Headliner MPG Awards Special 2020

MPG AWARDS 2020 SPECIAL ISSUE

AT I V E C

P S UP OR T

G THE C

OM

IN

RE

MAGAZINE

MUN I TY

Manny Marroquin

THE EVOLUTION OF LARRABEE STUDIOS Katie Tavini

MASTERING WITH A TWIST Robbie Dunne

MILOCO GEAR MD ON STUDIO TRENDS

STEPHEN STREET

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Contents MPG Awards Special 2020

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SONIC VISTA INSIGHTS

STEPHEN STREET

MENTAL ME

Our friends in Ibiza have a chat with US blues-rock artist, Wandrin’ Ghost, about his musical journey.

10 SONNOX DRUM GATE

We spend a day fixing a tricky drum multitrack with the help of this new plugin from Sonnox.

12 DANI BENNETT SPRAGG

Last year’s Breakthrough Engineer of the Year talks about her latest musical projects.

14 MATTHEW HERBERT

This British artist specialises in creating original compositions such as recording the life of a pig.

18 ROBBIE DUNNE

We descend on The Vault studio in Miloco’s South London complex to chat to the Miloco Gear MD.

20 DANIEL MOYLER

We’re at Strongroom catching up with talented Recording Engineer of the Year nominee, Daniel Moyler.

COVER STORY: A glittering career making records with iconic artists such as The Smiths, Blur, and The Cranberries has led to Stephen Street picking up the revered MPG for Outstanding Contribution to UK Music - and deservedly so.

26 KATIE TAVINI

Mastering Engineer of the Year nominee, Katie Tavini, is letting her work in the studio do the talking.

30 LARRABEE STUDIOS

Manny Marroquin gives us the guided tour of L.A.’s premier recording space, which has evolved over the decades.

34 THE SM7 STORY

From broadacast to podcast, Shure’s SM7 has had quite the ride.

We explore its 47-year history.

36 PAUL NORRIS

We sit down with Metropolis’ chief engineer to talk about the studio’s USPs, and a recent hip hop trend.

H E A D L I N E R | M P G AWA R D S S P E C I A L 2 0 2 0

SK Shlomo describes an emotional and heartwarming journey through mental health and recovery.

42 CAMERON CRAIG

This MPG director explains why being nominated for Recording Engineer of the Year means so much.

44 PSB M4U 8 REVIEW

On a flight from London to Boston surrounded by rowdy kids, can PSB’s M4U 8 noise cancellers do their job?

46 SUCH SWEET THUNDER

We pay recording and mixing duo Pete Cobbin and Kirsty Whalley a visit at their epic London studio.

51 STREAMING EXPLORED

Does Spotify’s stronghold on the artist community mean creatives are getting held to ransom?

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editor’s letter

Welcome to this special MPG Awards edition of Headliner.

I

n this issue, we shout all things Music Producers Guild more than DJ Khaled likes shouting his own name.

On the cover is winner of MPG’s Outstanding Contribution to UK Music, Stephen Street, who is known for his longtime associations with The Smiths, Blur, and The Cranberries - although the way he tells it, his career could have easily gone another way...

We chat to Matthew Herbert (Remixer of the Year nominee) about how striving for originality led him to record the sounds of a pig’s life, from birth to plate; while Katie Tavini, who’s up for Mastering Engineer Of The Year, wants to let her work, not the fact she is a woman, do the talking.

Over at Strongroom Studios, Recording Engineer Of The Year

SOCIALISE WITH US: headlinermagazine.net @Headlinerhub HeadlinerHub headlinerhub

nominee, Cameron Craig, reveals the work he has put in to have producers and engineers mentioned in the same breath as artists, while Daniel Moyler (up for the same award) tells us how he went from night reception tea boy to an in-demand producer, mixer, and engineer. Not forgetting a catch up with last year’s Breakthrough Engineer of the Year, Dani Bennett Spragg, who tells us what she’s been up to since then.

The UK entertainment industry was rocked by the sudden death of Caroline Flack this month: Could someone so vivacious, fun, and successful be that unhappy? For SK Shlomo – a record breaking beatboxer, looping champion, and singer-songwriter – this is a facade that he knows all too well. He speaks candidly about almost being

swallowed up by depression.

In the studio, Robbie Dunne delves deeper into Miloco Gear, we learn why Metropolis Studios has become a home to American hip hop artists, and we get the guided tours of L.A.’s Larrabee Studios and London’s Sweet Thunder to talk audio evolution and epic film mixing, respectively.

On the tech front, marvel at the noise cancelling abilities of PSB’s M4U 8 headphones in the face of a plane full of school kids, learn how to fix a tricky drum multitrack using Sonnox’s new plugin, and reacquaint yourself with Shure’s SM7, which is enjoying a new lease of life as a go-to podcasting mic.

Good luck to all the nominees, and enjoy the awards!

Alice Gustafson, Editor

CONTACT Paul Watson paul@headlinerhub.com +44(0)7952-839296

Alice Gustafson alice@headlinerhub.com +44(0)7735-289920

Art Director Rae Clara Gray

Contributors Adam Protz Henry Sarmiento Jonathan Tessier Rian Zoll Khan

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Sonic Vista Insights

Wandrin’ Ghost

SONIC VISTA INSIGHTS

Wandrin’ Ghost is an American solo artist living in Ibiza. His sound is a blend of psychedelic blues-rock: an eerily reminiscent mix of Santana, Lou Reed, and Bob Dylan. He’s in the process of creating his first full-length album entitled The Fall of Fear, inspired by the ups and downs of American life.

I never even thought of proper songwriting until I got roped into the music scene when I lived in Seattle. My friend Jamie and I would jam together a lot and I started to help him fill trumpet parts in his personal songs, and that grew to playing alongside his band and fitting trumpet parts in their songs, and then helping another friend by joining his band and writing and performing more parts, then helping another band on their album, and playing shows until it all fell apart. I think by being observant to the process all that time made me believe that I could do it myself.

I’ve got tons of ideas in the vault for songs, albums, EPs and other projects, but I’d rather be slow and steady with my progress as I’m gunning for quality - I’m looking forward to seeing how my mash of artistic influences bleed out through the music. My goal is to explore more of the kinds of sounds I consider to be psychedelic blues, capture the moods and experiences most relevant to the current times, and bring beautiful souls together during the process.

When I moved to Ibiza, I didn’t think there would be any rock scene at all because I knew the island was a techno-paradise, so I was surprised

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when I found out it exists. It’s not big by any means, but there are definitely some dedicated folks out there that keep it going, and those are the kind of people you want by your side. I think the bands and venues have deeply dug into their territory, so the spirit of rock is not abundant but is alive and well. Not only that but there are quite a few blues and swing groups out here too.

I used to host an open mic in San Antonio, so have seen for myself that there’s definitely a desire for live music on the island. I think the difference compared to proper cities is that the gap between pro and amateur seems wider here: whereas many people use open mics as a way to test the waters or try new material, it seems that in Ibiza, those who pursue music are very clear about their intentions and would rather go ahead and play their own shows more power to them!

I think the reason I wanted to be a producer is because of the frustration of not immediately being able to perfectly express what’s in my head as it sounds to me. The challenge of having to work to make it sound as close to my idea as possible is what inspires me to keep perfecting the craft, and I find myself

getting pulled into it more and more.

I primarily focus on the writing because to me, psychedelic isn’t simply a sound but more of an experience, so that’s where I’ve found the balance between earthly and heavenly vibes are more easily sorted out. When it comes to my guitar, I try to blend a bright ‘60s vibe with some heavy ‘90s sounds, so I usually accomplish this with some good pedals: reverb, echo, wah, tremolo, and overdrive. When recording, I use a lot of effects, specifically on my vocals, which allows me to make it other-worldly, and that’s where a lot of the plugins come in.

Blues-rock is a genre that has still retained a lot of soul; it’s still close to its roots, despite the trends. It’s also becoming ever more international too.

I wrote an Ibiza-inspired instrumental after the first few weeks I got here so there’s definitely something magical about this place. I think one obvious advantage is that you get room to breathe and be yourself, you live the proper island life without the rush and nonsense of the city - so that definitely frees up your capacity to create. www.sonicvistastudios.com

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Review

Sonnox Drum Gate

TO THE BEAT OF THE DRUM We take an in depth look at the Oxford Drum Gate, the latest plugin release from Sonnox, which promises to transform the workflow of gating drums.

Gating drums can be a tricky business, depending on how and where they’ve been recorded. Unless you’re in a good space with some decent separation, you can find yourself in a bit of a hole when it comes to gating in terms of dealing with boominess, all kinds of spill, and frequencies which are battling each other relentlessly. In these situations, when you apply gates to a kit with intent, you can run the risk of compromising on your transients and overall sonics.

A recent mix session we worked on included quite a lot of the above – the drum stems we received had been recorded in a pretty confined space over nine tracks: kick in and out; snare top and bottom; a stereo room mic; tom mics; and a pair of overheads. No mic on the hats, as the space was so tight. The other issue was how dynamic the drummer was: a very talented, jazz/

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funk player, with lots of tom action and interesting progressions, and occasionally a bit heavy on the right foot, which caused a few headaches when it came to compressing and gating using our regular channel strip.

The kit hadn’t been recorded badly, it was just messy to deal with due to the recording conditions, and how busy the playing was. I guess when you’re asking a drummer to ad lib to jazz, you’re making a rod for your own back!

The Sonnox Drum Gate, I was soon to discover, can alleviate many of these issues, and is a really special plugin for a number of reasons. It’s not just a fantastic - and quite surgical - tool for the pro user who knows his or her frequency ranges inside out, but it’s also a great tool for the amateur, who might need help tidying up a kit using a piece of software that isn’t daunting with 200 knobs on it.

Let’s start with the GUI: a lovely, intuitive look with three separate elements. We have Detection, Delay, and Leveller, along with three selectable drum icons: kick, snare, tom. Nice and straightforward. The plugin also offers a walkthrough where it points out which bit does what, and so on. I have a quick look, all seems fine, then I dig right in, pulling up the said drum session.

Can You Kick It? First up, the kick (in) drum, which is the fatter of the two – and first element, Detection, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Using the vertical slider on the left hand side of the GUI, you can open the threshold to listen and indeed look for your desired spot, allowing you to locate the point at which the drum signal is starting to come through the gate.

Next, the Decay element, which is

Review

Sonnox Drum Gate

“It’s not only a surgical tool for the pro user, it can tidy up a drum kit quickly and effectively without feeling in any way daunting thanks to such a simple GUI...” adjustable via a horizontal bar along the bottom which displays the frequencies.

It’s brilliant experimenting with this and cutting and boosting signal where required; the graphics really help, but it’s what you hear (or not as the case may be) when you dial just a little extra in or out that really amazes me – it’s so responsive, and remarkably accurate. After a little tweaking, I find if I bring the decay down to around 20%, cutting at 41Hz and again at 275Hz, it’s tight enough sounding with great separation, yet still allows for the feel and all the subtleties that go with this jazz/funk style of drumming.

The leveller is the third element, and perhaps the most amazing: you can tell the plugin to ‘listen’ to your drummer, and auto-set a target area in the frequency range to allow for a consistency of sound. For example, when I click ‘auto-set’, it is programmed to ‘listen’ to a dozen or so hits, then decide where the sweet spot should be. Incredible. You can, of course, get highly meticulous and do your own levelling – and most users will - but the

point I’m trying to make here is how quickly and effectively the Sonnox Drum Gate has turned a problematic drum mix into a great sounding multitrack. It is also able to pick up the softer kicks and hits, and manage them as subtly or clinically as you desire. For kick (in), it was great being able to slide up and see how an 80Hz rather than 40Hz cut could focus on that ‘bite’ I was looking for to complement the main kick sound, and then I cut at 200Hz also, and still kept the feel and vibe. It took a lot of the dullness out of that second kick drum signal.

Super Sonics What entirely blows my mind is using it on a snare; the minute I apply it, I get a genuine ‘wow’ factor: job almost done just by turning it on. But again, letting the plugin ‘listen’ to the drummer and literally adapt settings in line with his style, is the real stroke of genius. The fact you have the Shorten Decay (on softer hits) option is so perfect for this drummer, too, because of his dynamism.

In terms of gain reduction, I’m at around

-42dB, which is cutting off everything from the outside world, yet losing nothing tonally, and cutting none of the snare verb off, either, which I find to be a real sticking point using my regular channel strip’s gate. Another box ticked.

Finally, it’s toms, which have been a real pain on this project. Until now.

Using the same process, in about a minute I’ve got wonderful control and separation over the toms with no audible compromise sonically, and what feels like zero transient loss. Because I’ve been so glued to my screen, it dawns on me that I haven’t yet A-Bd the kit with old settings against new, so I listen first without, and then with the Drum Gate dialled in, and as expected, it’s a complete transformation.

In conclusion, this is a special plugin that I can’t see myself not using on any future drum project – whether they’ve been recorded at Abbey Road, or in a shed..! Pro user or aspiring pro, definitely check it out. www.sonnox.com 11 HEADLINER

Dani Bennett Spragg

A Day In The Life

A DAY IN THE LIFE

Since winning the MPG for Breakthrough Engineer of the Year in 2019, Dani Bennett Spragg has gone from strength to strength in terms of engineering and mixing. We catch up with her to chat recent projects, miking techniques, and working on the fly.

“I actually first heard about it via Instagram,” smiles Dani, sipping on a latte. She’s talking about the day she found out about her MPG nomination.

