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Introduction. James Towler is Steve Winwood’s and Wincraft’s Front of House, Studio and Tour Manager. James kindly took some time out of his schedule to talk to Coloured Rain about his work
1. James. Firstly thank you for agreeing to talk with Coloured Rain and on behalf of our readership and indeed ourselves at C.R. can we congratulate you once again on your award for Recording Engineer of The Year by The Music Producers Guild for 2009. We understand that the Music Producers Guild Awards aims to recognise the enormous contribution recording professionals make to the success of the UK's music industry. A worthy accolade indeed. How did it feel to be nominated and to win this particular award as voted for by your peers? And wonderful to speak to you all at Coloured Rain as well. It was fantastic to get nominated for the Music Producers Guild Award. I didn’t actually know anything about it or the nomination or how I got nominated or when, but I received an e-mail through in January 2009 when we were out in Hawaii doing a corporate gig with Steve and I was absolutely blown away, couldn’t believe it, checked a bit more in to it and thought, well, great, back in England, will be able to turn up for the award. Then to actually win was just amazing. And against some of the other people in the category – Haydn Bendall and Markus Dravs, just fantastic, I can’t believe I won it. Absolutely fantastic. As you said to be voted by your peers and get that, I still look through the list now and can’t believe I’m up there with some of the guys like Brian Eno and Bernard Butler. It’s just amazing.
Beginnings. 2. How did you originally come to get into Recording, Engineering and Mixing? That’s quite a good question, in the beginning, how did I get into it? I came originally from more of a D J background. When I was about 14 or 15 that was my main interest in music really with a pair of Technics (turntables) which were belt driven in those days before direct drive and mixing them together. And that’s really where my first spark of interest happened with recording. From there I got together with a few friends, I bought a sampler and a mixing desk. That was back in my days in Bristol. I started messing around from there. It became a real passion because I wasn’t trained in any way in any kind of audio thing. It was always more just a passion of mine. I used to do offshore investments for an insurance company and at the age of 22 I felt it was not what I really wanted to do with my life. I ended up hooking up with Julian Richer of Richer Sounds and a guy called Kev Steele and they were starting a new company called X Music and they asked me to come on board and run the shop in London. Basically I used to sell hi tech music gear. That’s where that came from. And from there I just bumped into a guy called Mike McEvoy who was Steve’s MD back in 1996 and he asked me if I’d like to go out on tour and be a keyboard technician. So that’s the winding path of how I got to where I am today, doing a few other bits and pieces along the way. But that’s the nuts and bolts of it.
Your role. 3. Can you describe what your current job/role and responsibilities are? Wow, well that’s a kind of difficult one. Working for Steve, basically “diversification” is the key word with Steve playing the organ, doing the bass with his feet and singing and everything he does and it’s kind of a multi task company. I don’t have a job description as such. Mainly I look after the studio here in the UK, also we’ve got another studio over in Nashville and I take care of the equipment there. We have the touring side which I kind of look after, deciding what equipment we are going to use because we actually purchase a lot of the equipment that we use both for the studio and touring. So I’m involved in that and setting up the tours. Working with a Record label when we’ve got a project on the go. Dealing with the video side of things. It’s a kind of a bit of an all round thing really. I’ve got a couple of guys who help me out as well. There’s Ross Mitchell who works for me in the UK and there’s J.T. Poe in the U.S. I suppose that you can say I’m Steve’s right hand man and they’re kind of my right hand men and in either place we just make sure that everything that is going on gets taken care of.
Recording. 4. Can you describe for the benefit of our readers (and indeed myself) how the interaction between Engineering, Production and Mastering normally works?
