I've spent over three decades working as an engineer and producer at the highest levels of the music industry, including nine years at the world famous Abbey Road Studios.
I'm a graduate of the prestigious Tonmeister course in Music and Sound Recording at the University of Surrey in the UK, and began my career working at the Decca Record Company. Decca led the world in the art of classical recording, and it was my extraordinarily good fortune to work with such incredible artists as Sir Georg Solti, Luciano Pavarotti and Dame Joan Sutherland, and to learn my craft from such legendary producers and engineers as Christopher Raeburn, Peter Wadland, Chris Hazell, Jimmy Lock, John Dunkerley and Simon Eadon.
After a brief spell working in radio (mainly travelling around Africa and Asia building studios) I moved to Abbey Road Studios, where I was soon promoted to become the engineer in charge of Studio One, possibly the most famous classical and film-scoring room in the world. Here I worked with literally hundreds of producers and engineers from all the major record companies and recording teams - it was an amazing educational opportunity, and in a world where most engineers tend to work with and learn from a relatively small collection of peers, this gave me an almost unparalled breadth of experience.
With EMI Classics, I travelled extensively across Europe and North America, recording major artists such as Sir Simon Rattle, Itzhak Perlman, Wolfgang Sawallish, Mariss Jansons, Antonio Pappano and Seiji Ozawa. At Abbey Road I set up a joint venture with Apple Computers that became Abbey Road Interactive. This pioneered many of the multimedia techniques that are now commonplace, including producing the UK's first ever DVD, as well as creating websites and Enhanced CDs. I also developed Takelog, a software package for running recording sessions, which at one stage had been used on the film scores of six of the ten highest grossing movies of all time.
After completing an MBA from Imperial College Business School, and seeking new challenges, I left Abbey Road to join Warner Music Group. My task there was to persuade and prepare a somewhat reluctant organisation that this new-fangled internet thingy was really not going to go away, and that it would be a good idea to adjust its systems and processes accordingly. So a part of my work was to construct and maintain a huge global database of repertoire metadata, linked to an ever-growing archive of digitised material. This work has developed massively since I left, and can be seen today in all manner of streaming and download services, from Spotify to Apple Classical.
After four years in record company senior management, the siren call of working again at the sharp end of music production became too loud to ignore. So I decided to set out as a freelance producer and engineer and musician, and that's what I've now been doing for the past two decades. I love the variety that the freelance life gives me. When working in large organisations the natural tendency is put people in boxes - "you are employed to do X, and therefore all you will do, or maybe even all you can do, is X". But I abhor being pigeonholed this way. I am proud that I have developed world-class skills in many seeming disparate functions, and love the opportunities that I am offered to use a wide variety of them.
To give a flavour of the range of things I can do, I have put up a selection of examples of my work that show how my various skills have been used on different projects.