“It was very unexpected, and I suddenly found myself having to sort out all my stuff to send to the judging day: I sent a Baxter Dury track, a Blair Dunlop track, and an Amazons track.”

She went on to win the award, of course, which was presented to her by The Amazons – a band she is very close with, and that are destined for great things, currently in the midst of their first US tour.

Although Dani planned on heading to university to study audio, she didn’t get into LIPA, which she had her heart set on; instead, she went into the studio and got good at making tea.

“Once I got into the studio, I just never left,” she recalls. “I guess if I had got into LIPA, life would be different now – but at that point, I’d already done a few weeks work at Assault & Battery with Flood. So when I didn’t get in, I

12 HEADLINER

took a year out, and went to America and worked in a studio in New York City for a while. I then came back to London, and the week I came back, just by chance I was asked if I’d like to assist on a week-long session [at Assault & Battery] so I went back there and then stayed for 18 months..!”

An classic audio education such as this is certainly the most organic journey to take, though Dani admits she had no idea what was going on for some time: “I was full-on making tea,” she laughs. “I was doing recalls and setups, and then got my first proper assistant engineering role on the Ed Harcourt record that Flood did – it was a huge project where basically everyone in the building was involved in some way. We were on that for six months. So I stayed assisting at Battery there, and then moved downstairs to work with Alan Moulder as his mix assistant.”

Engineering straight to mixing?

“Yeah, definitely not a normal progression of roles,” she admits. “It was

probably nine months of assisting in solely a tracking room, then six months with Alan only doing mixing, then I moved to Hoxer, which was all recording for three years. Now I’m back doing a bit of both.”

Although life hasn’t changed dramatically after receiving her MPG Award, Dani says the accolade opened doors to the press, and that the biggest thing was that her name was getting thrown around a lot more: “It’s particularly nice that the award comes from my peers - that’s the most amazing thing about it.”.

Teamwork Conversation turns to an email thread that Dani and her fellow female audio fanatics share together. Sounds intriguing..!

“Yeah, we’re all on this massive thread, and if one of us gets offered work and we can’t do it, we ask if anyone else wants it,” she explains. “I feel like I am in a community of women

Dani Bennett Spragg

A Day In The Life

“I don’t usually take stuff when I go to different studios; I prefer working with what you’ve got, sort of thing, and not rely on stuff.” much more than I am a community of engineers, which is really nice. And there are a lot of us – you don’t see us very often, but we’re definitely there..! And actually, as soon as I started at Battery, Flood always said how key it was to have a woman on a session because it changed the dynamic. I guess that’s true.

I worked a fair amount with Flood... a very interesting and intense dude, and a bit nuts, in the best way possible! Ed Harcourt’s was the only full record I did with him, but Flood also did a month with me on the Ed O’Brien record that I worked on in 2018.”

And how is work now for this talented young audio professional?

“Work is great! I am floating around... [smiles] I tend to work a lot out of other studios, though I do have a room in my house which really works,” Dani explains.

“It’s my own little mix place, but I will work in whatever studio suits, really.”

“I have a pair of Genelec 8030s – little guys, but they’re great. I haven’t had them very long, but one of the Genelec guys – a guy called Perry - did the calibration thing, and that made me thing ‘wow, why doesn’t every set of speakers allow you to do that?’ It made

such a huge difference. My little room at home is like a triangle, so there are some issues, but I didn’t have to do much to it. I don’t know why that isn’t ‘a thing’ for every speaker. The fact you can tune Genelecs to your room is just incredible. I think the other main plus using Genelecs is their transparency; you always know what’s going on when you use them.”

Is there a Dani Bennett Spragg ‘thing’ in the studio?

“Ha! Well, I really like doing acoustic guitars – though I am not sure why,” she says. “I have a bunch of memories doing acoustics on various records. With Blair Dunlop, we did the record live in a week, and Ed Harcourt was producing it. We were adding acoustic overdubs and Blair was playing a dub, and Ed was playing a high strung guitar – I put two [Neumann] 67s on them playing together, that’s all we did, and there was nothing else to it, it was perfect.

“Then on the Blanco White record – he’s an English guy with South American and Spanish influences – he has these two little acoustic type instruments: one is a ron rocko, one is a chirango, both from Bolivia I think. They don’t sound like any other acoustic guitar-esque

instrument I have ever heard. One song on the record where the acoustic is the whole thing, I had some fun with; one guitar I classically miked, which was a bit boring, so I put a Ball & Biscuit [mic] through my Copycat and a [Neumann] M149 as the main sound, in classic mic position. It really filled out all the top end.

“I don’t usually take stuff when I go to different studios; I prefer working with what you’ve got sort of thing, and not rely on stuff. It’s more fun, and if I find something I haven’t used before, I happily put it up and see how it sounds or what it does.”

And what’s next for Dani Bennett Spragg?

“I’ve got the Blanco White record to finish, and I’m almost over the finish line with a Melena Servala project whose record I did in Urchin Studios in a couple of weeks, and last weekend we did a live version in Abbey Road in studio two which was so much fun – one of my favourite days ever, in fact. I’m a massive Beatles fan, too, so... [smiles] So I have to mix that, which I’ll do that at home soon.

And next? Who knows..!” www.danibennettspragg.com 13 HEADLINER

Matthew Herbert

Out Of Left Field

OUT OF LEFT FIELD It’s not every day that an MPG Award nominee reveals that their inspiration to create music is fuelled by contempt for Micheal Gove, or to have a piece of work that centres around recording the sounds of a pig’s life – from birth, to plate. Headliner meets musician and producer Matthew Herbert to talk music-making, our understanding of the universe, and striving for originality.

Inside London’s Strongroom Studios, Headliner is waiting to meet a man of many names. Should we address him as Herbert, Doctor Rockit, Radio Boy, Mr Vertigo, Transformer, or Wishmountain?

These days, he’s quite happy to be known simply as Matthew Herbert.

Up for Re-mixer Of The Year at this year’s MPG Awards, Herbert has not stuck to his lane in electronic music production over the years, nor to traditional sources of inspiration.

Starting out in the industry in the ‘80s, Herbert went on to achieve success in mainstream remixing for artists such as Moloko, Ennio Morricone, Quincy Jones, PUZZLE, Björk, REM, Perry Farrell, Serge Gainsbourg, Yoko Ono, John Cale, The Avalanches and Cornelius. So far, so normal.

But this is not where his interests truly lie: Herbert wants to delve deeper – being much more interested in speaking out about important issues

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ignored by the media. Herbert seeks to challenge the norm, have the world open its eyes to the bigger issues, and question our political landscape. This is where his creative side really comes alive – his unique projects blurring the lines between music production and experimental, surrealist art.

In 1998, Herbert issued Around the House, which mixed dance beats, sounds generated by everyday kitchen objects, and vocals, followed by Bodily Functions in 2001, which featured sounds generated by manipulating human hair and skin – as well as internal bodily organs. Plat du Jour was his next offering – a record made entirely from the sounds of objects and situations in the food chain, before serving up his most controversial piece to date – One Pig, where he recorded the life cycle of a farmed pig from birth, to the dinner plate.

A love of sampling was sparked when

Herbert was a boy: “I had a Casio FZ-1 sampler/ synthesiser keyboard, and I used it to chop up songs off the radio,” he remembers. “This got boring very quickly; in the space of about half an hour I felt like I was shopping – just consuming and taking stuff that I didn’t know the context of, or how it was made. I have no problem with that way of music-making, but for me, it didn’t feel original. It felt like I was shuffling somebody else’s ideas around.”

The Apple & The Pig The turning point came later, when inspiration struck whilst he was eating an apple: “I bit into an apple, and miked it up and plugged it into my computer. That was really transformative – if you slow down an apple crunch, you can hear the fibres pulling away from each other,” he enthuses. “I actually recorded one for

Matthew Herbert

Out Of Left Field

“Most of my inspiration comes from Michael Gove; I saw him on a programme and had a physical reaction to it...” a project recently, and it sounded like a tree coming down – so I’m really messing with the fabric and materials of time, and how we understand the universe.”

From then on, everything was fair game for sampling, from washing machines, to kettles – to animals.

“About 10 years later I realised that it could be about life and death as well,” he explains. “So I wanted to do the sound of something being born on legs, and the sound of dying, but that felt too difficult to do with a human – and strange territory. So I thought I could do it with an animal.”

It was at this point that Herbert decided that he would use a pig.

“They have a particular place in our society,” he continues. “We use them in everything, from orange juice, to ink, to paper, to clothes and food. Part of a pigs’ guts are used in the filtration system in milk, porcelain, bullets, medicines – and yet we treat them with a lot of contempt.

So I recorded a pig being born and then followed that pig’s life until it was killed, and then eaten. So you hear that whole journey from it being born, to someone

wiping their plate clean at the end of it. For me, that capacity for music to tell stories is an extremely revolutionary one. And it’s one that I think the music industry pretends hasn’t happened – they’re picking up guitars and drums, whereas we could be making music out of NHS hospitals being in disarray, or Tory donors taking Russian money under the table...or a fruit bowl – whatever!

I turn it into music, and it’s totally liberating and extraordinary.”

For Herbert, originality and saying something new is key: ‘If I sit down at the piano and try and write a piece of original music, I’m up against about 10 to 15 million other people also sat at pianos trying to write something interesting at the same moment. Whereas, if I sit down and play the sound of a pig’s body being chopped up into its component parts, I’m probably the only person doing that at that time,” he laughs. “So you kind of have a free, much more original little corner to begin with before you even make anything. A quest to be original feels like a good starting point.”

With such unusual projects under his belt, where does Herbert find his inspiration?

“Most of my inspiration comes from Michael Gove,” he deadpans. “Just the horror that comes out of the mouths of these people. I saw him on a programme and I had a physical reaction to it. What he was saying was mendacious, it wasn’t appropriate. Also, with the climate crisis, we have a profound crisis of accountability and a crisis of trust, and meanwhile the dominant narrative in the media is making things worse, not better.

We’re being lied to, and that’s why I got into music – to change the world and to make it into a better place.”

Complacency Does Herbert think that the music industry is in crisis at the moment?

“It has become utterly complacent,” he nods. “And I think that we have to accept that we’re part of the problem. We don’t need any more love songs: no matter what the state of your relationship is, I should imagine there’s probably several 15 HEADLINER

Matthew Herbert

Out Of Left Field

“I spent a lot of money and invested a lot of time in a quest for really great-sounding analogue equipment...” pieces of music that would cover that particular stage,” he says. “So why do we need any more about it? We need to be doing some reflection; we can’t just fly around the world to gigs because we want to, or because we’ve been asked.

We need to be held accountable, and we need to be asking serious questions about ourselves: where do we fit as musicians? Right now music is just the soundtrack to consumption; everywhere you go, music is in shops so you can buy more stuff, saying ‘it’s okay, the world’s okay,’ and the world’s not okay – things aren’t going well.”

For his regular film and television work, Herbert is required to churn out a lot of work on short notice, which is where reliable, quick recall technology comes in, although he misses the analogue way of working.

“I spent a lot of money and invested a lot of time in a quest for really greatsounding analogue equipment,” he says. “I have a Neve desk, however the expectations now from people that you work with in the film and TV industry is instant recall. You have to be able to go 16 HEADLINER

back to a version that you had six weeks ago and be able to tweak it. So I haven’t used my Neve desk properly in about 18 months, and that’s a real shame for me. I have to do it all on the computer now. I wrote something like 600 pieces of music last year, and sometimes you need to be writing 10 to 12 new bits of music a day, and to be pretty much finished mixing as you go. So the capacity to use analogue equipment in this environment has vanished completely. I did a film score for a Syrian documentary recently, and I had to write two hour’s worth of orchestral music, have it approved by the director, sync it to picture, transcribe it, score it, print out the parts, record it with the musicians, mix it and deliver it.

The turnaround is incredibly quick now, but also the expectation is incredibly high from the people making it. If I were an artist and I had the time, then I would still be in the analogue world, but unfortunately, I’ve had to abandon it almost entirely.”

Herbert uses Logic Pro, and when it comes to plugins, he favours all things quirky.

“Unfiltered Audio do some really odd things, and I like the odd stuff. That’s what I like about the Plugin Alliance – they do some very precise emulation analogue equipment, but then they also do some bonkers stuff as well. I also like Sugar Bytes and Sinevibes for their odd things, and Waves’ Abbey Road collection.”

When it comes to his MPG Award nomination – which Herbert clarifies is for his more traditional commercial remix work of late – he is both surprised and pleased to be recognised, although is humble when it comes to congratulating himself too much.

“I’m really pleased to be nominated – I’m very grateful for it. I really value [the MPG’s] support; it’s made up of peers and friends of mine, so it’s really nice to be noticed, and always nice to be nominated. I just want to talk about ideas really, and I am so grateful to be nominated for this, but as you can tell, I’m more motivated by ideas and politics,” he smiles. www.matthewherbert.com

An intelligent approach to gating...

Robbie Dunne

Miloco Gear

ALL THE GEAR, ALL THE IDEAS

In a world where a debut album recorded in a bedroom goes on to win five Grammy Awards, the music industry must brace for change. That’s exactly what Miloco did in order to survive, says Miloco Gear MD, Robbie Dunne.

“If our business model didn’t change over God knows how many years, we’d be long gone and out of business,” admits Dunne as we settle into The Vault at Miloco’s London HQ. “However, because we’re a reasonably small team, we can adapt very quickly.”