It’s quite an interesting question this one. I mean from Engineering, production to mastering which are the three separate phases to making an album. Initially you’ve got the initial recording of the album which when I work with Steve we always cut live and a lot of the other people that come to me, they want to cut live and that’s where we/I pick up extra work and they like the interaction of a band playing live and what I’ve done with Steve. How I capture that is kind of what they are after, which is quite exciting. I’ve got Paul Booth’s album coming up shortly which I’m really looking forward to working on. Yeah, so you’ve recorded it then you move on to the production side and move into the mixing of the album and adding in some elements if there is a need to. Deciding on certain takes and that kind of stuff We don’t tend to do a lot of post production work on Steve’s albums. It’s pretty much captured there and mixes itself really. That’s the fantastic thing with it. It’s not like going over every single note, drum hit or any of that. And then when we’ve got that final mix that we are happy with for mastering next, then I tend to use Tony Cousins at Metropolis in London, he’s my favourite mastering engineer to use. And on an album I usually spend about 2 days with him in total and that’s where he polishes off my mixes. Always an interesting one because it’s like there’re is a dark magic behind the mastering engineer but there are certain mastering engineers out there who basically compress and limit the hell out of it and just brighten it say for Radio use. But then you’ve got some fantastic mastering engineers who listen to what you’ve done and still try to keep that essence and energy within the mix, but just smooth out a couple of little things in there. and I believe that everything that I take to Tony, he comes back with a definite improvement. I have been to other places and have definitely not been as happy nor as satisfied.
5. These days I would imagine that the recording process requires people who have either been trained or have acquired expertise in Information Technology yes? This I guess being mainly because the hardware and software available for Digital Recording, mixing and storage has progressed so far. When I first started listening to recorded music I was aware that back in those early day in the 60’s it was firstly to 4 then 8 tracks, analogue and to magnetic tape and then things started to gradually improve. Nowadays with technology I understand with packages/systems such as Pro Tools HD Recording, Cubase and Waves TDM Plug in Suite etc., it can be up 128 tracks (or possibly even more now, I don’t know). And the days of splicing tapes together for edits have long gone! Does technology in your mind make your job harder, or easier and in what ways?
I believe that was music better then or better recorded then? I listen to some of those old Tamla Motown records and it’s just fantastic and if you think of the kind of way that they recorded onto tape then what went down then was probably better performance. And I operate on this 100% rule where 50% is instrument and performance, 20% is the room, 20% mike placement and 10% is mike pre. So the actual recording media doesn’t equate into it really. With Pro-Tools there is too much tendency to tinker and mess around too much with the sound, straighten up things and sometimes you look at something and it’s wrong and you edit to make it right timing wise but you are losing the feel and things like that. So it’s great that we went back to cutting live because it’s brought back something that was missing in the 80’s and 90’s where you get the drummer in and you track the drummer and track the bass player and keyboards, do the vocals etc., And to me that isn’t an exciting way to record and capture something and as I mix live and in the studio, I kind of like the nowness of the live situation - it’s captured and it’s gone. Capturing that is where there is a certain kind of magic. I’m still quite good friends with a lot of DJ’s involved in Dance Music and like Jody Wisternoff from Way Out West and Nick Warren and they’ve started getting rid of their software synths and are going back to the old ones because those old machines have a sound and it gets captured within the music. Technology moves along but sometimes misses the beauty of it and that’s what I think. As for people being trained, we all know that there are a lot of courses out there for music technology and Degree Courses. But I think that someone with a passion will always shine through. Most of the people that I know haven’t really had any formal training and it’s the passion for recording, moving microphones and so on. Like there’s some that put a microphone up then fix it with EQ and compression but if you can move the microphone to a great position in the first place then there’s no need for it. I did an interesting session last night with a guy called Michael Roach who is a Blues player from Washington DC who lives out by us and it was great really because I spent about an hour last night just trying different mikes and settings and just moving the mic’s around and seeing how it affected the sound. I enjoyed that and got some fantastic results and hopefully should be finishing his album off soon and I’m looking forward to that. It’s great to capture something magical from someone doing a performance and that’s what I enjoy and to me Pro-Tools is a tool and should be used as a tool and not as a fix it all system.
6. I first became aware of what the audio recording process was capable of producing in the mid sixties by firstly listening to recordings by The Beatles (Producer George Martin and Engineers Norman Smith then Geoff Emerick), (early) Traffic of course (Producer Jimmy Miller and Engineers Eddie Kramer and then Glyn Johns), Cream (Producer Felix Pappalardi and Engineers Tom Dowd and Bill Halverson), Jimi Hendrix (Engineer Eddie Kramer), Doobie Brothers (Producer Ted Templeman and Engineer Tom Landee), The Rolling Stones (with again Producer Jimmy Miller and Engineer Glyn Johns) and the list goes ever on. I liked the sounds that in using the recording process they conveyed onto the finished recording product (and still do). For me as a “Music Listener” when I buy or listen to an album, in order of priority I do so firstly for either the Artist(s) or the music (in either order) followed by the production and engineering. To my mind, or rather my ears, an under produced/engineered recording can affect the enjoyment of the work of the Artist(s) and the music. “Nine Lives” for which you won the award has a depth and clarity that to my ears makes it sound as though the listener could almost be in the studio with the musicians as they play, which I particularly like and it has a nice feel and ambience about it. How would you describe what went into creating the recording process for the album?
