Engineer/Producer Hugh Padgham: “I Was Always Trying To Break The Rules”

In so many records of the seventies, the drums sounded like somebody tapping on a bloody cardboard box—dull and flat and non-ringing. There were still loads of dead rooms around in those days, rooms that were trapped to death.

When I first got to the Townhouse, it was like that, and it took a bit of doing to persuade the powers there to let me have a live area in the studio where we could put in our own acoustic treatment, which was basically big stones dug out of the garden at the Manor Studios in Oxford.

Do you believe in always trying to make an artist as comfortable as possible, or do you try to keep them on edge?

Well, I know that different producers take different approaches: no two people will crack a nut in the same way. But I’ve always felt that 50 percent of making a record is the microphones and equipment, and the other 50 percent is the vibe in the room, which the producer is largely responsible for.

There’s the old cliché, for example, of winding the singer up just before he sings so that you get a better performance out of him.

Does that ever work?

A lot of people have done it and have gotten good results. More often, though, I tend to take the opposite approach—I’ll do whatever I can to make a nervous singer feel comfortable.

For example, here in my studio I’ve got table lamps all over the place so it feels more like home and is less intimidating. If you march someone out into the center of the main orchestral room at Abbey Road and just order them to sing their heart out, it’s probably quite a difficult thing to do.

So evaluating the situation is extremely important, as is pre-reading the situation—knowing when it might be the right time to do this, that, or the other. It’s a balancing act the whole time; you’re constantly reading the artist to try to determine if they react best to being wound up a bit or being coddled.

Do you spend a lot of time in pre-production socializing with artists, getting to know them as people?

I’ve always tried to do as little pre-production as possible, because I find that whatever you think you’ve achieved in pre-production often tends to be not what you thought it was—you won’t know if the drummer can or cannot really play until you get him into the studio, for example.

Even though the economics nowadays dictate that you be as prepared as possible, pre-production doesn’t always work out to be the best way to accomplish that.

Unfortunately, lack of time or budget sometimes prevents you from doing a lot of experimenting, and that’s a problem when working with new artists in particular. It’s nice when you have a longstanding professional relationship with an artist and you know what vocal chain sounds best on them for a ballad, for example.

The last thing you want is for them to have sung their best while you were busy fiddling with a compressor and so the level was moving up and down.

Presumably since you own an SSL console, you don’t like to mix in the box.

No, I don’t. I admire anybody who can do it, though. [laughs] I know that some people who grew up in the era of the analog console are doing it, and they say they love it, but I can’t get my head around it.

I also don’t believe that it sounds as good. You at least need a summing mixer, to my way of thinking, but a lot of people still don’t use even those, even though a lot of them are reasonably priced now.

I still like pushing three or four faders in each hand at once, and you can’t do that kind of thing with a mouse. There are, of course, control surfaces with faders, but even with those you’re still pushing all the audio through this little digital pipe.