Recording professionals familiar with Miloco Studios soon got to know Miloco Gear, which was set up approximately eight years ago in a bid to adapt to the changing landscape. Miloco Gear supplies professionals with a full range of new outboard gear, microphones, monitoring, software and consoles and its products are carefully chosen for sound quality, value, durability, and ability to cope with the rigours of a real world recording scenario. From the industry standard staples, to the quirky kit, Miloco Gear has a solution to fit any requirement, and can source rare or vintage pieces for customers. (So long, stressful auctions!)

“Miloco Gear is an extension of the existing studio business, which has been around since forever,” says Dunne.

“What we wanted to do is represent

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the brands we really believed in, but also we have the studios. That’s our differentiator.”

Originally hailing from Dublin – “you can probably tell by my accent,” – Dunne has a long and successful history in the music industry. His obsession with the record-making process from an early age led to work as a session musician, producer, engineer, studio owner and educator. At Miloco Gear, he is dedicated to going the extra mile for his clients, finding them the best deals, and advising on what will be the best solution – not the most expensive.

Prior to joining Miloco Gear, Dunne was working in business development for Apple, where Miloco was a client.

“Apple was an interesting role, but because it’s such a huge organisation, you have very little influence in the day to day running of it,” he recalls.

“Miloco then approached me to set up the gear division for them, and during that time the business has transformed.

So has the music industry – look at where streaming was seven years ago, and where it is now! I mean, people’s

understanding of the revenue it can generate. That’s where we saw the real resurgence again of people building studios. People understand the streaming model - it’s about getting as much content out as you can.

“It’s not only studios or the recording of music we facilitate, our clients have changed – we’ll do 5.1 projects for Netflix or Amazon, audiobooks or voiceovers, and help people create online content. So our type of client has changed a lot in the last few years.”

Miloco Gear has a longstanding relationship with established British brands such as SSL and Neve, but also embraces the newer companies, such as high-end speaker manufacturer, TPI. “We represent everything you would need in the studio. For example, we have beyerdynamic, so we can get everything from DT 770 Pro headphones, right up to a pair of Augspurger speakers, which would be anything from £15-40k.”

Dunne is careful to state that it’s not just the elite brands that Miloco Gear caters for:

Robbie Dunne

Miloco Gear

“If we look at the London Miloco studios - forgetting the 200 other rooms we have around the world - we’ve got 35 spaces here...”

“The brands we stand behind are brands that we know will be durable and have got great after sales support.

The key thing about any commercial environment or even an aspiring studio user is that they need to be able to work. We don’t want situations where if something breaks, the user has to wait weeks or months to get it resolved.”

Miloco Gear is for professionals as much as it is for people who want to improve the acoustics for their home working environment. The room Headliner is speaking to Dunne in was music producer, Stephen Street’s for years, where he famously worked on numerous Blur albums.

“This room - which has had a bit of a refresh since Stephen moved out typifies the typical studio building we’ll be doing now, because with 80% of records there’s going to be an aspect of programming to them. Plus, you don’t need a huge amount of gear. What is important is the quality of it – making sure it’s got a really good EQ, really good compression, and great conversion to capture it all. What’s super key now is spending the money on monitoring.

It’s making sure you’ve got the best monitoring you can possibly afford.”

The gear isn’t the only thing that makes Miloco’s business model unique: “If we look at the London studios – forgetting the other 200 rooms we have around the world – we’ve got 35 different spaces available here,” he points out. “If you’ve got a fixed budget for your album or EP, it wouldn’t make sense to do it all in one huge, live space if you’re not recording drums or a band. So what we can do is move the project around to the appropriate space for the appropriate stage of the project.

“So when you want a big drum sound, you use The Pool. If you want to do intimate guitar overdubs or vocals, we do them in here. If you want to do some programming, you can move into one of the small programming spaces, or somewhere like this room. When you want to mix, we can mix in The Red Room, so we work as project managers as well – managing the budget, looking at the staffing and what the appropriate room is for which stage in the process.”

Miloco’s annual gear event every November allows people to come to the studio complex and try the equipment out for themself, in a real studio environment – away from distractions.

“I’ve been to so many trade shows

over the years, and for want of a better phrase – they’re hardly inspiring a lot of the time – because what you get is some leaflets pointing towards a unit with someone reading out a spec sheet,” says Dunne. “So what we tried to do with the gear event is get audience participation for a start, so people can interact with everything themselves, and see the units!

But we also put all the units up against each other in shoot-outs, so you can actually hear and see what’s going on.

“I think that is often something they miss a trick on at trade shows, and when they do it, there’s so much going on around it. You’re going to have some guy doing an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo on one side and someone else demonstrating a line array on the other, and you’re trying to listen to a pair of speakers or a converter. It’s just impossible!

“Here, you can use the kit in a proper acoustic environment; and unlike a traditional guitar or piano shop, we do customer demos in the studios, so people come and listen to speakers in the correct environment in silence.” www.milocostudios.com

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Daniel Moyler

Night Moves

NIGHT MOVES Daniel Moyler has gone from self professed night reception ‘tea boy’ to an in-demand producer, mixer and engineer with an enviable showreel. Headliner meets Moyler in London to discuss his MPG nomination for Recording Engineer Of The Year.

An ability to stay calm has seen Daniel Moyler through a few scenarios that would cause the most experienced of engineers to lose their cool. Catching up at a London studio to discuss his MPG nomination for Recording Engineer Of The Year, Moyler recalls a particularly frantic time while recording a Jack Savoretti record in Rome: “I’ve definitely learned to stay calm,” he laughs. “One of the records I was nominated for was Jack Savoretti’s record that we did last year. We went out to Rome in the middle of the summer – it was incredibly hot in the studio, no one was around, and basically half the gear worked. So there were a few meltdowns about pulling out sections of the desk and to trying to fiddle with it. We had a five-piece band set up and we were recording everything live in the other room. So my job was to ride it out and stay as calm as possible – and try not to let the situation disturb the workflow or their performance. So an ability to stay calm is always useful!”

Brought up on The Beatles and Bowie, Moyler spent his teenage

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years playing in most of London’s ‘toilet venues,’ then turning his hand to engineering when he took a job on night reception at Trevor Horn’s SARM Studios. Before long, he progressed to an assisting position and began learning his trade under the world-class engineers and producers that came through the door.

Moyler went on to work with mix engineer Ruadhri Cushnan, and over two years he assisted on records for Ed Sheeran, Half Moon Run and Foy Vance, as well as the Grammy Awardwinning Album of the Year, Babel, by Mumford and Sons. He then joined the Miloco team and later took the leap to go freelance, although he describes his ascent through the ranks more humbly: “It was a traditional route in from tea boy,” he grins. “Night reception at SARM was about 10 years ago now, then I gradually worked my way to assisting, and then moved on to work at Miloco and assisted for a few mix engineers for a while.”

Tea boy on the night shift to working on a Grammy award-winning album is

quite the leap in a few short years – a fact that it not lost on Moyler.

“Yeah, it was quite a step up for me at that point. I was like, ‘okay, this is the bigger leagues…”

Fast Track Although still in the early stages of his career, Moyler has already engineered for a variety of talented artists including, Mumford & Sons, Kaiser Chiefs, ZAYN, Bjork, Dua Lipa, FKA Twigs, George Ezra, JP Cooper, Bebe Rexha, Rudimental, Tom Walker, Labrinth, Zara Larson, Tom Odell, Freya Ridings, Jack Savoretti, James Morrison, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Years and Years, yet his MPG nomination took him by surprise: “It was a shock! I was quite surprised because there’s guys I really look up to and I’ve seen gone through the process before, so you don’t expect these things.

But that little bit of recognition is nice,” he concedes.

Having worked with such an eclectic roster of talent, Moyler struggles to pick out any personal highlights, although a session with singer Brody Dalle, founder

Daniel Moyler

Night Moves

“The MPG is a great organisation, especially what it does for displaying diversity and championing great music, plus it acts like a union and represents freelancers...” of punk rock band The Distillers stands out, as does working on acoustic mixes with Scottish singer, Lewis Capaldi.

“Lewis just came in and smashed out three performances in about an hour,” he remembers. “We had it off and ready to go with a little acoustic package quite quickly. That was just before he erupted into what he is now. He was impressive, though – I think he was doing three sessions that day. I wasn’t even expecting him to be funny,” he adds. “The way he performs is insane.”

When it comes to his approach to projects, each one is totally different and tailored to the particular artist.

“For instance, that Jack Savoretti record is in the majority live, because he had an amazing warehouse band which was ready to go,” he explains. “Then we might work with someone else with a very small team doing a lot of the work, or Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, which is them smashing it out live. I want to capture the energy. You have to tailor what you do to work around the artist, where they’re at, and the sound they want to achieve.

“When I’ve worked with people that are a couple of albums in, there’s

something amazing because they know their sound – they know what they’re about,” he adds. “There’s a confidence that comes with that, whereas working with newer artists – that’s not quite there.

Part of the job is to really help them hone their sound and discover what it is they want to sound like. That’s quite exciting because you have a blank canvas. So there are advantages to both in a way.”

Moyler isn’t precious when it comes to kit: “I’ve got two tiny, shitty mics that I carry around with me everywhere,” he shrugs. “It’s a Shure Green Bullet and an STC Ball & Biscuit: two old, dirty mics that just give everything a bit of grit. They come in handy all the time. They’re in my bag wherever I go, and they must cost about 50 quid each. They’ve been on every record!”

Another bit of kit that Moyler loves is Audio Kitchen’s The Big Trees – an all valve, Class A amp which doubles as a preamp, which he uses on bass, guitars and as an amp. “That actually has been on pretty much every record I’ve been involved in for the last three years. It’s just a better maker.”

When it comes to using analogue

equipment, AMS Neve is a go-to: “I really like the 1081 mic preamp and EQ, and of course the 1033 console; Neve kit always adds a bit of warmth to the sound, and it’s nice to introduce that light and shade. For the Frank Carter record, we did all the drums on some old Neves. I like using as much of that as possible to add that body and weight to the sound.”

The MPG nomination still feels surreal to Moyler, who is humbled by the nod from his peers: “It’s nice to be voted for by peers; it’s quite meaningful. The MPG is a great organisation, especially what it does for displaying diversity and championing great music, plus it acts like a union and represents freelancers – it helps them with the ins and outs of everything. I know they do a lot of work on things like contracts and the behind the scenes stuff, and that’s really important. That organisation exists because it can be a bit like the Wild West out there for freelancing musicians, producers and engineers! So that’s an important job.

And you know, it’s a nice party as well.”

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Cover Story

Stephen Street

THERE’S NO OTHER WAY Stephen Street is a record producer that is known for his longtime associations with The Smiths and Blur, so it comes as no surprise to see him crowned the winner of this year’s Outstanding Contribution To UK Music award. Although the way he tells it, his career could have easily gone another way.

“I’m known for working with bands, and I do try and become like a big brother to them – in the nicest sense – not Big Brother in 1984,” clarifies Street.

“I’m a big brother in the sense of being family or an extra member of the band.

I try to instill a feeling that we’re in this together, that I’m working for you, and that I’m going to help you make a good record. I like to think of it like that anyway! That is something that has paid in dividends for me.”

He’s not wrong. This year, Street is the winner of the PPL Present the MPG Award for Outstanding Contribution to UK Music – an award from two organisations he sees a real value in: “I am humbled to have been recognised for this award. I think that producers by nature tend to be quite a disparate bunch, so it’s good that there’s something that brings people together.

[The MPG] is a place where people can air their grievances or worries and have someone represent them when it comes to agreeing how the record companies go about the business of drawing up

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contracts with producers and so on.

And especially for people coming into the industry, as young people, they need guidance as well. If they can go to someone like the MPG, they can find out how to go about this and get some advice as well.”

In The Beginning Best known for his work with The Smiths and Blur, Street began his career during the early ‘80s as an engineer, later going on to work with Morrissey, The Cranberries, The Pretenders, Babyshambles and Kaiser Chiefs – amongst many others. Before this, Street played bass in a band that never quite made it – a factor that led him down his eventual career path.

“It wasn’t really getting anywhere,” he recalls. “We had a record deal, but we didn’t really have much success. I knew that I was really enjoying being in the studio with the band, and I also realised that there were young producerengineers that were having success at the time. So I formed an idea in my mind

that studio work would be something that I would like to do.”

Street was determined, approaching numerous studios in the hope of securing a job – eventually finding an assistant position at Island Records’ basement recording studio.

“I was a bit green,” he admits. “But I was at Island for the best part of three years, and for a long time during that period I was the only assistant, so I was getting quite a lot of training; I wasn’t just working as a tea boy!

“So I was actually hands-on on the desk, setting up microphones and so on, and I applied as much knowledge as I could to try to be helpful. I think it was noted.”

It must have been, as one of Street’s first jobs as in-house engineer was for a session for The Smiths’s Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. He continued to work with The Smiths for years, working as an engineer on their album The Queen Is Dead before assuming a producer role for Strangeways, Here We Come, the band’s final album.

Cover Story

Stephen Street

“I bought an Audient Zen console when they first came out, and it has proved to be very practical and perfect for my needs...”

“Sometimes you have to wait for the stars to be aligned,” he says. “And that definitely happened to me when I met The Smiths. If I hadn’t done that, it could have been so very different. They definitely gave me the big step up that I needed as a young engineer. If that first single with them had never happened, my career path could be very different.”

