In 2001, Alistair Chant's band, Actual Size, were signed by Gut Records and used money from their record deal to build a recording studio in Bristol, UK, which would eventually become Toybox Studios. In 2003, Ali began engineering and producing full time and Toybox started to become a popular local recording studio. Along the way Ali's worked with Gruff Rhys, KT Tunstall, Euros Childs, Rokia Traore, Yann Tiersen, Giant Sand, M. Ward, Seasick Steve, She & Him, PJ Harvey, Mark Ronson, and The Kills plus producers like Flood, Jim Abbiss, Mark Ronson, John Parish, Ben Hillier, John Cornfield, Hugh Padgham Michael H Brauer, and Tim Friese-Greene.
Why don't you give me a bit of a history of the studio. How did it start?
I was in a band when I was at university, and that band went through various lineups, personnel changes, and musical directions, but the upshot of it was that we ended up in a situation where we were looking to just get a kind of permanent rehearsal space.
How did you find the building?
I was literally just walking down the street, and I saw a "Rooms to Let" sign outside this old Georgian building, on a square that I knew from when I first came to Bristol. It was kind of between where I was living and the center of town. I popped in, saw the landlord, and explained that I was playing music and that I wanted somewhere that my band could leave its equipment set up and have a bit more flexibility. It was simply the practicality of not wanting to have to go to practice rooms, pay 30 quid for a three-hour spot, have to pack all our gear away, and then waste all of that time. He showed me a couple of rooms and said, "Oh, I don't know if any of these are going to suit you if you're playing drums and making noise." I think I was literally walking out the door, when he just said, "But there is the basement!" It's a massive building, across five floors. He took me down to the basement, which was completely empty, and he said, "Well, you could just use one of the rooms down here." We had to build a door, because there was a little bit of noise leaking up through the lift shaft which runs the whole length of the building, so we put a little doorway in, and then we just set up our practice room. I seem to remember spending most of a whole summer down there.
How did it move from a band practice room to a studio? Was it a gradual process?
I'm not really sure how it got into recording exactly. I think it happened over a period of time. The band wanted to record demos, and it was just a sort of natural progression that we have a little recording setup of some sort. Mixed in with that, prior to this I had been working as a post-production editor after I graduated, so I'd learned Pro Tools at university, sort of primarily on the job that I'd had for a couple of years running up to this point. Once I'd finished that job, I was kind of just concentrating on music over that year, really. I was on the dole. I took my final paycheck from that job, and I'd managed to scrape up enough cash to buy an Apple Mac and a little Digi 001, which was sort of an entry-level Pro Tools interface that had come out at that point.
Right.
I kind of bypassed the whole 4-track thing, I have to say. I did have experience with 4-tracks and stuff, but I didn't really get into it. I'm slightly ashamed to say that computers were the things that got me on this whole path, and they've also been what I have been doing at times, as well. With my last paycheck at that job, I managed to get enough cash to buy a little Mac, a little interface, and some microphones, and then the band was set up down there. We'd kind of get into this rhythm of writing and recording simultaneously rather than just jamming in a room, smoking a load of joints, and then going to play a show the following week, which was kind of how it had been up to that point. It became more like, "Ooh, we could experiment with this, or try samples." It was sort of a natural evolution of the writing process of that band.
So do you think the studio really affected the sound of Actual Size?
Yeah, very much. We were still based around a live setup of drums, guitar, keyboards, and a singer.
When we met, and you asked me to produce a track for Actual Size, what stage was this at? Obviously you didn't have the studio then, because I remember we went to State of Art to do that recording.
Yeah. I think we probably didn't have the studio when I met you, but it would have been just after that that we did get it, because I remember you coming to a practice that we had at Frontline Studios, and we did some pre-production together before we worked on that.
Oh, that's right.
Our band had recorded some demos and I was sort of really inexperienced and didn't know how to finish them off. I'd kind of gotten in too deep, I thought! I asked a local engineer who did live engineering, but also worked at this studio if...
