and when they're in, they're not watching. Me type set up or, or even as we even said, I mean, obviously you have to set up a bit occasionally as you jump between things, but we're just doing stuff, record, record, record, keeping everyone's excitement up, keeping that flow going. I'm making lots of notes in my head and writing things down. And then in the evening, sometimes it'd be an evening where we really want to record and it's a really lovely atmosphere and you're doing the more abstract stuff you might be getting, you know, having drinks or whatever, but often the evening will be artists will go off and then I'll go back and go through what we've done with my notes. Thanks. Do the editing, the compiling from bouncing, bouncing between tracks or takes doing vocal comps. But that's not something that happens when the artist is in the room. Artists don't want to watch me comp stuff. It's tedious. It's boring. It takes out the will to live of everybody, including me sometimes. But, uh, so for me, The thing I avoid is periods of not doing stuff when the artist is here, I think. And being just prepared so that that happens. And what about when you're mixing, what do you try to avoid doing when you're mixing? Um, I try to avoid going for too long. You get locked into something and you realise you've been on it for two hours. In fact, all you need to do is stop and come back in. And you go straight away. Yeah, straight away. What you can do now, which of course we couldn't do in the analogue age, is if I get to a part of mixing. I'm like, Oh, what am I doing? I'll just stop, go to another song. And it's working on a completely different song for a while. I can jump between things. And then when I come back, Oh, there you go. You straight off into it again. You've forgotten what was holding you up or you just come into it from a different perspective. Yeah. I think so many people, especially when you first start out mixing, you've become obsessed. Yeah. Actually. Another thing I don't do is I didn't start with a bass drum. And I used to just start with, well, I just started with bunging all the faders up, but I have been for years, so I did get, I mean, there was a point where. You know, you push it up, get ultimate bass drum sound, get ultimate snare sound, keep going through like that and then realize that none of it fits together. Yeah. Uh, and then with, by just pushing up what you've been given, balancing it for an hour or two, just getting to understand the song. Um, EQing in, not in solo. So sometimes there's a part and you're kind of just EQing, in the mix. If you actually solo it, you think, I'd never EQ it like that. But it's working when I pop it out solo. That's, you know, it's doing exactly what it wants to do. So, um, that kind of thing, not obsessing about an individual sound, just seeing how it works within. And also even when recording that was another, you know, thing really saying there's never a bad sound there's no such thing. It's just Not right for this track. Maybe all sounds, you know can be right somewhere Not that thing of something right and wrong it with the beauty about this industry is it's not right or wrong We either like it or we don't and someone else might not like it and they might you know Might be completely opposite to ours But as long as you're doing what's working for you all in the project and you're all enjoying the process then great You Thanks for taking the time to speak to me and uh, good luck. It's my pleasure. It's nice to be reminded about some of these things over the years. It goes by very quickly. I would warn that, that you're into a studio and it's like a TARDIS. One minute I was thinking, is this the right career? And then it's 35 years down the line and this is what I do. This is my proper job. Well, thanks again. Pleasure. Thank you for listening. And be sure to check out the show notes page for this episode, where you'll find further information along with web links and details of all our other episodes. And just before you go, let me point you to the Sound On Sound forward slash podcasts website page, where you can explore what's playing on our other channels. This has been a Mixbus production by me, Kevin Paul, for Sound On Sound.