Although the band parted ways, Street’s relationship with Morrissey was still going strong. Working on the singer’s solo record felt like huge step up – a fact that was not lost on Street: “The Smiths were so revered at the time, so if I had failed miserably I would have been public enemy number one!

So that was an incredible relief when the first couple of singles were such big successes. That really gave me the springboard to go into the new decade of the ‘90s.”

Fortunately, that’s when Street ended up working with Blur. After hearing She’s So High, the band’s first single, Street contacted their manager. He went on to produce their second single, There’s No Other Way, then the band’s next four albums: Modern Life Is Rubbish, Parklife, The Great Escape, and Blur.

“I’ve worked with them on so many records, especially throughout the ‘90s, but I’m also very pleased to say as

recently as four years ago, so that was wonderful,” he says proudly. “I have managed to retain a lot of working relationships with various acts throughout my time. That means hopefully I’m doing something right!”

However, working with Blur is another example of success which Street insists could have easily gone another way: “After I heard She’s So High and I saw the video, I thought that there was something about them. I let them know I was interested in doing something, we met in a pub in Soho, and they said they’d give it a go.”

Recording swiftly got underway, resulting in the smash hit, There’s No Other Way – which is still in rotation to this day.

“It was just one of those fantastic things,” he remembers. “I got involved for about a third of the first album because they had recorded a fair amount already.

But it nearly didn’t work out: I wasn’t in the frame to do the second record, to be honest with you. I think they intended to work with Andy Partridge of XTC, so that could have been another ship that passed in the night. It could have ended very differently and could have been me done in that relationship.”

As luck would have it, Street bumped into Blur’s Graham Coxon at a gig. The

pair got chatting and arranged to link up again.

“Fortunately, that is what happened,” laughs Street. “Then I worked on Modern Life Is Rubbish, which was a big step towards Parklife coming out the year after.”

Feeling Zen In his home studio, Street is using an Audient Zen console that he’s had for years. “I bought one when they first came out, and it has proved to be very practical and absolutely perfect for my needs. I find it a very simple, easy desk to use – it’s very well laid out and makes things easy to route, such as the power knob compression. It’s got a good, clean signal path as well.”

Not a fan of mixing in the box, Street needs a decent number of returns from his DAW Pro Tools system: “I like to sub group things with different groups of faders, and I can patch in my outboard effects as well – I still like to use some outboard as well as plugins.”

“Mixing in the box works fine for some; you don’t need to have a big room. It’s famously known that the Billie Eilish record was made in her brother’s bedroom, but then again, with that kind of genre, it can be. Because of the genre 23 HEADLINER

Cover Story

Stephen Street

“I find it quite sad that so many of the great recording studios that I’ve made albums in over the years have now disappeared...” that I’m known for, I like to get in the studio and have space and air around the musicians – you capture something that has a little bit more depth to it.”

When it comes to some historical studios having to close, Street makes his feeling clear: “I find it quite sad that so many of the great recording studios that I’ve worked in and made albums in over the years have now disappeared; I find that a very sad thing to be honest with you. I would like to see a return to decent studios that have been designed to be studios rather than just some kind of rehearsal room, or some kind of industrial unit that has suddenly turned into a studio because it’s got some microphones. I’m hoping that we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel in the choice of studios and that we can see a trend again of people opening up decent recording spaces that can accommodate musicians that can perform to their best.”

Having worked at Olympic Studios for many years, Street was particularly crestfallen to see the studio shut its doors.

“I find it really sad that a studio that was probably only second to Abbey Road as far as its catalogue of incredible records, was allowed to close. I just found that a travesty. I just hope that now we are beginning to see a little bit more income coming into the recording side 24 HEADLINER

of the music business. At least now with the official streaming services, there’s no reason for people to go on to pirate sites anymore and completely rip off the artists and the producers involved in making records. Hopefully we’ll see a bit of an income increase on the recording side from streaming and so on, and hopefully some of that money will be reinvested into recording studios.”

How has Street’s job changed in the last 10 years?

“You’ve got to be a lot quicker,” he answers, ironically, without hesitation.

“The budget to make a record is so tight that you have to be really ready and on the case. Don’t waste time. That doesn’t mean you’ve got to do mammoth long sessions; I have always been someone who likes to get in the studio at about 10am and do a good 12-hour day, but no more than that because you just get tired and worn out, and that just means you start later the next day. You want to get the job done efficiently, on time and under budget. I’ve always been very aware that it’s not the record company’s money that’s being spent, it’s the artist’s, and I do not want to leave them in a deep hole.”

Street says that PPL plays an important role in the music industry today: “I find that that’s what we have to rely on to help fill in the gap that has been left by the lack of CD and record sales,”

says Street. “So to get some income from the PPL side of the business is a very welcome and much-needed income stream. I think the worst time was about 10 years ago with all the downloading on pirate sites. So many producers and engineers that were expecting to get some income from their royalties found that it had completely dried up.

“So it’s very good that there is another source of income, because I think when tracks are performed, it’s not just the music you’re listening to, it’s the sound of the record. That’s why you get so many artists sampling things – because it’s not just the music contained in that motif they want, it’s also the sound sample that they want as well. When records have been sampled heavily and there is a songwriter that gets a percentage of that record because their music is in the sample, I would argue that the producers can get a cut too, because it’s your sound that they’re sampling.”

With an outstanding contribution award under his belt and an enviable client roster, Street is in a position to pick and choose who he works with. “ I’m lucky in that respect. I’ve always been... not, choosy,” he pauses…“I’d say that’s a bit too hard a word. I’m a little bit particular about what I take on. I suppose you could say that’s choosy,” he laughs.

Katie Tavini

Learning From The Master

LEARNING FROM THE MASTER Katie Tavini is one of only a few women nominated at this year’s MPG Awards, but is excited to let her work, not her gender, do the talking. “I’ve only done two filmed interviews ever, and the first one was a car crash,” she admits, as we set up for her interview about being nominated for Mastering Engineer Of The Year.

“After that first interview, the people interviewing me were like, ‘I don’t see why women-only things have to be a thing,’ and then they went on a big antifeminist rant. It doesn’t matter that it’s opportunities, it’s that no one was giving [women] them!”

Women being fairly represented at industry events for the arts is a subject fraught with tension, with high profile female actors drawing attention to the lack of female nominees at the Oscars and BAFTA ceremonies in recent years (shout out to Natalie Portman for her all-male nominees dig), while it was also noted that there were no female nominees in the producer categories at the Grammy Awards this year. Is it just that men happened to be better in their respective categories on those occasions; are women not as drawn to these lines of work? Or are women not given the same opportunities? This year, Tavini is one of three women nominated across the MPG Award engineering and production categories, and has her own thoughts on the matter:

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“I go to mixed events and people think I’m there as someone’s girlfriend,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s tough because there are a lot of amazing women in this industry, but there aren’t usually that many women nominated in the categories. But it goes in peaks and troughs: one year you’ll have loads of women nominated, like a few years ago when so many women won awards, and it was really amazing. This year, I guess people have just got their heads down and are cracking on with work. When there’s such a huge divide, you’re always going to have a bit of a gap there. And because there’s so many more men than women in the industry, if women were to get shortlisted every year, they’d be the same ones!”

Tavini acknowledges that it’s an incredible opportunity to be recognised for an award, but that it should be for good quality work, regardless of gender: “I don’t think any of the women that I know want to be known for being a woman in the industry – they want to be

known for being an amazing producer, mix engineer or recording engineer,” she clarifies. “There is such an emphasis on gender and music, but until things are a bit more equal, that’s always going to be the case.”

That WTF moment Fascinated by sound from a young age, Tavini remembers listening to her dad’s vinyl collection and being intrigued by the intricacies of a stereo mix.

“I noticed that some different sounds were coming out of each speaker, and I was like, ‘what the fuck? That’s so cool!

I want to do that’. Obviously, I didn’t know what it was at the time, but as I got older I took more of an interest in studying audio. I nerded out! I used to borrow books from the library that had massive lists of all of the Midi notes and numbers, and I’d sit in my bedroom making music.”

Tavini plays the violin, which was useful for learning musical theory, then went on to study music at university, which really opened her eyes to the

Katie Tavini

Learning From The Master

“I was looking to improve my mixes, someone told me I should learn to master; whether it was good advice or not, I took it...” world of audio engineering. What she thought would be some casual work experience at Manchester’s Limefield Studio then turned out to be her first job in engineering.

“It was a proper studio job,” she remembers, smiling. “John Ellis, who owns the studio is an absolute next-level creative genius. And Bill Leader, who produced from there, is such an amazing producer – and he really gets people.

Watching him work and engineering for him was such an amazing opportunity.

He taught me so much stuff; he’s been an engineer and a producer for his whole working life, and I think he was 80 the first year that I started working there.

He has so much knowledge to share; I wouldn’t be doing this now if it wasn’t for that.”

Turning To Mastering A piece of advice changed everything for Tavini: “I was looking to improve my mixes,” she recalls. “Someone told me that if I wanted to do that I should learn to master. Whether it was good advice or not, I took it. I loved what I discovered

and never looked back. Plus, I’ve got a short attention span – I can’t be doing with half a day of listening to one drum sound,” she laughs.

Tavini then started using tracks from the studios she was working with and attempted to master them at home, doing – in her own words – “a really, really bad job”. She then tried to match them up and compare them to the professional masters that came back.

“I think because I had done a lot of critical listening in my degree, especially because it was more classical musicbased, this really helped me analyse the proper masters and work out why mine did not sound anything like them!”

After a lot of practicing, someone approached Tavini to master something – a job she took on by warning them in advance.

“I said alright, but don’t use it if it’s shit, please, for both of our sakes! But they really liked it and ended up using it, and then they asked me to master something else, which was Sonic Boom Six’s self titled album. That did quite well on the punk scene, and I started getting

more work off the back of that, which was amazing,” she says, humbly. “So it’s a really long winded way of saying, I got into this by a happy accident.”

However, going from engineering to mastering wasn’t smooth sailing.

“It wasn’t easy at all,” she recalls.

“There are so many more factors involved, from actually mastering the track, and knowing how to set up a mastering room is still a learning curve.

There’s the whole building of your studio, your equipment, and also building up your tastes, because that’s really, really important. Listening to as much music as possible is the only way you can get really good at mastering. I’ve still got a long way to go.”

Tavini’s nomination for MPG Mastering Engineer Of The Year came as a surprise to her when happening to come across Headliner’s article announcing the nominees.

“I’ve been a member of MPG since 2011, so to be nominated was amazing, because it’s all my colleagues in the music industry. When I started out, I was based in Manchester and it just felt like 27 HEADLINER

Katie Tavini

Learning From The Master

“It’s a great night for celebrating the industry and the things that have been achieved in the past year, as well as hanging out..” the whole music industry was Londonbased. It’s not really the case now, because social media is so big and it’s a lot easier for people to connect. The MPG has been really welcoming and supportive of me, and to be nominated is amazing. Just being shortlisted has been pretty life changing, and I’m very grateful. It’s a great night for celebrating the industry and the things that have been achieved in the past year, as well as actually hanging out. Because when you’re in this industry, you don’t really get to see people very often because you’re all working at different studios or in different cities.”

When compared to its more glamorous sound engineering cousin, there is a misconception that mastering can be a sterile art.

“I think there’s this illusion around mastering that it’s some kind of wizardry, which it’s just not,” she asserts.

“There’s quite a lot of admin involved in mastering, and all of that has to have metadata embedded into it – you’ve got a run off all your different formats like EDP, or vinyl sides. So, while there is quite 28 HEADLINER

a lot of organisational work, which can be the dry bit, the audio processing can be really creative. There’s never anything that’s ever the same, because every track that comes in has been recorded in a different place, by different people, with different tastes, and with a producer that’s got a different vision. So it’s how to use the studio to get the best out of that.”

When it comes to mastering practices, less is more for Tavini: “Because it’s so easy to ruin something!” she stresses. “If you’re working with a producer and you send a mixed master, unless they’ve said ‘we’re not entirely happy with the sound of it,’ chances are, they’re happy with the sound of it, and that’s how they want it to sound. So really, you want to keep that sound. Whereas, when I started mastering, I was like, ‘how do I make it sound more like this?’ And actually, that’s not the point of mastering, because, what’s the point in making something sound like something else? Everything is just going to end up sounding the same.

So I think the real beauty and subtlety is in the differences between projects.”

“I work for myself and I’ve built up my mastering work, and I’ve had to pay rent, travel and you know – eat – alongside mastering and working and building a client base. So there was absolutely no way in hell I would be able to afford the really expensive stuff.”

To get around this, for the last three years Tavini has been building up an arsenal of outboard gear.

“So it’s the opposite from your typical mastering studio,” she says, pointing out that she loves Sonnox plugins. “They are amazing! I especially like the Sonnox Limiter. The quality of plugins now compared to 10 years ago is insane. I also like the Brainworx Digital mid/side equaliser plugin, because sometimes you get mixes which just feel a little bit too dense or scrunched up, so you can really spread stuff out using that.”

Regardless of who wins on the night, Tavini is already looking forward to some exciting projects this year: “The hardest part is that I can’t talk about a lot of it,” she says. “But I can say I’ll be working with artists that I love!”

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Manny Marroquin

Larrabee Studios

THE LARRABEE EVOLUTION

Manny Marroquin is one of the most in demand mixing engineers in the business, and has worked with internationally renowned artists from Mariah Carey to Beyonce, Ed Sheeran to Lady Gaga, Rihanna to The Rolling Stones, to name but a few. Based at Larrabee Studios in Los Angeles, Marroquin takes us through the journey of the iconic recording facility, which has been an SSL studio from day one.