That was Rik Dowding?
Yeah, Rik Dowding, who still works at State of Art Studios now.
And does FOH for Portishead doesn't he?
That's right. He was the only person I knew at the time who knew people in the Bristol music scene beyond our peers and the bands we were gigging with then. We'd only been there a year or two, so we were still getting to know the place. I'd make these recordings, and I approached Rik and said, "I don't really know how to mix. I don't know how to finish these. What do you think? Can you help or can you recommend anyone?" Your name came up. He suggested, "John might really like this. You should check him out." I looked you up online, sort of looked over your discography and who you'd worked with, and I thought, "Oh, this is really exciting!" I'd never considered having an external influence in the band. It had sort of been a self-contained unit up to that point, and we'd got used to just doing things our own way, probably as most bands do if they're left to their own devices.
Yeah, absolutely.
So it was Rick who suggested you. I phoned you up one day, and you said, "Yeah, drop something around," so I popped you a CD, or maybe even a cassette at that point — I might not have even had a CD burner at that point. And you phoned up and said, "This is good." There was one track that you liked particularly and that you'd be interested in producing that for the band. I think we started off with this whole thing of, "We'll do an album, but we've already got it all recorded. We'll just get someone to mix it," just to have someone go, "Hmm, yeah. That's a good song."
It puts things under the microscope a bit more, doesn't it?
Yeah, because I think we probably didn't have any perspective on what we were doing at that point.
And a good session it was, I remember. After that session, along with other things, you got a record deal, didn't you? Was that how the money came to upgrade the studio from the entry-level Pro Tools to more of a professional recording situation?
Yeah, it was. I'd put the idea forward, and the label immediately liked it, because they liked the demos we'd recorded, the single we'd done with you, and that combination. They were very keen for us to try and preserve whatever kind of naivety, stupidity, or innocence we had in those original recordings. They responded to that. Up to that point, the practice room had basically been a basement or a cavern space. I remember we'd soundproofed it, or tried to soundproof it. It's all stone, the walls are stone, and it's arched or vaulted kind of like a wine cellar. There was no carpet, nothing. It was quite a harsh sounding room on its own. I remember we went out and bought loads of cheap carpet.
Did you know anything about acoustic stuff? Or was it completely trial and error?
I went on what I'd seen in other practice rooms. It was just aping what I'd seen. We were kind of nailing things, and I remember we got these big bolts to be able to attach these carpets to the walls. The whole thing was like something out of a comedy sketch. It was very funny, just filthy old secondhand carpet. It was worse than a rehearsal room! It really was. I remember when we got a sofa down there for the first time, and we thought, "All right! We're classy now!" We got used to working in that space, and it was nice to be able to shut yourself away. When we got this offer of a record deal, and the record label came down and saw that we'd sort of been naively enterprising in our own way, that we had set this place up where we could write, practice, and make noise into the small hours, I think they got into that idea. It wasn't very difficult to persuade them to try and upgrade what we had, to buy some microphones and do a bit of acoustic treatment.
I think one of the reasons why Toybox has become such a successful studio over the years has been the choice of gear that you've bought. Everything seems to be have been a very considered choice. Specifically, it seems to be the sorts of things that people do not have in their home studios.
Yeah.
Was that a conscious decision, or was it sort of accidental?
I just research, really. The other big inspiration for setting the place up was State of Art Studio actually, which was the only other kind of semi-professional, big studio I'd been in up to that point. Going there, I thought how smart Geoff Barrow [of Portishead] had been in doing exactly that, taking money that they'd made from their band and setting up a workshop where he could do his own thing, but where other people could come and use it. It seemed like a smart move to me, and that completely inspired what I did. He kind of gave me the idea. Their choice of equipment was some quite esoteric stuff, a lot of old tube gear and things that have character to them. I suppose on one level it's kind of anything that really sets you apart but also gives your studio a bit of mojo. It's probably a mixture of seeing that place and the approach that they took, and then the same with other kind of producers and engineers and peoples' choices for equipment. It just led on from that. For the first bunch of mic preamps we bought, I bought them because I saw in a magazine that Adrian Utley [also of Portishead] had endorsed them. I thought, "I like what he does, so this is probably a worthwhile investment." I didn't know him at the time, but I liked the sound that they went for. I'd definitely say that the world of Portishead was quite inspirational to me, especially when I first moved to Bristol. They were into things that gave their recordings character and weren't just run-of-the-mill. As we all know, lots of older equipment, or the older generation of recording technology, invariably seems to have piqued peoples' interests and made them excited, so I'd just sort of go with that, really. They're also the kinds of things that I like to work with.
