Recording - November 2019 - 17

What was your next step? Full-on engineer?
I was an assistant for about ten years. I dabbled in engineering here and there, on projects like Kanye West's
Graduation. Next door in the Interactive Department,
which did Blu-rays and DVDs, a position opened up for a
junior role. It was a sideways-down step, but I just wanted
to try something new, and within a few months, I was an
interactive producer.

Which is?
For instance, I worked on the Blu-ray release of Reservoir
Dogs and a Ringo Starr DVD box set. Sourcing the film assets,
getting them cleaned up, working with subtitle people, doing
bit management, checking for errors, working with the graphic
artists for the menus-it was all micromanaging the technical
side of the process.
About that same time, I helped out with the early Abbey
Road plugins as well as hardware. I would go to some of the
trade shows with Chandler and demo the gear.

Is that how you ended up in your current role?
Abbey Road was the first facility in the UK to create and release a music DVD, and within ten years people were knocking
them out in their bedrooms. So, unfortunately, the interactive
department got closed.
I was thinking my time at Abbey Road was done, but then
the general manager called me into his office and said they
wanted to expand the concept of audio products.
It was already happening on the side, but when we started doing plugins with Waves, and software instruments with
Native Instruments like the ABBEY ROAD DRUMMER series it
became a whole department in its own right and we then also
started expanding the hardware line with Chandler Limited.

So, let's dive into Abbey Road products and your role.
I love working on the audio products because it's a way of keeping the legacy going. The original gear like the TG and REDD
desks are bespoke to Abbey Road and other EMI studios.
Some of it ended up on the second-hand market when a
few of EMI's studios around the world closed, but it's
rare and sells for outrageous amounts.

Plus, not everyone can come to Abbey Road. So, it's like
having a piece of Abbey Road coming to you. The user base
for this gear is so broad, from artists and producers in high-profile studios, right through to people experimenting in their bedrooms on their laptops, or their phones.

How do you get Abbey Road on your phone?
We recently released a recording app called Topline. We
did loads of research, and we found that musicians were still
using the Apple Voice Memos app to record more than anything else, you know, the built-in recorder on your phone?

You mean the one we're using right now? [both laugh]
There's nothing wrong with it, it works, but it wasn't designed
with musicians in mind, so we developed a simple 4-track recorder app that you can use to lay down a backing track on
your guitar or whatever, then you can lay down a melody part,
you can do a quick little mix, and you can hit the send button,
email that to your friend and then they can add a vocal line on
top and then send that back to you.

It sounds really useful.
You can download it at the App Store and it's free! It also
won Best Music App and Best User Experience at the 2018 UK
App Awards last November.

Most of our readers know that Wade Goeke and Chandler
Limited make all the official Abbey Road hardware.
Wade started years ago with the Chandler EMI TG series,
but I wasn't directly involved at that point. After a while Wade
stopped making new Abbey Road gear and moved on to other designs [such as the Germanium and Little Devil series-Ed].
When I started looking after the Products Department, Wade
and I reconnected and started thinking of all this amazing new
stuff we could do.

How does the process work?
Whether it's hardware or plugins, we start with not only the
gear, but we go to the archives and pull out old sets of schematics, technical notes, and even session notes, and find the
history behind this gear. Why it was built, what it was used for,

Studio 3, modeled for the new
Waves Abbey Road Studio 3 Plugin

RECORDING November 2019

Recording - November 2019

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