We have this conversation quite a lot and I’m part of the Cheltenham Audiophile Society and we have a meeting every Wednesday at a pub which is always a good place to discuss things and it’s something that comes up. And George Shilling is apart of it and a lot of people in our industry put a lot of work into the production and the engineering side of it and it is about the performance and the song and I think that sometimes gets lost and I know I mentioned this before. But this is how I feel. How I approached Nine Lives and we cut it at Wincraft studios at The Barn and it’s about the live situation and capturing those moments there and I do try and capture it as I do when we do a Live Gig. Basically what you are trying to get across and for the rest of the listeners to the music is that it is a real thing going on and that you can be in the room there with them. And the barn does have this great natural ambience that adds to the recording. If you listen to Neto’s Album ‘Lua’s Dance’ it’s the same thing. It’s got that same air to it. It’s just something in that room and it’s fantastic. We’ve been in there for about 10 years now. I started designing it about 12 years ago now and the studio has been there for the last 10 which has been great and I really enjoy it up there.
7. You must have some nice memories about the recording of this album. Is there anything in particular that happened during the sessions that gave you a good feeling or a sense of satisfaction at the time, when you look back now?
Actually I’ve got more memories of the ‘About Time’ album than the ‘Nine Lives’ album. The Nine Lives album we cut, if I go back and look at the sessions, in less than 7 days in total doing the whole thing. So it was more of a whirlwind kind of thing really To record Nine lives was really fast. For About Time we spent 5 weeks recording and that was the first album that I worked with Steve on because Junction 7 was 1996 but it was 2002 when we started About Time, so to me that was more memorable. Looking back, what came from Nine Lives was fantastic and I think spending time out on the road and mixing live on the road to then go back into the studio and cut this album helped I had a few extra tricks up my sleeve and to me it was more where I was looking for the recording to go for Nine lives because About Time that was more George Shilling’s vision and Nine Lives more my vision sonically of where I wanted it to be. To sit back and listen to it now is fantastic. I’ve just started going back to About Time and the mixes I did then and started to tweak those and that’s been quite good fun over the past week. I called up a couple of tracks, Domingo Morning being one to see if I could pull anything more from those recordings and that’s been quite exciting.
8. Having researched a little into your recording career I saw that you have credits for Assistant Engineering and Mixing of Steve’s “About Time” album; Engineering, Mixing and Mastering of Steve’s “Nine Lives” album; Engineer for Steve’s contribution to Sam Moore’s “Overnight Sensational” album, Engineering for The Netobands “Lua’s Dance” which was also recorded at Wincraft Studios. On your myspace page you mention that your roles are (or have been): Producer, Engineer, Programmer, Re-Mixer within the following genres: Rock, Blues, Ambient, World, Jazz, Electronic, Drum & bass. Aside obviously for the excellent work that you have been doing for Wincraft can you tell us a little about other recording ventures that you have been involved with?
I’m always tinkering around doing remixes. I did a few remixes for the Sunday Club. Coming from a Dance Music background originally I always do a few bits there. I don’t tend to do any kind of writing or that stuff anymore. I’ve stayed away from that for the last few years because I’ve really been tied up doing Steve’s stuff. I get a lot more satisfaction now out of recording rather than writing. I work quite a lot with blues guitarists. Michael Roach who I’ve mentioned before, Andy Budgen, Sam Holmes. A lot of Cheltenham local stuff. I’ve also worked with a guy called Hunter Williams out in Nashville on a project called Sojourn. I’ve got quite a few projects coming up, finishing the Michael Roach album, Paul Booth’s album which I start and goes into production in April. I’ve just finished mixing a live album for Steve, I’ve just finished the Madison Square Garden for Steve and Eric (5.1 and Stereo mix) and I’m always seeming to bounce around on projects and around and about. I’m always looking for someone to record. Someone who I’ve got my eye on at the moment is a guitarist called Dave Harper who’s just fantastic. So hopefully I’m going to slot a day in with him soon and he’s got a band so kind of whip them into shape and get something there as well. So yeah, I’ve always got a kind of hunger for recording shall we say.