What happened to the band? I know that you made an album, but it never got released, and you didn't seem to be able to get it back. The band kind of imploded, so how did you end up with the studio?
I mean, maybe on some level or other, the studio was a bit of an insurance policy as well. At the moment when we entered into that agreement with the record company, I went into it completely believing that we were going to be able to do music professionally, and that it was going to be our means of income and our lifestyle for however many long years. A lot of things were changing in the music business at that time. Downloads were just starting, and Napster had just come about. I remember seeing that quite early on and thinking, "Hmm, I wonder what's going to happen with this." The band sort of went through the process that nearly everybody I know who's had a record deal has been through, which is to get a load of money chucked at them, live the lifestyle for a few years, and then nothing really happens, or nothing big enough to keep the record company prepared to keep plowing the same kind of money into you. In our instance, it was also mixed with the label losing their biggest artist [Tom Jones] at exactly the same moment. He'd just had a huge success with a comeback album, which this record label had released, so the coffers were full at the moment when we'd signed to them. After a year or so, we'd recorded an EP (at vast expense, I seem to remember). I learned so much in those couple of years. It was eye watering, some of it. We recorded the EP. We then recorded a single with you again. You had done the initial single that had gotten everybody interested, and we sort of got signed off the back of that. We did an EP with a different producer, and then we did another single with you. The thing with the label was that the way they'd sort of sold themselves to us was that we were going to get time to develop; they didn't expect us to have a big hit straightaway. Probably a lot of people have heard the same story, but then circumstances changed with Tom Jones leaving the label. I think the final straw was that they made our A&R guy redundant. He was kind of our interface with the label and the people higher up in the ranks we didn't know that well. The minute he went, I think we knew that our days were numbered. We sort of limped on a bit, and we recorded an album again at another studio. This was the crazy thing. We just kept on [going to other studios] after having put the money into building Toybox! Though we did record there with you. But we also ended up going to other studios and paying remixers huge fees to do radio remixes of these songs. The results were all good, but I kept looking at the bill at the end of it and just thinking, "We're never going to make this money back!" It seemed insane to me, but I went along with it. It was a crazy, bloated, overblown business at that point in time I think, and it's all been sort of culled back down to its roots a little bit now, which is probably a good thing in the long run.
Yeah, yeah.
Basically the band couldn't really continue without some financial input. People had girlfriends and wives at that point, and we couldn't all go back on the dole when the record advance ran out. We did limp on for a little bit, and we did some more recordings of our own, which I think turned out really great actually, but after six or eight months of trying to then slog it off we just sort of went our separate ways. I think by default, since the studio was sort of my realm, and I'd taken more of an interest in the recording side of things than the others had, they just said, "Well, you run it and just do what you want, and we'll use it if we have further musical projects that we want to bring to the studio." And they all did. I've sort of continued working with all of them, particularly Ed [Patrick], the singer, who went on to do his solo project, Kid Carpet. I worked on most of his albums, either co-writing or in a production capacity. It was amicable, and it worked out all right.
When did Stef [Stefan Hambrook], also kind of your partner in the recording process, get involved?
