Hi there, I'm Charlie Andrew.
I'm a producer and this is my studio.
This is where I spend most of my time
recording and mixing the bands I work with.
So over the years I've worked with a band called Alt-J,
just finished their third album.
Also artists such as Marika Hackman
and Sivu,
all of which I've just done new albums with,
and obviously there's various others along the way.
I've worked with Madness,
Benjamin Francis Leftwich,
and various others.
At school I had a keen interest in
science; physics mainly,
and mathematics, and I also
learnt two instruments.
I learnt the drums and the saxophone actually.
And then it dawned on me that it would be very
fun to merge the two together somehow.
I knew I was never going to be a professional soloist,
but somehow combining the two really intrigued me.
I was very fortunate that when I did my A-levels,
the school I was at had a small studio, very
basic setup, and I just found myself in there all the time,
at break time, after school,
whatever, just messing about.
So I realised this is what I wanted to do.
As I said I spent most my time in this room,
it's quite cosy but it does the job.
I certainly understand the acoustic in here
so I do my mixing in here.
It's part of a bigger complex, so there's
a communal live space with another control room
which I sometimes use as another live space.
Very versatile space,
and you know, I love it here.
Equipment wise, I'm running on Pro Tools HDX,
and a various array of inputs.
I've got the Audient ASP880 here,
and the ASP008 over here,
and various other inputs
going in, depending on what I'm recording.
So the ASP880 I use quite often
when I'm tracking drums.
Because it's so transparent,
it works on most things,
or pretty much everything to be honest.
So if I've got to have quite a lot of mics on a drum kit,
its perfect for that.
Also for acoustic guitars,
it's just a lovely piece of kit really.
I really like recording acoustic guitars from
quite a distance, then really compressing it
then you can hear the environment
that the player is in.
I do close mic as well, that can be spot on
for some things, but sometimes it's quite
cool if you've got a kind of fast rock and roll song
and it's an acoustic guitar, just to
heavily compress a distant mic,
and that's your acoustic guitar.
I think that's really cool.
Also it gives a bit of perspective to your mix,
a bit of depth, just naturally rather
than having to put reverb on a close mic'd guitar.
I'm a big fan of recording ambience as well so
there'll be various mics dotted around
off mic as it were, getting the room ambience.
All the bits that quite often people don't
necessarily want to hear, I want to hear them,
so each room will have at least one ambient mic,
as far off source as possible just to
get that intrigue going.
So for mixing, on an outboard point of view,
I use these two EQs a lot.
The GML is a beautiful piece of kit,
so I use that a lot and then I've got the Maag here
which has a lovely "AIR" band on it,
which is just that real top lift at the end there.
So this lovely piece of kit here, Vortexion,
it's an old mixer from the '50s which is just
great for getting a little bit of character
on various things, with percussion and things like that
with lots of transients, you can just drive it quite hard.
So as you can see it's quite a small room,
so plugins do have a big part of what I do.
There's some really great ones out there these days,
but as long as I can get the sound I
want at source, hopefully the mixing process should
look after itself.
That's the idea.
But yeah, when it comes to things like compression,
I do a little bit on the way in on vocals
and things like that.
Anything that's a lead line might have a little bit of,
depending on the sonic I'm after.
Yeah, sometimes it's quite fun to experiment down the line.
I've got so many different sets of speakers here
because I like to reference the mix on
different outputs.
So I've got the big Focals which have obviously got
more bottom end than the Auratones for example.
The Auratones I find really useful for things
like balancing vocals and things like that,
because sometimes when you've got a lot of
bass in your mix or something it might mask
some vocal and you end up pushing the vocal up a lot,
and then you take it elsewhere and
you realise you've mixed the vocals too loud.
So it's quite nice, I find the Auratones really
useful for that.
Obviously Yamaha NS-10s are an industry standard
reference point, and then also I've got the
radio here, which is ultimately what a lot of people
are going to be listening to
mixes on so make sure it stands up on that too.
I actually quite like it when a performance is imperfect,
I think those are the things
that catch my ear in a positive way.
Rather than
I think it would catch my ear in a very negative way
if the whole drum performance
was "flawless",
and no dynamic to it whatsoever.
That doesn't interest me, you know,
you might as well just turn that on,
turn the 808 on or something.
That's what that does.
I want to hear a human performance.
For me personally,
I would want to hear more of that in today's music.
Like I said before, I'm very fortunate with
some of the artists that I work with, that they
are quite open minded to that and I think they've got
a similar viewpoint to me,
all listening to sort of,
older recordings that intrigue you because,
you know, there's
imperfections in there that really
are quite endearing.
I've just done the Marika Hackman record
and that was all tracked live, same as Sivu,
it was me and him basically the whole
album was based on a live take
that he performed, and then we might
embellish the arrangement after that.
But on top of this live take that
may or may not have been recorded to a click,
some were, some weren't
which I think just adds a real magic to the whole thing really.