9. And from a recording perspective, aside from your continued work for Wincraft, do you have any further ambitions, recording wise; say perhaps recording other artists at Wincraft Studios which is clearly a commercial concern or on a freelance basis?
Aside from the work that I do at Wincraft Music which doesn’t sort of leave me any time to do other stuff I was recently out in Santa Monica working out at P.O.P. Sound where we were finishing the Clapton/Winwood project and there were a lot of people working on DVD’s, 5.1’s, on the film side and that definitely really does interest me. And I’ve always wanted to record an orchestra so that’s one of the things that really is an ambition of mine. I love strings and to do that on a film for Hans Zimmer or John Williams would be fantastic but I don’t think we’ll be getting that at Wincraft Studios somehow. But that’s something I would like to do at some point in my life, but hey the barn’s running well and Steve’s ongoing, so at the moment I’ve got no need to look anywhere else.
On the road.
10. Of course we’ve been following Jason Jarvis’s excellent GUITAR CHIMPS ADVENTURES IN BIGLAND Blog which has given us an interesting (and fun) outlook on The Steve Winwood and his band touring excursions and I’ve seen you myself on tour slaving away over a hot soundboard. But I can imagine that it’s pretty hard work too for you and the crew particularly in moving and setting up the equipment together with sound checks pre show and of course dismantling and exiting after the show. Of course what I’ve just said is a very simplified view. James, can you describe for us in more detail including timescales of the stages of what actually happens from a Touring Crew and Tour Management perspective?
On the road. It’s good. We’ve got a great crew, well the band and crew on the road. It’s a small touring party of 10 people being 5 crew and 5 band. I think we’ve actually done it with 4 crew and 5 band in the UK and that definitely stretches the work out a bit It’s not as bad now getting in and out of venues. The great thing as I mentioned before is that we do tend to own a lot of our equipment, I mean sounds wise. Lights we don’t and we just tend to use In House production, but sound wise I have my own Digidesign Venue Board which I mix monitors for from Front of House as well which frees up J.T. (Poe) so that he’s not stuck at monitors as he used to be when we were out on the road a few years ago. And then we’ve got Jason (Jarvis) on stage doing guitars and also the blog which I hope you all enjoy reading. So yeah, we’re always looking at ways of streamlining what we do on the road to make it easier to get in and out. And one of the things that I always try to get through to the guys is kind of let’s kind of have a new idea each day to improve and to make it better. It’s definitely an advantage to have all our own Mic stands and Mic cables, desk and stuff because I think we can now roughly set up in about 90 minutes and get out in under 45. So if we didn’t spend so much time kind of playing around on the equipment then we’d probably be able to have shorter days and spend more time in the places where we are to go sight seeing! A bunch of techno geeks on the road I guess. So that’s the kind of in and out of that. The tour management side. I’ve got Ross Mitchell who works with me in the office in the UK and he’s also kind of my travel agent now which is really good and he’s got a corporate account set up which has made a lot of things easier. Touring is not rocket science. It involves long hours, a lot of travelling and we get to have a little fun too. I enjoy it.
11. I imagine also that the size of a venue and its acoustics play their part in making your jobs a little more difficult at times. And I guess also if you are touring with another act (like Tom Petty) or appearing at Festivals then this can add to complications with using shared P.A. systems or other equipment. How do you find this aspect of what you and the touring crew have to do?
Different venues. Well that’s the kind of challenge of the day really. The great thing of having the venue profile desk is that it comes back to where you are. With Tom Petty last year, having the 3 months on the road you get a feel for the board and without even looking at it you know where you should be. And if that’s not what’s coming out of the speakers then you’ve got some problems. I must admit that I didn’t enjoy mixing arenas. Mixing Madison Square Gardens, I did enjoy that but the majority of arenas I tend to find that the sound is not as detailed as what you get in theatres really. It’s interesting in that I never really take what I hear in sound checks to be what the room is going to be like really. As long as I’ve got most of my lines in for the sound check I’m more or less happy. I tend to get the basis of the mix on the first song because when everybody comes in, all the acoustics change so for a room that sounds great during the sound check it could be terrible in the show and likewise what sounds terrible in the sound check can be great for the show.