Larrabee Studios has been a leader in the Los Angeles music industry for over 40 years, during that time hosting many of the leading artists from yesterday and today. Originally owned by pop lyricist, Gerry Goffin, and his wife and songwriting partner/singer, Carol King, the studio was purchased in 1969 by the Mills. By the late ‘70s, Larrabee had grown into one of the first SSL studios in the country.

Marroquin, who has eight Grammys to his name, first came to Larrabee Studios as a client in the mid ‘90s after learning that it was a studio with a reputation for catering to engineers, in addition to boasting the very best equipment. Following a recession several years later, as a key client, Marroquin gradually became the majority owner of the studio.

“The one thing about Larrabee is

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we’ve always had the greatest engineers here – from David Bianco, to Sylvia Massy,” he says. “Mick Guzauski was a tech here – it feels like everyone has come through here, from Dave Pensado to the Dexter Simmons’ of this world. It’s got a lot of rich history as being the goto place for a lot of engineers.”

Within that history lies the evolution of the studio’s consoles. Larrabee Studios has always used SSL, starting with an SSL 4000G and upgrading to J and then K Series consoles as and when they came out, with the new Duality Deltas being the latest SSLs to make a splash. But Mills always wanted Larrabee to be an SSL facility from day one.

“SSL is part of my sound - how I drive the console, the channels, and the EQs,” Marroquin explains. “Having three totally different consoles, each with a different sound and workflow has made

for an interesting SSL journey.”

The SSL Story The main room (studio two) was the first room to feature a 4000G console, which was later swapped for a 9000J.“I was a fan of the J, but not as much as the G,” Marroquin remembers. “The G has the best compressors on any console by far – there is nothing that comes close to it. To this day, this is my favourite compressor. The G sounded so good, and very 70s, but it was definitely old technology in terms of how we’d use the computer. And when the J came out, I remember the top end being super smooth, like I’d never heard before. But the computer – it would save settings in two-to-three seconds, not 30 seconds, so it was very innovative at the time. The J’s computer was also so much faster – the recall alone, just the graphics made

Manny Marroquin

Larrabee Studios

“There was criticism when we picked a Duality for such a beautiful room, but we like to think we’re progressive, and on the forefront of technology, quality and workflow, and that’s what some of our clients demand...” it feel like ‘oh, now we’re in the future!’

“And then the K came out. I can drive the K channels a lot harder than I can the J, and the stereo buss – well, I can smash it, and it sounds so good! With the J, I couldn’t do it as much, so in terms of overall workflow, the K is the ultimate analogue console. So to summarise: G, to J, to K got better and better... and then Duality came in. It’s smaller, and better for mixing in terms of speed.”

Marroquin first encountered modern SSL workflow when working with Alicia Keys on a small SSL AWS. When Duality came out, that’s where the big shift happened, Marroquin says, adding that the Duality consoles are becoming his go-tos for mixing: “We all saw the good old days coming to a near end, but the good thing about SSL is that they kept improving the product, and the Duality is one of the most fun desks to mix on for a lot of reasons. So I have to give it to SSL for always innovating and executing in a tough marketplace.

“I think I mix quicker on a Duality, and this may sound silly, but I feel like

because of the size of the console itself , I don’t have to get up and go to my matrix, whereas on the K, because it’s wider, I physically have to get up! So for me, for the workflow on the Duality, I literally have to extend my arms in either direction, and I cover a lot of real estate. I never realised such a simple thing could make such a big difference!”

The Duality Delta 72 was the first to be deployed at Larrabee, with the Delta 48 replacing the 4000G. “We were conscious about power, and the Duality made sense, as you plug it in and go, and we don’t have to worry about old tech that would slow down the workflow,” Marroquin explains.

The [Delta] 72 currently resides in studio six, while the 48 is now in studio four – which is where the old 4000G used to be.

“They’re really nice mix rooms, both of them – the 72 is in one of the nicest studios in the world; you can put a 30-piece orchestra in there and 10-piece band with isolation. It’s a gorgeous room,” he continues. “When we took over, there was a lot of criticism on why

we picked a Duality for such a beautiful classic room, but we like to think we’re progressive, and on the forefront of technology, quality and workflow, and that’s what some of our clients demand.

We know who we want to be, and where we want to be – and we think Duality sits just where we want to be.”

Marroquin says the Duality pre is surprisingly transparent: “I really like it. If you have a great mic, why would you want to colour it more?

We have an amazing mic collection at Larrabee – you put one of our Neumann U47s on the Duality pre, and it sounds amazing. These Duality mic pres sound as good as anything out there, in my opinion. And this console’s EQ is probably my favourite EQ ever, and it is also the cleanest sounding SSL EQ. In fact, it could be better than the K! That is one of the things that really makes that console.

“And, of course, you also have the G Buss on the Duality; I love smashing that stereo buss – and the Duality can take it, and sometimes even more so than the older boards. It’s pretty phenomenal.”

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Manny Marroquin

Larrabee Studios

“We have improved everything, taking Larrabee into 2020 with the most modern and classic kit combination...”

Elaborating on the G Buss, Marroquin likens it to a production tool: “If it’s full spectrum hip hop, it’s harder to drive it, as you don’t want to take the attack out of the low end, but if I’m mixing pop music, or maybe some alternative stuff, I like driving it from the very beginning, as I can make decisions based on that sound. It becomes a production tool, which is really cool.”

The Duality workflow also impresses Marroquin where it counts: “Using it with the Pro Tools workstation, to me, was the ultimate deciding factor. If you’re working on a vocal blend and you put it on the Pro Tools workstation, it’s so amazing being able to grab faders and not to have to go into Pro Tools,” Marroquin reveals.

“And the recall – are you kidding me? It is heaven! I’ve got two assistants, and they recall in about 10 minutes, where it used to take at least 45 minutes. It’s the best - one of the biggest improvements. The graphics are great, the meters are great, and you get right on it. I can always count on it. We never ask ourselves ‘did we get the recall right?’ - as it’s spot on every 32 HEADLINER

time, and so quick.”

“The 72 is a great board for the big tracking room, so we wanted that number of pres, but I mix on the 48 even if I have the 72 frame. I try to keep everything on the 48, as to me, it’s kind of the same. I only move between the 48 channels on either frame, as it’s so quick.

Everything’s right in front of me - and the 48, of course, is a smaller footprint, and I am using it on so many different projects now. I am 100% happy and wouldn’t change it for anything. I think we’re at an all time great moment at Larrabee right now.”

Restaurant With A Twist Larrabee doesn’t just limit the use of SSL to its studio rooms: one can also be found in the in-house restaurant.

“It’s really a supper club of 2020 – well, the future supper club, as I like to call it,” Marroquin laughs. “The concept is to have a stage whenever we need it, and we’re basically pre-wired via fibre optic cable to the studio, so we can record any show in any one of our rooms. Talk about content we can create! We can record it

there with the SSL Live L300 console at the venue, but we can also record it here with any of our desks, so it makes it a very interesting thing to do. So now any artist that comes, we’ll be able to offer content, and no one is able to do that anywhere at this point.”

Three XL9000K consoles still call Larrabee Studios home to this day, with the facility continuing to offer its clients the classic kit it is known for; but the fusion of old and new is what makes it the forward-thinking facility that it is.

“We have improved everything, taking Larrabee into 2020 with the most modern and classic kit combination,” Marroquin concludes. “The clients feel the difference, and that they’re being treated like they’re at a 5-star resort.

We try to take care of them and keep improving; try to make a working environment that caters to a lot of different demos and artists.” www.solidstatelogic.com

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Shure SM7

The Rise Of Influence

THE RISE OF INFLUENCE From broadcast, to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, to podcasting – Shure’s SM7 has enjoyed quite the ride.

Headliner discovers why the mic is still leading the way – 47 years later.

Shure’s SM7 has had quite the journey. Introduced in 1973, the mic (available today as the SM7B) started in broadcast, made the jump to unconventional studio favourite, was used by Michael Jackson to record Thriller, and is now enjoying a new lease of life as a go-to podcasting mic.

Apparently, it all started with the SM5: The dynamic boom microphone found a home in many radio and film studios following its introduction in 1966. While widely accepted in the broadcast and motion picture industries, Shure set out to develop a new microphone offering a smaller footprint and some of the same sonic characteristics of its newlyintroduced SM57 in a mic designed to reach beyond the broadcast industry.

According to John Born, product manager at Shure, there was no budget: “A group of Shure acoustical engineers were given the SM57 cartridge element (Unidyne III) and asked, without restrictions on size or cost, to make it better. They went nuts!”

This is perhaps one of the reasons that Born refers to the SM7B as ‘an SM57 on steroids’. Variations of the Shure Unidyne III cartridge are used in

many of Shure’s dynamic microphones to this day: the SM57, SM58 and SM7B all share a similar acoustic network based on the Unidyne III element, but the SM7B diaphragm is slightly different and is optimised for increased low end response, the larger housing allowing for greater volume behind the cartridge, which extends its low end response.

“The SM7 was designed as an extended, full range microphone and intended to be universal in its applications,” Born explains. “It has a flatter and wider response than its SM57 and SM58 siblings but its frequency shaping switches in the back (selectable low cut and presence peak filtering) allow it to more than adequately fulfil and enhance applications where the SM57 or SM58 excel.”

The SM7 debuted in 1976 and eventually replaced the SM5B, which was discontinued in 1986.

The Thriller Effect No one could have predicted that the SM7 would have made its big recording studio debut in the high profile way that it did: via Michael Jackson’s groundbreaking album, Thriller, which

to this day is reported to be the best selling album of all time. You got to be startin’ somethin’, indeed.

Quincy Jones and recording engineer, Bruce Swedien, were the ones to select the mic, which was used for most of Jackson’s vocals and, according to legend, all of Vincent Price’s.

With all the ultra-high-end recording microphones available to the producers, why the unassuming SM7 – then a standard for radio and voiceover work?

“I was allowed the freedom to make microphone choices, and nobody ever said a word,” reveals Swedien. “I just did it! For example, I used a Shure SM7 on most of Michael’s lead vocals – Billie Jean, The Way You Make Me Feel - and boy, did that raise some eyebrows! But I love that mic, and I have six of them. The first one that I bought was in 1977, and it was one of the first SM7s to be used on a major music project. It’s dynamic of course, and it worked just flawlessly with Michael – if you notice, you can hear all the lyrics very clearly.”

The SM7 quickly became one of Swedien’s favourite mics, and he went on to use it religiously: “I recorded most of the big hit

Rolling Stones Mobile

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Shure SM7

The Rise Of Influence

SM7Bs on Headliner Podcast

“The rise of podcasting and YouTube influencers has given the SM7B a new lease of life for modern content creators...” records of Michael’s career with him in front of one of my SM7s,” he concurs.

“I’ve been pretty vocal about how much I love that microphone – it’s a great mic.”

Another high profile act flying the SM7 flag was The Rolling Stones, whose state of the art mobile recording studio included Shure SM7, SM58, SM82, SM53 and SM56 microphones. In 1970, the mobile studio was driven to Stargroves, Mick Jagger’s English country estate, to record much of the classic Sticky Fingers.

Other bands that used the mobile studio to record include Queen, Santana, Dire Straits, Fleetwood Mac, Bad Company, and Iron Maiden.

“It was the only independent mobile recording unit around,” Keith Richards wrote in his autobiography, Life. “We didn’t realise when we put it together how rare it was – soon we were renting it out to the BBC and ITV because they only had one apiece. It was another one of those beautiful, graceful, fortuitous things that happened to the Stones.”

1971 saw Deep Purple travel to Switzerland, to make what would become their bestselling album, Machine Head. The group wanted the best venue and recording kit available to them.

“The Rolling Stones Mobile was the band’s weapon of choice,” said Dr. Drew Thomas, archivist for Deep Purple. “When we think about Montreux, Machine Head and the band’s legacy, we can’t separate

them from the Mobile – it was a critical component in the band’s recording process, and very integral to the legend of Deep Purple.”

When the Mobile was almost destroyed in 1971, it was immortalised in the lyrics of Deep Purple classic, Smoke On The Water following a fire which caused smoke to spread across Lake Geneva: ‘We ended up at the Grand hotel / It was empty cold and bare / But with the Rolling truck Stones thing just outside / Making our music there.’

Next came the SM7A revision in 1999, which improved the humbucking coil and the design of the yoke mount, bringing us to the SM7B version in 2001, which incorporated a larger windscreen – although acoustically, the microphone versions performed identically.

So what is it about the mic that keeps people talking after all these years?

“Maybe it just takes this long for a mic to gain acceptance, but some of it has to do with the emergence of podcasting – there’s an appetite for a high quality voiceover mic,” says Born. “Then there’s the fact that this is a $350 microphone that has beaten studio microphones costing 10 times as much in microphone shoot-outs. It’s finally getting the recognition it deserves.”

Shure artist relations associate, Ryan Smith agrees: “It continues to be used on major

recordings, both as the lead vocal mic and on other applications: guitar amp, bass amp, kick drum, hi-hat, snare drum, horns and many more.”

But the mic’s story doesn’t end here. In more recent years, the rise of podcasting and YouTube influencers has given it a new lease of life as the microphone for modern content creators. Since the SM7B started life as a broadcast studio microphone, it’s perhaps not surprising to see it come full-circle; if anything, it’s a testament to its versatility.