I'd met Stef before all of this, probably when I'd first moved to Bristol, actually. He'd worked in another studio called, which is now Access to Music; a music production college. I'd just met him through playing music together on a couple of projects. He's a drummer, and we stayed in touch. He was probably the only other sort of engineer-type I knew that didn't have a base at that particular moment. He came down and had a look at Toybox as it stood back then, and he was thinking about going freelance. He'd bought a mobile rig so that he could do demos and not be based out of another studio. It just kind of came about through necessity, really. He said, "Well, you know, I've got some work that I could bring down to this place, and I've got some nice speakers and a few mics that I could contribute." We decided to pool our resources and see if we could do something together. In a way it just became, "Well, we're probably stronger with two of us." I didn't have a clue how to run a business! Maybe it did seem sort of daunting to try to take the whole thing on in a big, proper commercial capacity all by myself. It just sort of naturally fell into place like that. I started recording demos for friends' bands who had been peers of Actual Size, and I did one or two projects that people seemed to like. Things kind of went from there. Stef brought in work from people he knew from studios he'd worked at, and it just evolved.
At what point did you realize that you were a recording engineer/studio owner and were making a living from that? Was it a sudden realization, or have you still not accepted it?
[laughs] I still haven't... no, no. I don't know. I didn't enter into any of it with the intention of any of those things. I just liked being involved in music, I liked recording, and I liked the kind of playground that is the recording studio.
The reason why I started working at Toybox, while I was working with you in particular, was your studio etiquette, which is something that I always look for in any engineer that I work with.
I've been in enough recording situations as a musician with other producers and engineers to have seen and experienced the many different types of characters who are involved. I think the longer you do this sort of thing, if you're continuing to learn and evolve in it, the more you realize that so much of it is about how you're communicating with people, and how much you listen to them. I quite like the idea of being able to find the place within any given structure to help facilitate and oil the machinery, for sure. I suppose that sometimes it's more rewarding than others, but I've definitely been in sessions with other engineers and producers where I've seen how not to do it. I've also seen how to do it really, really well. So, a degree of it is necessity, just sort of being aware of how you can keep everything moving efficiently and productively, and keep everybody feeling positive and moving forward. Practically, going into a studio is like any other job. You've got X amount of tasks to fulfill, and X amount of time in which to do it. As much as we like to treat the whole thing as a creative experience, as we should, there's a huge amount of practicality to the whole thing. I just try to be aware of that as much as I can. I'm still learning that time management is a big part of it as well. It's sort of like how to get the job done in time, but to never make anyone feel pressured.
Yeah, which sounds perfect.
Whatever you can do to facilitate that is what you need to do. It all fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, and the tighter you can make that jigsaw, the more cohesive the end result is going to be. I guess in the case with you, I know you really well now, and we've worked together a lot, so we can probably kind of preempt each others' ideas a little more. If I were to do the same thing with other producers, and I have engineered for other producers, there is a sort of period of figuring things out, as there is with every artist. There's a whole range of parameters. It's also important to keep the experience enjoyable and not to let things get too weighted or heavy. The more relaxed you can make people feel, the better results you're going to get, generally speaking, and you're going to get the job done. It's about getting the job done as well.
Obviously you came at this as a musician. That's often the way that people get into studio recording, but you've managed to still play and keep one foot in the musician camp. Has that been difficult? I know that a lot of people who have become studio engineers (or studio managers/studio engineers) feel like, when they finish, the last thing they want to do is do play any more music. How have you managed to keep playing, as well as to have your career as an engineer?
Well, I feel like that all the time, which is a horrible admission to myself, as much as anyone else! I don't know. I suppose it's just having projects to be involved in. I did get another band together after Actual Size broke up, and we did quite a lot of stuff for a good few years. I suppose at that time I wasn't treating the engineering and studio stuff as my full-time job. I was trying to balance a bit of the two. Now I'm not in that position, and I'm not playing with a band, so the studio has definitely expanded to fill most of my time. But I do enough projects where I feel creatively involved, so it kind of exercises that part of me. I get to play a bit on peoples' records, if it's necessary. I don't assume that position, but I do get asked to. Things come along like Adrian Utley's Guitar Orchestra project, and it's like, "Oh yeah, I play guitar and stuff as well, so let's do it." I suppose that enough opportunities have come along in the meantime that I've been able to continue playing, and I hope I'll always manage to do that. Maybe I'll start some blues/jazz/funk band when I'm a bit older and do the pub circuit. Or maybe not.