One example last year I can remember is Scala (London). Admittedly we hadn’t been touring for a while and it’s always difficult during that transition period between studio and live and your expectations of what you’re going to hear. The Scala soundcheck was absolutely dreadful. I couldn’t stand the room, I was getting so much from off the stage, I couldn’t get the level out of the P.A. to be what was going out from the stage but as soon as everybody was in there and it started it was absolutely amazing. It had cleaned up the sound so it’s very difficult and that is one of the major things. Festivals. Yes, they can be complicated but I don’t find festivals a problem any more. I used to dread them and I probably dreaded them more when I was on the stage but now I’m doing front of house I’m more than happy As long as I’ve got my 4 BNC lines all hooked in and I can see all the risers are in position and the multicores are connected then I’m kind of happy because I’m in control of that. Festivals, well I’ll probably regret that comment someday but touch wood I don’t mind them. It’s good fun.
Oh No! Cheltenham Town lost again! Other.
12. When I contacted you, you mentioned that you were just finishing off some aspects on the soon to be released Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood at Madison Square Gardens DVD and CD release, working on the 5.1 and stereo mixes, which we are all looking forward to. And I would imagine that you had some input into the DVD that that came with the Special Edition of “Nine Lives”. I would also imagine that the Video Suite facilities at Wincraft are first class. Is the Video aspect of Wincraft Studios something that Wincraft and you would like to do more of in the future?
Visual is something that does interest me and we have always tinkered around with video at Wincraft Music. I do do a fair amount of video editing, but more audio than video. I don’t know if you have ever noticed when we’re on the road that we’ve sometimes got some little video cameras on the side of stage and front of house and we bring that back and edit little bits and put bits together. There’s a new system that I’m working on at the moment, just doing the final designs, to maybe take out a more elaborate video recording system on the road hopefully for the European Tour. We do do quite a bit of visual work and something that I edited about a year ago because I spent so much time on the road last year was for a band called The Only Ones. They shot a DVD in Shepherds Bush and they came to me to do the visual edit and someone else to do the audio edit and that was quite successful around Europe which was quite funny really in that I sometimes get classified as being a Video Editor or “Vidiot”. But yes we do have quite a good video editing system at Wincraft. With Final Cut things have got a bit easier and you can have it on your laptop and we can actually do it online. I actually did a lot of the TRAFFIC –The Last Great Traffic Jam DVD, I don’t know if you noticed that? I did a fair amount of editing work on that at some point and that was my first kind of learning project getting into video. We are always welcome to video projects coming in and we are set up to do 5.1 so you can mix the picture there, you can edit there and it’s a great location for someone trying to finish a project to get away to. And I definitely enjoy it out there. On Nine Lives I had a little bit to do with that. Not too much because it was Sam Erickson who was the Director on that and a lot of Sony people more involved but the sound and how it was all set up there was pretty much my design.
13. And finally, do you have any other career/personal ambitions?
Well I just seem to have fallen into what I’ve fallen into and it’s been great. I would never have imagined when I was playing with record decks at the age of 14 that I’d have recorded a few albums for Steve Winwood and now a live CD and DVD for Steve and Eric Clapton. I can’t think of really what else. The only thing, as I said before would be to record the soundtrack for a film. That’s something that’s an ambition on the music side. And on the personal side to take some more time off and maybe get another interest such as fishing or something and not be so stuck in the studio all the time and on the road. That’s about it really. I’ve got absolutely no complaints of how life has taken me so far and where I’ve got to and yes, absolutely fantastic. Thanks for the interview and thank you Coloured Rain and I hope your readers enjoy reading this.
And thanks very much James for taking the time out to answer my questions. Interview by Eddie Gibbs March 2009 Links: www.wincraftstudios.co.uk/ and Guitar Chimps Adventures in Bigland Blog dubjae.blogspot.com/ |
