As a producer and studio owner, every now and then I get an enquiry for work that gets me all excited.
    One Sunday morning, Dave Bronze called me to enquire about the my studio’s availability for late September. As it happened,  we had the week he was looking for available so he decided to come up for a look around.
   Then he mentioned that the session was a Robin Trower album.
    Now, I’ve been in to Robin’s music for a very long time, so the prospect of having him in my studio was an exciting one to say the least.
    The following Sunday,  Robin and Dave came up for a look around, and confirmed the booking.  I was extremely pleased and excited, but unfortunately, that same afternoon I ended up firing my assistant
engineer, unwittingly placing myself in a situation where I would end up engineering Robin’s album.
    At New Rising, we divide the studio’s work between sessions that I am producing, and ‘dry hire’, where the artist brings their own producer, and we provide an assistant engineer, so under normal circumstances, as Robin and Dave were producing the album, I wouldn’t have been in the studio, but as our replacement assistant only started work the week before, I decided to take the job on myself.
    I was expecting something of a tough call, as when you’re used to producing records and having the final call on decisions, it can be very hard to not be a part of the decision making process. Still, I thought, it should be fun.
And it was a lot of fun: Most of the bands I work with these days are in the rock and metal field. It’s very much where my heart lies - I love guitars, particularly really loud, distorted ones, but it was a welcome relief to record a band of this calibre and ability.
    Everything was tracked live originally, although Robin decided to re cut a lot of the guitar parts. Some of Davey Pattison’s guide vocals, sung in the control room, were eventually kept as the master vocals (On two occasions if I remember correctly).  Davey is a truly remarkable singer, and an extremely nice guy to boot,
as is drummer Pete Thompson.
   The first week of the session saw us getting nine songs down, to Otari Radar 24 track digital, and there wasn’t a duff song among them.
  I honestly think that this album is Robin’s finest work. His song writing is, without doubt, at an all time peak.
Robin returned on his own to do some more tracking during early November, and expressed concerns over the tracks sounding too digital, so we decided to copy them over to two inch analogue, and in the process, found the key to how the record needed to sound.
    Another session in early December saw us complete a lot more tracking, and mixing five songs to half inch analogue tape (I can never go back to DAT again!).
    Robin returned again just before Christmas, the day after our replacement assistant engineer had cracked up and stolen our Apple Mac computer, which had all of the rhythm tracks from the album I’m currently working on, on it.
   We had managed to get it back, but were a little shaken up. Despite all of this, we managed to nail three more mixes during the session.
   Due to my prior commitment to another project (the debut album by UK band Vero),  I was unable to take on the tracking of the final two songs for the album, so the guys went to Intimate in London. However, I spoke to Robin a few days ago and it seems that there is a strong possibility that I will end up doing some more tracking and mixes in the near future.
   So all in all, it was a fantastic experience, and there is a treat in store for all Trower fans when they hear this album.