You've got to tell the story about how you got the huge Trident desk through the tiny corridor into the control room.
I'd just started working with you around that time, and you'd suggested buying a desk for the studio. I think that we only had a Mackie at that time. The idea that I would have been borrowing a load of money just to buy a desk seemed totally beyond my reach at that point. It seemed like an appealing thing when you came along and said, "Oh, I might buy a desk for the studio." It was like, "Oh, great, brilliant! Amazing! Christmas has come!" Or so I thought.
There's always a catch.
Just a few. We originally looked at a Calrec, and then we ended up talking about Tridents, and that was it. We found a Trident TSM, which we'd read about, and everyone seemed to say it was a really good desk.
I'd worked on Tridents before and always really liked the sound of them.
This one in particular was a bit better than the series 80 ones. The EQs were quite a bit different, and it had four band parametric EQs and filters and everything on it, so we were getting quite a lot of desk for the money. It's a huge, hulking 40-channel board with a monitor section as well. Access to the studio is fine most of the time. We have this lift shaft, which we don't have constant access to, but we've used it to get any of the larger things down into the basement, like pianos and the tape machine (we've got a 24-track), or anything that was too big to get down the stairs. When we found this desk (I think we hadn't totally decided on it at that point), I remember looking at the dimensions and thinking, "That's huge, I wonder if it will fit?" I sort of measured it out, and figured, "Oh yeah, that'll fit completely." But then I thought, "I don't know if it will," because if you think about moving a sofa or table or something, the way you have to shift large objects around [makes things seem bigger than they are]. I thought, "I'll just make sure." So I took the dimensions of the desk and built a replica of it out of wood and cardboard, just to see how maneuverable the thing was. I tried getting my mock-up down the stairs, and it obviously wouldn't go, even end-on.
Yeah.
Our building's got quite high ceilings because it was modified for industrial use, but to my amazement, I couldn't even get it up in the hallway with those huge, high ceilings! Then I thought, "Oh, maybe the lift shaft might work." I went to the lift, opened the doors, and we just took this thing and lowered it down the lift shaft. It seemed to go around the corner just fine, so I did a few more in-depth calculations, and it looked promising. "Theoretically, this is possible." We went ahead and ordered it, and we hadn't even seen it at this point, because it came from a studio in France. It arrived in the back of a truck, all kind of bubble-wrapped, or cling-film wrapped up. You can obviously move it end-on down corridors and that's no problem, but when you have to get it around corners or anything, it becomes almost completely unmovable. It's three and a half meters wide, which is too high for basically any ceiling. We took it into the ground floor of the building where there's a big open space, and it probably sat there for a week or two while we were deliberating how we were actually going to do this. I think it weighed half a ton, with the modules out. In the end, I kind of capitulated and just thought, "I don't think I can actually do this. I need to find a removals company or someone who can get this out of here." Ironically, we only had to move it a few meters. It was literally just going down one floor and that was it, but actually getting it there seemed nigh on impossible. I was just frightened of breaking it or something. I phoned a few removals companies, like piano removers and people of that ilk. They all just sort of came in, had a look, and said, "No, I'm not touching that, because we don't normally do this sort of thing." I think it carried on sitting there for longer, didn't it? It was so frustrating, because we'd prepared everything to move it in, and the whole studio was out of action at this point. We couldn't do anything while this desk was sitting upstairs. In the end, I called Andy Allan, an engineer who'd run another studio in Bristol. He had helped us set Toybox up and done all of the sorts of acoustic treatment. He said, "Yes, I think I can do this, and here's how much it's going to cost." He came along, and what we did was suspend a steel girder across the ceiling of the ground floor. We had to go and buy a steel girder (I've never done that before), and we got like a block-and-tackle winch that we attached to the girder, which sort of bolted in place with clamps to stop it from moving around. Then Andy suggested that to protect the desk, we needed to build a wooden crate around it. The whole thing was getting so out of hand at this point. I was like, "What have we done?" We didn't think this thing through in enough detail, but we've got it now, so we've got to make it work. We built a wooden frame around the desk to protect it, tied on a load of ropes, and basically shoved it down the lift shaft. The whole thing was just dangling in