Record Producer

 

Thursday 13th October

George Shilling 

This week, George Shilling, record producer, recording engineer, mastering engineer and musician, visited the university to give a talk to the (BA Hons) Music students. Luckily enough, a handful of AP students were allowed to sit in on the session with George. To visit George’s website, follow this link.

George separated his lecture into two parts: the first was regarding himself, how and why he got into the music industry, where he was (or not!) schooled in HE, how he landed his first recording engineer job with Livingston Recording Studios, and where he went from there. Throughout the lecture, he would refer to ‘Lightbulb Moments’ during his career. These were positive moments in his career which allowed him to develop and progress. One such moment was when George was called to produce a track for Coldcut, who used a certain type of PC to program their sounds. Even though he had not produced a track before, George accepted the job and went out the next day to buy this same PC ad spent all of his free time studying how to use it before this session.

George also talked about diversity during his career, and highlighted the importance of this. For example, he was an excellent Cellist while growing up, but left it behind when he got into the recording industry. However, when he built his own studio later on in his career and could afford instruments within it, he bought a Cello so he could play again, and now offers to add accompaniment to tracks he records and produces – expanding his skill set. Another example of that is doing the lecture itself in order to generate money, or playing live shows for artists.

The second half of George’s talk was strictly ProTools based. He opened up a few sessions and showed us several tips and tricks he had used in order to achieve a certain effect in his recordings. Of these effects included both compressing the signal multiple (4 to 5) times to mimic analog tape recorders, and others included a way of creating a reverb processed twice, both of very long durations, in order to add an underlayer to the vocal performances. Finally, he explained that he enjoying muddying his music when recording on ProTools as it seems too clean for him in this day and age, so use many processors in order to achieve this with his music, to create excitement and life.

This talk was very interesting, but I felt it was perhaps more suited to a student recording an EP this Semester, unlike myself doing Location and Post Sound. Also, I felt that he talked about the past a lot which wasn’t greatly helpful for students of today, who want to know what’s going on in the industry right not, and how we can get into that industry successfully.

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