“I think some of it comes down to isolation,” Born nods. “Compared to a typical studio condenser – and the multiple-element quad array products typically found in USB podcasting mics – a large-diaphragm dynamic mic will capture less of the room. A high-quality dynamic mic not only sounds great, but it also offers more isolation from the poor acoustic environment of most podcasting locations. Combine that with the mic’s illustrious history and the iconic appearance, and it’s easy to see how it quickly became the aspirational mic from a budding generation of bloggers and influencers. The SM7 story continues into yet another decade, and as we continue to evolve the product (as we always do), who knows what it might inspire in the next generation of talent?” www.shure.com 35 HEADLINER

Paul Norris

The Hip Hop Club

THE HIP HOP CLUB

Metropolis Studios’ chief studio engineer, Paul Norris explains why top of the range equipment and taking care of clients has helped the studio become a UK home to American hip hop artists.

“One of the things I love about working at Metropolis is the variety of stuff; we can be doing strings one day, hip hop the next, and then a rock band the next day,” begins Norris. “All those musicians like to work at different times of the day, so it keeps it quite varied.”

Joining Metropolis in 2011 as a runner, Norris quickly worked his way up through the ranks, gaining valuable experience on a wide range of projects covering hip hop, classical, pop and metal.

“I was part time and I was gardening on the side,” he recalls. “After about eight months or so, I got put on a few different sessions, but not enough to become a full time assistant. After a whole year I was made an assistant, so I did that, and I just kept going!”

Norris says the journey from assistant to engineer was a fairly organic one: “You pick up stuff as you go along,” he explains. “And I learned from so many great engineers. They needed

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engineers one day, so I thought, ‘well, I’ll do that!’ It went from there, and that was it. I just never left!”

He’s clearly been doing something right: now Metropolis’ chief engineer, Norris won a Grammy Award for his engineering work on Rihanna’s Unapologetic album, and worked on Ed Sheeran’s X, Zayn’s Mind of Mine, and various 5.1 mixes for Gorillaz.

More recently, he’s been responsible for recording and mixing Metropolis’ Live to Vinyl sessions for artists including Lewis Capaldi, Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, and Rag ‘n’ Bone Man, in addition to working with Paloma Faith, H.E.R, Michael Kiwanuka, Little Mix, Snow Patrol, David Guetta, Jessie J, Wiz Khalifa, and The Black Eyed Peas.

In his role as chief engineer, Norris is in charge of the Metropolis kit inventory.

“I need everything to run smoothly, I make sure the assistants are up to scratch with what they need to know, and make sure they haven’t got any

issues,” he says. “So it’s like I have two separate jobs: my job as an engineer is the same as any other engineer, and the chief engineering side is more of a managerial role in a way, but without being a manager,” he grins.

Norris admits that the desks in the studio aren’t getting used for mixing as much as he would like: “Time constraints and money constraints just mean that in-the-box mixing is probably the way to go,” he says. “For me personally, I’d still have people come in and mix on the desk, although people still do that sometimes.

Rich Costey mixed the Sam Fender album here last year in Studio E using an SSL XL 9072 K Series console, but that was a specific project and the label knew that that was how he was going to be working, so they were fairly willing to work within those constraints.”

Norris attributes consoles being neglected in favour of in-the-box mixing to labels wanting super-quick changes:

Paul Norris

The Hip Hop Club

“We have become a home to a lot of American hip hop artists; if they’re not recording in hotel rooms, they like to come here...”

“For instance, if you turn the high hats up, you don’t want to be recalling the whole desk, and you really don’t want to have to print stems of 100 tracks just in case one of them needs turning up,” he says frankly. “So unfortunately, the desks don’t get as used as much as they should for mixing.”

However, it’s not all doom and gloom: “When it comes to tracking, we’re tracking a whole band,” he says. “For that, quite often the entire desk is going to be getting used because you have so much set up ready to go. So they’re still getting used in the tracking rooms. Mixing just tends to be in the box just because with the way plugins are now, we’re so close to what the outboard was, and you just make up that difference.”

Recently, Norris has been using an Austrian Audio OC818 microphone, which he has been curious about trying for a while: “I saw some information about the mic and the company’s heritage [the Viennese team is mostly comprised of former AKG employees]. I thought that the mic sounded like it was amazing and something we were missing. Those old AKG mics are very expensive and they’re not necessarily in the best condition, so if the OC818 is something that comes from that lineage, I just thought: ‘I’ve got to try them!’ They’ve been used on pretty

much every tracking session here since,” he points out.

The mic has particularly impressed Norris when recording drums at Metropolis: “I’ve used them a lot as overheads, as drum mics, on strings, and as a close mic on a piano. They’re just such a natural-sounding mic,” he enthuses. “It’s got such a smooth top end. Quite often when I’m recording stuff, I’m not going to be mixing it. So I don’t want whoever’s mixing it to have too much work to do.

Quite a lot of our clients are on very short time frames so we haven’t really got the time to go: ‘We’ll try six different pairs of mics and you pick them’. You need to know that the ones you use are going to do the job. You need to know that the mics you’re using have clients going: ‘Yeah, that sounds good!’”

Each of Metropolis’ studios have various monitoring options, however one of the ‘house standards’ are Genelec’s 8351 studio monitors as nearfields, which are used as the main monitors in Studio B – a tracking and mix room that has been used by George Michael, The Stone Roses, U2, Elton John, The Verve, Rihanna and will.i.am.

“I think it’s important to have the same nearfields in every room, because projects do move from one room to another and it’s important to be able to

trust what you’re hearing,” says Norris.

“We use the Genelecs in every room, and the great thing about that is the calibration. I think it’s great to have a nice standard across every room that people can move around and go, ‘that’s the same as what I listened to downstairs’.

There’s nothing worse than recording something in one room and then moving to another room and going, ‘Oh God, that’s not what it sounded like!’”

With a few studios closing their doors of late, Norris is pleased to report that Metropolis is the busiest that he has ever known it to be: “We have become a home to a lot of American hip hop artists; if they’re not recording in hotel rooms, they like to come here. We had Future in last year, and he had two rooms for about two months. The thing with that community of artists is a lot of them are friends, so we end up becoming a hub for a lot of hip hop artists, which is great.”

“In London there’s not the home for those artists in the same way as there is in Atlanta, L.A., and New York. So it’s good to be a base here for them. That is down to our service, the way that we look after our clients, and just knowing that the monitoring is good and that the studios are going to have everything they need.” www.thisismetropolis.com 37 HEADLINER

SK Shlomo

Mental Me

SK SHLOMO: MENTAL ME

Simon Shlomo Kahn, aka SK Shlomo, is a world-record breaking beatboxer, world looping champion, and collaborator with artists including Björk, Ed Sheeran, and Damon Albarn.

For many years, he carried a secret: like many other creatives, he struggled with depression, and at times it felt like it was going to swallow him whole. This is his story, in his words.

Photos Joseph Branston | Andy Teo Photocillin | Nathan Gallagher

In 2018, I had been off the road for nearly two years after a series of suicidal episodes. But last year, I launched my debut album to raise mental health awareness, gave a TEDx talk telling my story, played on the Other Stage at Glastonbury Festival, and created a oneman stage show that got nominated for the Edinburgh Fringe Mental Health Award. I went from barely being able to perform in 2018, to heading on a tour of over 140 shows throughout 2019.

I can’t tell you how proud I am to have made this recovery, and how grateful I am for the huge amounts of support I have received from family, professionals and from the public. So when Novation asked me to write a piece about my story, I saw this as an opportunity to be honest about what happened to me.

The intention is to encourage others to be more open about their vulnerabilities with the goal of normalising the concept of struggle. That way we collectively feel safer to support each other, rather than feeling isolated or believing that everyone else is living the ‘perfect’ life that we see on platforms like Instagram.

I have always identified as a

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performer. As a preschooler growing up in a noisy British-Iraqi-Israeli family, I believed all the countless Arabic aunties telling me I was beautiful. Aged three years old, I was bellydancing at my grandmother’s parties and I quickly learnt to win love by projecting a happy persona. My family’s loving praise made me the centre of the world - a world rich with vibrant colours, rhythms, and imagination.

Until I got to school. Grey, British primary school. We were the only immigrant family and aged four or five, I was painfully aware that I was different. I didn’t belong, and it hurt. Until I turned eight and discovered my super powers.

On the day of my eighth birthday, my parents gave me a drum kit. And with that drum kit, I began a love affair with music that took me away from my pain. I found a rhythm - a purpose.

I started making tapes of songs I was writing, singing, rapping and drumming.

I made rudimentary multi-tracked recordings by stealing my brother’s tape recorder so I could press play on one tape and record myself playing along on the other. I started to dream of

becoming a world-renowned musician like my heroes — The Prodigy, Michael Jackson, and Freddie Mercury. I kept practising my drums and, after a solo drum kit performance at the school concert, I had my first taste of ‘fame’.

Suddenly, the kids who had never given me a second glance knew my name.

They wanted to be my friends. This felt good, and it was addictive. I wanted more. I doubled down on my drum practice and applied for a scholarship at music school. But after complaints from the neighbours, my parents had to impose strict rules about what time of day I could practise my drums.

This wasn’t as bad as it sounds, because it led me to discover the art of beatboxing. Beatboxing was an even easier way to impress people, gain acceptance, and even get free food by showing off my vocal skills to unsuspecting takeaway owners. What I hadn’t realised was that beatboxing would change my life. One day I was approached by Björk to work on her all-vocal solo album, Medulla, an experience so inspiring I decided to go solo. I picked up a loop pedal

SK Shlomo

Mental Me

“I launched a crowdfunding campaign with a video talking openly about my mental health; it was scary, but empowering...” so I could expand my beats into full songs. I became the first World Looping Champion, and the first non-classical Artist in Residence at London’s famous Southbank Centre. This beatboxing had given me an international audience. I was making a living from my art, and from the outside, I had the whole world in my hands. But there was a truth that I was too scared to tell anybody: I was deeply unhappy.

Every new broken barrier left me even more hungry to find that ultimate achievement that would finally calm my unrest, until there was only one ambition left: I wanted to be a singer-songwriter and make my own album. One day in 2016 I felt a spark of inspiration. I sat at the piano and started to write. But what came out was terrifying - it felt so real, so raw and emotional, like I couldn’t control it.

I hired a studio in the middle of nowhere where I wouldn’t get distracted and settled in to write. I wrote five sick tracks. It was flowing. I was thinking, ‘I’m a flipping genius’. But, on the sixth day, things went wrong. After those years of touring, the constant distraction, the crowds cheering me, validating me, I was suddenly left alone with only myself and my mind. It felt like I couldn’t breathe, like the built-up waters of anxiety were finally rising above me. I felt helpless,

panicking. It felt I would never feel safe to be seen again. And after a few weeks of stasis, feeling like I was holding back some kind of tidal wave of disaster, I was finally ready to admit that I wasn’t okay.

First of all to myself, then to my partner, who after a lot of encouragement and false starts, helped me to speak to a doctor. I reached out to BAPAM — the British Association of Performing Arts Medicine, and the BAPAM doctor referred me for therapy.

Over the months that followed I worked so hard, avoiding being out in public, but trying to pull myself back up from the darkness, trying to rebuild something. I tried yoga, meditation, journalling and CBT. I didn’t want to take medication. This depression episode had me hiding away for nearly a whole year, writing my truth into my songs, isolated by the shame of this secret suffering.

And as a performing artist who was off the road, but still responsible for feeding a family of four, I was not earning any money. The CBT was helping, but the therapist was concerned that I needed trauma support and referred me to a trauma therapist. I immediately began treatment for PTSD. This meant facing my biggest fear: I had to revisit my memories of surviving that near death experience when I was four years old. I realised just how much of my life I had spent in ‘fight

or flight’ mode as a result of that trauma, like I had to be on guard day and night in case anything terrifying happened again.

I kept on writing my music. The songs became part of the therapy; a vehicle for processing the truths of my past.

And when the logical time came to tell the world I was making an album, it was scary because these songs were about depression and very few of my friends, and certainly none of my fans knew I had been struggling. But these songs came from the heart and they felt right. I decided it was time to come out of hiding.

I launched a crowdfunding campaign with a video talking openly about my mental health. It was scary, but empowering — I started getting messages from people all around the world who could relate, and my total quickly zoomed up to 15%. I had been warned that I would need a thick skin, so I practised in therapy, refining and simplifying my story, until I’d found what felt like a safe way to be vulnerable.

But nothing could prepare me for what happened next.

One day, a few weeks into my campaign I woke up to a barrage of angry messages from somebody on Twitter, claiming to be a fan but attacking me about my mental health. He told me I needed to see how low I had stooped.

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SK Shlomo

Mental Me

“To feel safe enough to ask for help before our setbacks grow into secrets, we need to take small steps towards vulnerability...”

He told me that depression, and specifically suicide, are evolution’s way of weeding out inadequate men who aren’t fit to reproduce, who aren’t fit to be fathers. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t breathe. I kept having these frightening, intrusive thoughts.

But one thing had changed since my last episode of depression. Since I’d opened up online, my friends, family and fans had started checking in with me every day, and a well-timed online message just asking if I was okay brought me the courage to share what was happening in my head. And being met with compassion and reassurance helped me pause for breath, to see that I didn’t have to attack myself, or shame or isolate myself for not feeling good enough to live.