midair! It was really frightening, because this thing weighs as much as a small motorcar. I just got as many friends as I could to come down that day and hold a rope. So there we are with this thing, all pulling back. It was like, "No one let go, no one let go!" while we tried to lower it down. Again, it's only a few meters that it had to go, traveling hardly any distance. I'll never forget, my friend Bob had to dash downstairs and actually get underneath the desk to guide it back through the doors. It was essentially just a U-shaped path, but he had to be there underneath it. With the rest of us just holding it with ropes, he was risking life and limb, which I am eternally grateful for. We gently lowered it down, and then we had to rotate it in midair as well, because we couldn't just let it hit the floor. It did a complete rotation, and then there it was, sort of half-stuck out in the lift shaft, half-stuck in the corridor. Then we realized that we couldn't get it around the corner because of the wooden box that we'd built around the desk to stop it from twisting. We then found ourselves with saws, little jigsaws and drills, to basically hack bits off the wooden box, just to get it around this corner! It was really like taking off an inch at a time and then moving it another inch. The wooden box was basically pointless. It protected it for a few meters of its journey, and that was it. So we're hacking away, hacking away, hacking away at this box, with the desk basically exposed, until we finally managed to get it around that corner. I think that was probably eight or nine hours into the procedure. This had taken all day to do, and I'm pretty sure we even came back the next day to finish it. You know, nudging it around the corner, nudging it, nudging it, and nudging it, until finally it could make the turn into the control room. From that point on, it was obviously quite a lot easier. You were on holiday at the time that this happened, so you managed to avoid getting involved in this whole thing, which has been a bit of a bugbear ever since that I will eternally hold against you! But it's been great! It's an amazing addition to the studio, and it's really, in a home decorative kind of way, sort of tied the place together, as well as literally — electronically.
Obviously, because the board sounds really nice, when I'm there I always mix on it. I don't know whether you do the same. What are your feelings about the recall issue? Nowadays, people are so used to mixing in the box and being able to instantly recall every mix they've done and tweak the smallest and most inconsequential sounds.
I do tend to mix on the board, but probably like many people, I've gone through most sorts of variations, hybrids, and options. I've mixed in the box, not mixed in the box, used stems, and all those sorts of things. I think it really depends on the project. Personally, I prefer using the board — partly for sonic reasons, and partly for workflow and the way that you approach what you're doing. There's definitely something that has a huge effect, what Steve Albini calls the "digital paradigm." The idea of looking at music is something that I've become more aware of. When I first started using Pro Tools, I just thought it was great; sort of the be-all, end-all. I did all this tweaking, fiddling, and automating to the nth. All of that stuff's great, and it's amazing we have the possibilities of those things, but I've come to appreciate the instinctive nature of analog mixing, and also the speed of it as well. Actually setting up a mix in the computer can be infinitely more time-consuming in a way, even though you've sort of got it in your head that it's faster. I don't know if it actually is, but that said, I think that both methods inform each other in a funny kind of way. Mixing in analog has taught me more about mixing, when and if I do mix in a digital setup. I think that both have their place, but I certainly prefer the sound of an analog mix. I prefer the speed and the instinctive nature, and I like the physicality of it. It's quite nice to be able to hit "go" on the computer, kind of leave the screen to one side, and just trust your ears and be able to walk around the room. I like being able to go up to a compressor and tweak it while standing in a different place, rather than bringing up plug-ins all the time. Given the choice, I would definitely work in that way. But I also accept that some projects require complete recall, and you need to be able to keep tweaking. I think particularly for film work, on those sorts of things with the computer side, it seems to make more sense to keep things in that realm, because there's every chance that you're going to have to keep making tons and tons of tiny alterations. But I think that when it comes to music, giving people the choice of constant tweaking just stops them from finishing things! If I wasn't working on different projects all the time, I might appreciate that ability to keep fiddling and tinkering, but I think after spending years working that way, I just prefer to finish things. Everyone that I know who prefers to mix in the box seems to take a lot longer to finish things.
