On Thursday, I attended a guest lecture for BA Music students, run by George Shilling, a record producer, who has worked in the music industry for over 30 years. His most notable credit is for engineering The Only Way is Up (1988) by Yazz and the Plastic Population. His website is georgeshilling.com.

George’s session was split up into two parts, the first looking at his life, the places he’d worked at over the years, and also the roles he’d had. He spent several years working as an assistant before he had a chance to sit at a mixing desk, and from there quickly acquired new skills, such as music programming on personal computers. He has worked in many places over the years, and mentioned that he is always trying to muddy up, and dirty the sound, as he feels that with the power and versatility available in DAW’s like Avid’s Pro Tools, the produced sound is too clean and clear. Several of his plugins aim to reproduce the sound of analog tape. He now works out of a purpose-built studio, complete with a treated room to record in, and has worked with artists like Frank Turner, Stornoway, and Ocean Colour Scene.

The second part of his session George showed us some of his Pro Tools sessions, showing us how he worked on tracks. He likes to use a lot of compressors, and in one example worked out that elements of a track were being compressed around 4 or 5 times. A few other tips and techniques I picked up were how to create the long vocal reverb that appears on Adele’s Hello (2015), by using the Little Alterboy plugin, a de-esser, two reverbs, and then compression on top, and also a method for miking up drums. This required two mics to be placed in front of the bass drum, one of either side, which gives decent ambience but without the splashiness of the cymbals. Interestingly enough, his mics of choice were the Cole 4038s; a ribbon mic typically used for broadcasting. After this, he answered a few questions, and then brought the lecture to a close.