Looking back, I know these feelings are all too common. And this anxiety only becomes amplified within the artificial walls of social media — the echo chamber for all our insecurities. It’s like the noise drowns out all reason. Zooming out, I could see just how much I still had here to live for. That online message saved my life.

After this point in my story, something changed in me. I had learned to surrender, to breathe a little bit deeper every time I felt like I couldn’t bear who I was. Once I started to embrace my whole truth, I found my centre, I rediscovered my spirit. For me, recovery meant learning to stop running from the pain. I realise that we can’t ever be 100% 40 HEADLINER

recovered, but recovery hopefully means finding a balance, and accepting when things are just too much. Mental health is just like physical health, in that it will go up and down over time, but when it’s hard, hopefully we can learn to take it a day at a time, or even one breath at a time. We all have painful emotions and it takes great strength to examine them with honesty and truth.

I wouldn’t change any of the pain I’ve been through. To change that would be to change who I am today. I realise how lucky I am — at no point do I want to imply that my life has been harder than others. But when you’re in it, you can’t see the truth. In fact that feeling of privilege can work against you — like you should be happy, or you feel like you’re not worthy of that privilege because you’re not good enough.

Anyway, since I decided to be open, my whole world has transformed. People look me in the eye now. They aren’t afraid to be real with me. And it turns out the community around me was ready to transform too — people reported back to me that they are now getting support with struggles they had previously been too ashamed to share, some even seeking professional help after hearing my story. One of my fans finally signed up to become a mental health professional after watching the stage show I made about my journey.

Since giving my TED talk I’ve been asked to speak about my experience at multiple events and I’m often asked:

‘What is the one thing we can do to support people around us who we might not know are suffering?’ My answer is simple: don’t probe into their lives, but be more open about your own. When we demonstrate vulnerability, we make it safe for others to do the same. I’m not suggesting we all have to broadcast our deepest darkest insecurities on the internet — that is not the answer to our suicide epidemic. But to feel safe enough to ask for help with our setbacks way before they grow into shameful, destructive secrets, we all need to take small steps towards vulnerability.

If like me you believe that sharing our weaknesses makes us stronger, I invite you to try something. Try sharing one truth today, big or small. By sharing what’s really happening today might help someone else speak their truth tomorrow. Who knows, it might even save a life. My dream is that we collectively change our approach to the way we talk about our struggles, especially via social media, and turn these vulnerabilities into a means to create a positive support network.

What if we decide to celebrate all that we are, even the parts of us we are ashamed of? Mine is just one of millions of similar stories, and even though I felt suicidal, like I couldn’t go on any longer, I wouldn’t change any of it, because without my story, I wouldn’t be me. www.novationmusic.com

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Cameron Craig

On The Level

ON THE LEVEL

In addition to racking up credits with an impressive array of artists, including Amy Winehouse and Adele during his career, MPG Recording Engineer Of The Year nominee, Cameron Craig has worked tirelessly to have producers and engineers mentioned in the same breath as artists, as Headliner discovers...

Having started out in his native Australia, Cameron Craig achieved success with many multi-platinum albums, securing a nomination for ARIA Engineer of the year in 1995. Going as far as he felt he could in Australia, Craig decided to move to the UK to further his career, although England wasn’t his first choice.

“To be honest, I wanted to move to L.A.,” he says sheepishly. “I knew people in L.A., but getting a visa for there was tricky. Anyway, I think I’m more English than most English people! My brother lived in the UK, so coming here was easy. But I didn’t know anyone, so I literally didn’t work for a year. I was just trying to get a foot in.”

A foot-in he got after securing a job at a studio in Wandsworth, where he immediately felt very at home.

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“The reason I left Australia at that point was because I was pretty comfortable,” he clarifies. “So I came over thinking I’d just carry on doing that, but it never quite worked out that way.”

After moving onto Chiswick Reach Studios, Craig had to start from scratch: “I basically had to throw out everything I’d learned, because anything you did there that you would normally do in a big studio just didn’t work. So I had to relearn everything.

That’s where I met [U.N.K.L.E’s] James Lavelle. We ended up working together and have done ever since. That put me on a different track; it became less technical and more creative, which was really helpful for me.”

England proved to be the right move after all, as today Craig is a two-time Grammy award-winning producer-

mixer-engineer, with an impressive credit list that includes several albums with U.N.K.L.E., and credits with Adele, Amy Winehouse, Paulo Nutini, Bjork, Annie Lennox, Grace Jones, Joe Strummer, Duffy, and many more.

One Grammy was secured for Album of the Year for his part in recording Adele’s phenomenally successful 25, and for Best Engineered - Non Classical in 2008 for his contribution to the Suzanne Vega album, Beauty and Crime, not forgetting recording the orchestra on Duffy’s Grammy and Brit Awardwinning Rockferry album.

Recent Projects ​This year, Craig is nominated for MPG’s Recording Engineer Of The Year for his recent work with U.N.K.L.E featuring Michael Kiwanuka, inspired by Alfonso

Cameron Craig

On The Level

“I do tend to choose studios that are a bit quirkier; for me, the environment is almost more important than the technical side...”

Cuarón’s Netflix film, Roma.

“It’s nice when [a nomination] comes along, because it is very much recognition, but from people who are busy making records,” he says. “So rather than just sales figures, it’s nice to be judged by people who are actually doing it.”

Working across many music styles, he approaches each project differently.

“What I do for one project won’t necessarily work for the next, so each one has a little bit of finding your feet for the first few days. But instead, I’ve got a lot of recurring clients, so that phase is gone and it becomes interesting just trying to get the best out of the songs.”

Out of all the critically acclaimed artists he has worked with, Sia left a real impression on Craig: “The first Sia record we did was about 15 years ago, and that was a really good project,” he recalls. “Creatively, it was like, ‘we have to do whatever it takes to make this sound great’. We had great players in this residential studio in Kent, and it was just a good, fun project. We were quite relaxed and were able to take our time and get things right. Everyone was on the same page, everyone was working

together, and the results were great.”

Over time, Craig became used to working in the quirky studios, and in turn - started to favour the more eclectic equipment found within them.

“I started working in the main studios again, but by then I kind of got the hang of working in weird places – the big studios didn’t have the weird gear! So I carry a lot of gear around with me – all weird and wonderful stuff.”

Studio Kit One thing Craig is never without is his trusty rack of vintage Neve 33135s: “They go with me everywhere, and I take them for their consistency; they’re great on guitars and vocals. They have a big open sound, and the EQ is a little more precise than my other options. I also have them as hardware inserts when mixing, where they get used on all sorts.

“I do tend to choose studios that are a bit quirkier, a little bit left field generally.

For me, the environment and that side of it is almost more important than the technical side. So I usually carry enough with me that the technical side is not an issue. Although nowadays it’s a lot better,” he notes. “A lot of studios have

all the strange ribbon mics, whereas 15 or 20 years ago, that was not the case.”

Craig is in a unique position out of all the MPG award nominees, serving as an executive director of the MPG, while sitting on the board of UK Music representing the MPG to the wider music community.

“The MPG is run by the five directors, and we all have our areas to deal with,” he explains. “My particular area is UK music and PPL.” When Craig first started, producers were not even on the agenda: “I literally sat there for the first six months going ‘and the producers, and the producers’ – then after a little while everyone started going, ‘oh, and the producers!’ Now we’re very much being talked about on the same level as everyone else. At the UK Music Summer Party they had three main political party leaders get up, and they all mentioned engineers and producers while talking about the whole industry. It’s great to have people be aware that we exist; we are working hard at growing that awareness.” www.cameroncraig.com 43 HEADLINER

Headphones will always be a personal choice – especially if, like myself, you have a stack of them, all of which have or at least have had a purpose over the years. Some I use for referencing in the recording studio, some are just easy to transport and plug into the iPhone; there’s even a custom set of IEMs in my collection, which I love when I want to hear, well, everything.

The noise cancelling headphone market is a crowded one, and although I’ve had a couple of sets over the years that have served me pretty well, I must admit, for a headphone lover like myself, I rarely take them out with me. The place I would use noice cancellers is in the air, so that’s the application that I am reviewing these PSB M4U 8s.

I’m on a transatlantic flight from London to Boston – sitting in economy, and it is a loud economy cabin mainly due to the 40-strong team of school children who, if their matching hoodies are anything to go by, are bound for a ski resort somewhere in Maine. No wonder the teachers are drinking.

First off, the M4U 8s are sturdy – and collapsable – so the hard case isn’t necessarily an essential, which is handy, as it’s pretty big. These are large, over-ear cans which are incredibly comfortable, and when I first plug them in, I actually think the noise cancelling is already activated such is their snugness and ability to naturally keep outside noise at bay. Once I do activate it, all of the surrounding screaming that I’ve been dealing with for the last 60 minutes has vanished.

So how do they sound? Very good, actually. The main thing I find can be lacking in some noise cancellers is the stereo image when the cancellation is active - many can lose that width, but the imagery on these is extremely good, and the frequency range seems full. I’m referencing via the movie, Joker, which has a masterful score, written by Hildur Guðnadóttir (who won an Oscar for it earlier this month) and the audio is crisp in the top end, deep and rich in the lows, and nice and wide throughout.

There are so many nuances and aggressive changes in dynamics within this score, and it’s all coming through loud and clear, with no interruption from the outside world.

I decide to move straight to another movie - Judy - the Judy Garland story, for which Renee Zellwegger won an Oscar. Her performance is spellbinding, as is her singing - and what I find surprising here is that despite the mad turbulence and uberloud cabin, even at the most delicate parts of this movie, I’m still lost in it. At this point, I realise the product’s RoomFeel technology (which PSB claims places the sound around you without altering the audio signal) is very real indeed. Four adaptive microphones were used to block out the noise, and it works incredibly well. Kudos.

Something else that’s key here: I am not suffering from any ear fatigue. That is perhaps the biggest surprise of all, especially considering flights can be harsh on my ears at the best of times.

Today, I’m comfortable, and can hear everything clear as day.

Another key point: battery life. The M4U 8s are charged via USB, and I didn’t give them a full charge before I boarded the plane, yet they haven’t died on me, and that’s been four and a half hours of constant use. That, to me, is impressive.

Due to their sonic quality as well as comfort, I can see myself taking these on the train and utilising the Bluetooth functionality - maybe even sitting at home on the couch with them listening to music. Their noise cancelling is superb, but don’t let that take anything away from how these headphones sound in their own right. If it’s true audio in a tricky environment you’re after, they’re a no-brainer. And if you just want a nice set of cans to listen to your favourite songs on, you could do a great deal worse.

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Cobbin & Whalley

Such Sweet Thunder

SUCH SWEET THUNDER Recording engineers, Peter Cobbin and Kirsty Whalley have enjoyed phenomenal success in their respective engineering careers, and together as Such Sweet Thunder - where from their epic studio in London, they specialise in producing and mixing music for the biggest blockbuster films. It all started when they both decided to break away from the safety of Abbey Road and go on an adventure of their own...

“I’m a dinosaur,” jokes Grammy award winning, Cobbin. “I do one thing well, and Kirsty does everything well – she’s a great multitasker, has got a really great technical mind and a more refined sense of musicality. I’m a little bit broad; I’m really experienced from a mixing perspective, because that’s what I was trained to do. It’s fair to say that we have different skill sets within the job.”

He’s being modest.

In 1995 Cobbin was invited to become senior engineer at Abbey Road Studios, where he pioneered mixing music for surround – and was the first engineer ever to undertake remixing works for The Beatles. This in turn led to other successful collaborations, such as remixing John Lennon’s catalogue and creating dynamic works for artists such as Amy Winehouse, Freddie Mercury, Bjork, Kanye West and The Eurythmics.

Before arriving in London, Cobbin was a mix specialist. His training in his native Sydney (EMI/Studios 301) saw him assisting on sessions with Duran Duran, Elton John and Bob Dylan.

As a classically taught musician and a lover of pop, some of his early years

46 HEADLINER

meant editing repertoire by day and recording rock and roll by night.

Cobbin soon developed an appreciation for fine analogue equipment, helping him to develop a natural ease when working with artists of different genres, such as Ed Sheeran, Sting, Annie Lennox, Luciano Pavarotti, Kate Bush, Gotye, Janet Jackson, Paul McCartney, Florence and the Machine, Mick Jagger, Emeli Sandé, and Mark Knopfler – to name a handful.

But it was destiny that Cobbin’s love for music, image and cinema collided creatively. As one half of Such Sweet Thunder, Cobbin has helped create some of the most memorable soundtracks in recent times, such as for The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, Star Wars and Shrek franchises, and The King’s Speech.

Whalley, meanwhile, is one of the few (if not the only) women to mix an Oscar winning score, which was awarded to the 2017 multi-award winning film, The Shape of Water. Developing a love of all things technical from an early age, Whalley made her own metronome when she was just 10, studied cello and

piano at the Junior Royal Academy of Music London, and was touring around Europe in orchestras as a teenager.

Her obsession with music coupled with “matters of geek-ness” led her to becoming a Tonmeister at the University of Surrey, although after graduating, finding a job as a woman proved to be difficult: “I walked around all the studios in London with my CV and tried to get a job,” she recalls. “No one would take me! It was just that time when they thought, ‘we don’t want girls in our studio’. But I did find a job with a film composer – although I’d never given film music a second thought really. It opened my eyes to this film stuff, and it suited me quite well!”

Whalley went freelance, which she insists is not as brave as it sounds: “It was hard to get employed; no studios would hire me! Even with the experience I had.”