Yeah.
So on that level, I think there's definitely a lot to be said for it. Also, everybody kind of mixes in computers now, so why should I do the same as everybody else? I'm a big believer in not doing what everyone else does just because everyone else is doing it. We've set ourselves up so that we can mix analog, and I feel that's been a worthwhile investment creatively, sonically, and artistically, if for no other reason than that it's the kind of thing that most people don't do now.
Well, certainly not at home, that's for sure. The last thing I wanted to ask you about was the most recent session that we've worked on with Rokia Traoré, because that was obviously quite different than anything we've done together before.
Yeah.
It was the first time I'd worked with African musicians, and the first time I'd recorded some of those instruments. There were also a lot of people playing simultaneously. Tell me a bit about the challenge of recording that lineup.
What was it, seven of them?
Seven, I think.
It's one of the larger setups that we've ever had to deal with, but I think we've done more than that simultaneously at Toybox before. We might have gotten up to ten or eleven musicians, but not in recent history. We don't have a massive studio with hundreds of booths and everything, but we can comfortably accommodate seven, I would say.
It was the challenge of recording a drum kit, double bass, live backing vocals, live lead vocals, and electric guitar...how to get all those, and the fact that they all needed to be able to see each other while they were playing, but we still wanted to have some kind of control over the separation. I mean, not total separation, but it was nice to be able to achieve, if we wanted to go back and do something...
To replace...
...to have that ability.
Yeah. I think it was helped by the kind of music it was. They're not like a big loud, noisy rock band, so their dynamic range made it possible, I think. If it had been a louder band, we might have come up against more problems. I went up to their rehearsal in London, when they were rehearsing for their Barbican show that you were playing at, and I walked out of that practice room thinking, "I don't know if we've got enough gear to do this!" I got straight on the phone and had to order another headphone mixer, some more sets of headphones, and these sorts of things, which is good, because we can obviously continue to accommodate larger groups now as a result of it. I needed to be at that rehearsal to really figure out what was what. I did make a plan at that moment, or a few different scenarios, of how we could set everybody up. I don't generally do that. These things sort of figure themselves out as you go, but planning is important with a lineup that size, plus the fact that we only had a short period of time to record. What was it, like eleven days I think?
Something like that, for recording. It was really fast.
We had to get everything down straightaway, so we couldn't be fiddling too much. I'm glad I put some preparation into that. If I hadn't had two or three different layout plans in my head, I think it could have taken a lot longer to set everything up. But they were all such fantastic players that you couldn't really make a mistake with them, in a way! The quality of the musicianship was just fantastic straight off the bat, so it was really a pleasure to try and eke out the very best engineering-wise from what they were delivering performance-wise. It was a different session for me, as I suppose it was for you, than a lot of things we've worked on, which have generally been small ensembles, individual artists, or constructed bands. I know that they were a constructed band, but it was still a band that had been performing and practicing together. I think that besides just having to get a few more bits of equipment, like multiples of things that we already had but needed more of, it worked itself out pretty well. There are a couple things I would have done differently, or a few things I could have improved. Recording the ngoni, an acoustic instrument that's very, very quiet, was particularly challenging, because we needed to have it in a room where the musician had direct eye contact with Rokia, the singer. There were also people singing really loud around him, and we couldn't really isolate him, because whatever we'd put on him mic-wise was still getting bleed, so there were things we just had to work with. That was one of the tougher ones, but yeah, it worked out.
