Mark Willsher – Full Member

Please tell us a bit about your musical background. How did you get started in the music industry? What was your pathway to your current role?
I got interested in and started having trumpet lessons at age 12.  I spent most of my teenage years playing in local jazz groups, concert bands, and the local youth orchestra.  Eventually I went to university as a music major – during which time I needed a part-time job and the music department had an opening for a lighting technician and audio recordist.  I got the job, but I’m not sure anyone else applied.  Having always been very technically minded I enjoyed the recording part of the job and spent many evenings sitting in with the CBC (Canadian BBC) engineers (who came to broadcast higher profile events) soaking up as much as I could.  The staff engineer at the time was unbelievably supportive and every evening would leave his keys to the facilities with me (regardless of whether there was an event to work), which gave me the freedom to experiment and record anyone who wanted to record.  By the time I came to the end of my studies I was doing very little playing and the majority of my time was spent recording, so I applied to an audio program at the Banff Arts Centre in Alberta – which changed everything.

 

I’ll pick three wildly different ones:

– Scot Stafford’s score to the Netflix animated feature “Ultraman Rising” released in July 2024.  This was such a joy to work on.  I’ve known Scot for years, and the freedom he, Director Shannon Tindle, and Netflix gave me allowed me to do my very best work.

– Michael Franti and Spearheads “Stay Human” album released in May 2001.  This was fairly early in my career, but has always stood out to me.  I did have a fair amount of outboard, but most of this was mixed on an 8 buss Mackie mixer, with a couple of tracks mixed on GML HRT mixers with rotary pots – which is always a good reminder to me if I start to make things unnecessarily complicated!

– The Cypress String Quartet’s “Beethoven: The Late String Quartets” three volumes released August 2009, August 2010, and March 2012.  The complete opposite end of the spectrum in that it’s just two microphones, and in fact the only releases I have ever done that are just a single pair.

 

What one tip can you share with other MPG members that could help their workflow?This is probably related to my age and where things were when my career began, but try a control surface and spend less time looking at screens (unless you’re working to picture – then put the movie screen front and centre).

 

What one tip would you like an MPG member to share with you?
I’d love to hear what others are doing for immersive mic arrays.  The shift to immersive releases in recent years opens up a massive new world of possibilities.

 

Do you have any words of wisdom for people wanting to get into a similar music production role to yours?

Learn as much as you can across a broad spectrum – you never know where opportunities may come from, and you want to be in a position to excel when a great opportunity presents itself.  Plus the more skills you have the greater an asset you are.

Make sure people know what you want to do, otherwise they won’t assume a given opportunity is something you’d be interested in.

Don’t be overly precious about your work.  It is important to bring your creativity, expertise, and experience to the table, but at the end of the day it’s your client’s product and not yours.  They need to be thrilled with the end result.