How would you define your main role on most of the projects you currently work on?
I’m a mastering engineer. I do very occasionally mix but that’s more reserved for my own band’s music these days.
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?
As with most engineers, I started out as a musician recording my own bands and this grew into producing other local bands at a small studio in my friend’s garage. I later took a bit of a detour into mixing for film & TV when I moved to London, and have been lucky enough to work at Pinewood Studios, Technicolor and Grand Central Recording Studios to name a few. This is where I got my formal training at big facilities. I always kept up doing music production on the side during this time and playing in bands. I was lucky enough to play at Download Festival 2013 with my alt rock band at the time ‘Searching Alaska’ after winning the Red Bull Prize, and that band got me a lot of contacts that I still work with to this day.
Although I started out as a mix engineer, mastering always intrigued me and a lot of my friends in the music industry were becoming very good producers and mixers. While I was always OK at mixing, I was able to get better masters than a lot of my friends, so I fell into the role of the ‘go to’ mastering person in my circle and it grew from there.
Having worked in film & TV, I had developed good Izotope RX skills from cleaning hours of location sound and also doing some archive film restoration. I found that the technical QC knowledge alongside the music production background really helped me a lot when moving into mastering. It’s been a bit of an unusual path but I’m now living down on the south coast in Brighton working out of my own mastering studio.
What or who inspired you to follow this path?
Back in my university days a lecturer pointed me to the well-known Bob Katz ‘Mastering Audio’ book, that was probably my first introduction to mastering theory. Although at the time it was quite a lot of technical knowledge to take in!
When I was playing in bands that had a bit more budget, we would send music off to be professionally mastered and I was fascinated by the process, especially how much of a difference that last 5-10% would make to the overall sound. Growing up listening to rock, metal and generally all things alternative, I’d look on the liner notes of CD’s and a few names came up a lot like Ted Jensen, Bob Ludwig, Howie Weinberg and Andy Sneap (yes that forum for those who know). So I’d look up these names online and follow their work, watch interviews and try to find out how they did things. Back then mastering in the box wasn’t really as common place among the bigger names, so I’d have to try and translate what people were doing to the plugins I could afford.
Are there any highlights from your work that you are particularly proud of?
It’s hard to choose but if I had to pick just a few releases: A band local to me in Brighton ‘everyday saints’ are making some great occult-y indie/pop music and I’ve been lucky enough to work with them for their last few releases, including their latest single ‘guts/glory’. One of the few projects that my friend Crayg Williams is involved in – ‘The Endearing’ recently released the album ‘Internet Friends’ which is a very cool 80’s/90’s inspired synth album I got to master. Also, my friend BEKIMACHINE makes some great trance/techno music, if that’s your thing check her out. She’s very busy doing fantastic livestreams, hosting the Cloud 9 events and is about to release her new EP ‘Pixie Dream Girl’ that I was lucky enough to master.
What’s one tip you can share with other MPG members that could help their workflow?
I’m probably a bit late to the party on this one, but getting a Stream Deck and triggering Keyboard Maestro with it (if you’re on a mac) has really helped to speed up the more repetitive tasks. I’ve only really scratched the surface with the macros you can build, but it’s very powerful. I’m a WaveLab user when it comes to mastering, and as far as I know there isn’t an equivalent to soundflow (for Pro Tools) out there, so you have to build your own macros in Keyboard Maestro in that DAW.
What’s one tip you would like an MPG member to share with you?
As a self-employed person being organised with your schedule and project management is important. I’ve tried a few different systems like Trello and HubSpot to name a few, but I’m still searching for the most streamlined platform to make my day-to-day life easier. If anyone thinks they have found the best system I’d like to know.
Do you have any words of wisdom for people wanting to get into a similar music production role to yours?