Meeting Cobbin when they were both at Abbey Road, things started to change for Whalley.

“We’re both into music and we love film – we had the same synch,”

Cobbin & Whalley

Such Sweet Thunder

“We have found ourselves in Paris, Russia, and Australasia setting up temporary mix rooms to do a specific type of job...” reflects Cobbin. “At the time, Kirsty was probably employed as a music editor, programmer, or a composer’s assistant, whereas I was Abbey Road’s official engineer.”

When moving to London from Australia, Cobbin was surprised at the lack of women working in studios in the UK. “I was definitely scratching my head about a few things,” he nods. “I’d had a very positive experience as a young trainee in Sydney, and I would say for every bloke, there was a woman. I came to Abbey Road and there were none – not one operational female member of staff. I found that quite unusual. When I got to meet Kirsty, I realised she was probably one of the best music editors I’d ever worked with: her passion was about recording and mixing. Even though she put her name forward for placements, I just felt there was a resistance in the studios here to take women on in operational roles.”

Cobbin acknowledges that things have changed a lot in the last 10 to 20 years, but at the time felt that there was a ‘painful awareness’ that studios needed to do something.

“I saw the opportunity to ask: ‘Why don’t you let Kirsty have a go?’ And of course, once she did, everyone comes back and goes, ‘Wow, she’s amazing! Can we use her instead of you?’” he laughs.

As a young engineer-in-the-making, and with the door now opened to professional recording, Whalley gained valuable experience recording and mixing large scale film scores, and developed skills as a synth programmer, music editor and writing assistant to film composers. Standout projects include Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (parts 1 and 2), The Imitation Game, Alien Covenant, The Hobbit trilogy, and Hugo, not forgetting in 2012 Whalley was made an associate director for Danny Boyle’s epic Olympics opening ceremony.

Sweet Thunder After forming a bond and a mutual respect for each other’s workflow at Abbey Road, an idea began to take shape: what if they were to open their very own studio for film work? They did just that, and were henceforth known as Such Sweet Thunder: one being sweet, the other representing the thunder (Headliner still doesn’t know who represents which).

The duo’s studio (just a short walk from London’s King’s Cross) features an impressive 9.1.6 Dolby Atmos mix room, dubbed ‘Sweet Thunder’ “We had a quiet ambition,” explains Cobbin. “We needed to build a mix room that we could do anything in, and we’ve worked on the biggest projects in our very niche area of recording. We do the

biggest projects going, and projects can get incredibly complicated. Particularly since we’ve gone digital: directors will obsess about their edit. A studio will say they love the film, but hate the ending and reshoot it – it can go right down to the wire. That puts an enormous pressure on everyone involved, working backwards from anyone who’s delivered visual effects, or the music, or sound.

So we had to set up something that we knew could work.”

The team have had to be ready at a moment’s notice for some of their biggest projects, as Cobbin explains: “Peter Jackson would call and say, ‘Hey, I can’t get out of New Zealand for my last two Middle Earth projects. Can you come to Wellington? Is it possible?

Can we record and mix the music there?’

Ridley Scott was the same: ‘I’ve got a broken leg. I can’t get out of North America. Can we come there?’ We have found ourselves in Paris, Russia and Australasia setting up temporary mix rooms to do a specific kind of job.

Sometimes that is a lot of work!”

At the heart of the mix room is a custom-made ‘ThunderDesk’ – the result of a complete rethink about the concept of a mixing desk for today’s engineer. ThunderDesk is a moving fader production console, an integrated music player, a keyboard instrument, and a flexible working surface all rolled into 47 HEADLINER

Cobbin & Whalley

Such Sweet Thunder

“It’s a real commitment for one small mix room to have six Merging Horuses and two Anubis, but the product is that great...” one, and skillfully crafted in beautiful oak. The desk has its own integrated 9.1 speaker system and acts as an independent sound source – no computers are required.

Two built-in touch screens facilitate music streaming and internet radio, while the desk boasts retractable hi-res displays with video switching for their multiple Pro Tools rigs. The desk has 28 valves, and thanks to two in-built custom levelling valve amplifiers, Such Sweet Thunder have the best of old technology, reimagined for a modern workflow.

“It’s part of our business model to help create solutions for an ever-changing world,” says Cobbin. “We did some work on a film for Tim Burton; I was recording the orchestra at Air Studios in the morning, and I’d upload all the multi tracks to Kirsty, who was here. She started mixing them while I was still recording the choir, so in the final mix, what you’re hearing was 90% of what Kirsty had done on the same day.”

“We made a few tweaks and it made it to L.A. by the time difference,” Whalley smiles, pointing out that they have their own thousand megabit upload. “We can’t have the client waiting for three hours for the files to arrive. The Tim Burton one, for example, is a 7.1, 96k mix with 16 stems!”

Merging Technologies plays a key part to facilitating a smooth workflow: the studio boasts two Merging Anubis compact AD/DA interfaces and six 48 HEADLINER

Horus multichannel units – all networked together allowing anything to be connected to anything else, with enough analogue inputs to connect all the legacy pieces of kit – without any hassle.

When initially setting up Pro Tools, Whalley and Cobbin wanted the best converters they could get for their stereo: “We got tipped off about Horus – which I’d only seen used for classical sessions at that point,” admits Whalley.

“We thought it was some kind of classical trickery, you know? We thought that it wouldn’t apply to us in Pro Tools, but this could be great. We bought a quite modest first Horus and we used it to do analogue summing with a beautiful stereo chain. We were blown away with it and started using it as inserts within Pro Tools. And while this was great, we never quite got round to working out the best plan until we did a recording in Glasgow for Danny Elfman, where we decided to take up a Pro Tools rig to record, and they had a setup with Horuses on the floor. We took ours, and I was thinking, ‘oh, they’ll plug this into here’. And all we ended up doing was joining their network. That was the first time we really saw the power of audio over IP.” Whalley says that while they were using their own mic amps to boost up their system, it triggered something in their brains: “We thought that we could do this instead! We have all this lovely analogue

equipment, we can pull it into any of our rigs – wherever we want it. It’s a whole new way of mixing for film, really. That’s what got us inspired, and gradually we bought another Horus and some more analogue equipment and started to incorporate it into our workflow; we hadn’t seen anyone do this before.”

“It’s a major commitment for one small mix room to have six Horuses and two Anubis, because the product is that great,” Cobbin stresses. “We’re not holding back now on the imagination that we can apply to our own kind of mixes, and that’s brilliant. The Horus has been pretty significant in challenging what I call ‘the old way’ of working.”

Whichever way they are working, the duo are clearly doing something right; good relationships with their clients ensure that they come back to Such Sweet Thunder time and time again: “Exactly,” smiles Cobbin. “We’ve done a lot of the Harry Potter franchise, so we know the director really well, and we’ve had a few meetings to discuss the next one. I think it’s fair to say that Hollywood keeps us on our toes; it can be incredibly rewarding and demanding. Although artistically, we also find that sometimes it’s the small, independent films that are doing some wonderful things creatively,” he concludes. www.merging.com

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JUST LAUNCHED!

Review

Music Streaming

MUSIC STREAMING EXPLORED The streaming world has become our go-to medium to listen to music from Spotify to Deezer, Apple Music to Napster, Soundcloud to TIDAL. Artists spend months writing, recording, producing, mixing and mastering their music, and the end result compresses to a form that can be downloaded and streamed in seconds. But how do these streaming qualities differ sonically, and which is currently flavour of the month?

Words Floyd Mason

Each streaming platform has its own way of winning artists over: TIDAL offers streaming qualities as close to the master as possible; Apple Music holds direct contacts with BeatsFM, streams music at a very good quality, and the chances are, you’re reading this on your iPhone. Spotify, however, has the Spotify For Artists app, making it easier for artists to tailor their own profiles however they choose. They also have the largest number of listeners and claim to have the best playlists curated to your preferences using their own algorithms. I’m going to listen to all three to determine which streaming platform has the best sound quality.

Apple Music streams at a bitrate of 256kbps, which seems lower than Spotify’s 320kbps at face value, but it’s not exactly like-for-like because Apple Music uses its own AAC audio codec.

Apple also defaults to audio of the highest quality, assuming your device is connected to Wi-Fi, so sound quality is apparently better than Spotify’s, thanks to Apple Music using a 256kbps AAC bitrate, compared to Spotify’s max 320kbps Ogg Vorbis bitrate.

Listening On Headphones I decide to stream a recent single, which I produced, on Apple Music first of all, through some headphones, which I know well. First impressions are that it sounds fairly close to the original master, as we can pick out certain aspects of the track that I could only hear in the studio, and not on Spotify.

The overall sound seems ever so slightly thinner than the master, particularly in the choruses, but it’s not too noticeable at this stage.

By default, Spotify streams 96kbps audio tracks. Its premium subscribers can upgrade to 320kbps, which is a decent quality stream, but not the same level of audio quality found on a CD. In terms of stream quality, on a mobile device, you can choose what bitrate to stream, in increments up to 320kbps.

Desktop playback is at 160kbps (or 320kbps for Premium users). So all in all, there are a lot of variants at play.

I pull up Spotify, and immediately notice the quality is much lower compared to the original master. The levels are still the same within the mix, but the low end seems to have thinned

out even further, whereas the original master has a blanket of depth which pokes out dynamically throughout the song. The dynamics of the master seem lost on Spotify. The entire song, in fact, sounds thinned and flattened.

Most streaming services compress music files for fast delivery to your smartphone or tablet. Part of the music is essentially chopped off, which still leaves you with the meat and potatoes, but you lose musical nuances that can give a song more life and substance.

TIDAL, however, offers CD-quality music streaming as it streams FLAC files at 1411kbps.

With a TIDAL HiFi subscription, you have the ability to stream a large number of tracks in lossless quality.

Lossless content means uncompressed CD-quality music; you hear the music the way the artists intended, without compromise. TIDAL HiFi relies on FLAC, a more robust and realistic streaming format. Whereas MP3 files are compressed to decrease file size but also take out any extra details which can cut quality, FLAC offers CD-quality audio in its purest form. So it comes as

51 HEADLINER

Review

Music Streaming

“The dynamic range is fuller, the highs are true, and the vocals are so present; it’s the ultimate way to listen to streamed music.” no surprise that when I pull up the track on TIDAL, everything is wider and clearer than on the other two platforms. There’s hardly any difference, in fact, to the studio master. The low end is perhaps a touch fluffier, but other aspects are still cutting through really well – it’s night and day compared to Spotify, and way better than Apple Music, also.

The Car Test The classic old school listening test! I pull up Spotify first, and it feels really thin.

The impact of the low end is minimal in comparison to the master, and it even feels like the individual stems aren’t as glued together as they should be. It’s also much harder to pick out certain BVs and brass lines. It’s a totally different sound to how I – or any artist or producer - would intend for their music to be heard. This is quite an eye opener.

Apple Music in the car feels closer to the master, but there are still slight differences, though these are different to the flaws on Spotify. On Apple Music, it feels like some of the high end is lost in the mix. It’s just lacking that extra polish in comparison to the original master, whereas Spotify struggles to even replicate the mix. As expected, TIDAL is very very close to the master, but in the car we can hear the slight differences between the FLAC stream and the original. It’s like taking the original mix 52 HEADLINER

and simply dialling down the level of ‘punch’ it might have. But at least the levels sit the same, as opposed to literally changing a mix which can be heard from the other streaming services. It’s certainly a truer representation in all departments.

In The Studio The final test is the most clinical: a treated studio environment, listening through an NAD M10 streaming amplifier and a pair of Genelec 8341 monitors.

It’s simple to connect any device via Bluetooth to the M10, so from a phone, I quickly have the .wav master of Bluebirds up and running. What a sound this is: the stereo imagery and overall clarity is fantastic, and after the previous two tests, this is particularly good for our musical morale! The lows are now balanced, the tops are sparkling, and the midrange suddenly feels really accurate.

As I switch to Spotify, I am taken aback; such is the high quality and total transparency of the M10 / Genelec setup, Spotify’s flaws are highlighted further. The headphones and car stereo will of course have levels of colouration which makes everything a little kinder on the ear, whereas this high-end system is entirely pure, therefore sonically unforgiving. This is amazing from an audiophile perspective, but a shock to the system as an artist! It confirms my previous fears, and the disappointment

truly sets in: the sound is flatter, and the dynamics are crushed, a bit like my musical soul..!

Apple Music is a step-up, but I’m now hearing a different type of EQ colouration - again in the high end, but through the M10 and the Genelecs, it’s way more accentuated. It gets me thinking: could this be to cater to the mass hip hop audiences, and Apple Music massively boosting the low end?

It’s certainly what it feels like.

Finally, back to TIDAL... the energy is back! Almost identical sounding to the master. The impact of the low end is there, and I can clearly pick out each BV and brass line. The dyamic range is fuller, the highs are true, and the vocals in particular are so present. It feels like the ultimate way to listen to streamed music.

So in conclusion, TIDAL clearly streams music in its highest quality format, followed fairly closely by Apple Music, with Spotify trailing way behind.

Which begs the question: why is Spotify the streaming service that most artists will choose to promote their work through?

You can’t help but feel that we’re being held to ransom due to the highly targeted algorithmic playlisting that offers artists huge opportunities to have their work discovered. But at what cost?

And is it worth the exposure when your listeners aren’t hearing the songs as intended? Something to think about.

Legendary studio headphones Designed in Japan