Interview Guy Massey
With ten years at Abbey Road Studios and MPG Recording Engineer of the Year 2011 under his belt, Guy Massey has an enviable career. MTM learns more...
Most people are familiar with the tea-boy career route into the studio world, and Guy is a living testament to this approach. After playing in bands and getting into recording through necessity, Guy chose to take a condensed three-month summer course at Surrey University, Guildford. After sitting a geology degree in Manchester – at a time when the city had its most exciting music scene – Guy opted for the three-month course as it had a rewarding carrot being dangled at the end of it. He explains: “The course was run by John Watkinson and David Pope. They said that if you did well on the course there was the opportunity to do a three-month placement at a studio in London afterwards.” On completing the course David offered him two studios for his placement – one of which he can’t remember, the other was Abbey Road.
Abbey and beyond
Although this was obviously a fantastic opportunity for Guy, he knew what he had to do in order to stay: apply some serious effort and determination. He recalls his initial experience: “For three months I worked for nothing. I was sleeping on the floors of various friends as I hadn’t moved to London at this point. After initially assisting on cassette tape duplication for promos, Colette Barber from Abbey Road had taken me on her books and let me start tea-boy work at the studios, which included some big film gigs. I remember one of the first days I went into Studio One with a tray of drinks: standing in front of me was Sir Richard Attenborough and Anthony Hopkins. I love films, so this was an amazing early experience.”
After Guy’s three months, his hard work was recognised by Abbey Road in the form of a job offer. He was then put into the studios and assisted, primarily in Studio Two, for five years. He’d use studio downtime to record bands of friends to make the most of his situation. He tells us about the importance of being an assistant at the time: “A lot of bands or producers would bring in their engineers. As an assistant my role was to know the studio inside out. You had to kind of second-guess what the engineer would want so it was ready to go instantly. I learned so much from seeing different people come in. A big thing that Haydn Bendall [former Abbey Road senior engineer] helped me understand was that 50 per cent of being an engineer or producer is your technical ability, the rest is how you get on with people. You have to spend so much time with them and be sensitive to their needs. If you can get on with people I think that’s half the job done. It’s a weird existence working in a studio: no daylight and long hours.”
The other half of Guy’s ten-year service saw him becoming a recording engineer as his primary role. Guy was still doing other odd jobs as well, though, as he explains: “There would always be the odd time when help was needed. I remember filling in last-minute as tape-op on Lord Of The Rings. I love movies, but assisting for one in the studio when you’re thrown in last-minute, towards the end of a long and fraught production, is really stressful and I found it hard to cope with. I only had to do a couple of days, though, so it wasn’t too bad.”
Remastering The Beatles
Guy also played a critical role in preparing the Grammy-winning Beatles remasters. He talks us through the process of dealing with such precious material: “My initial job was to transfer and archive most of the mono and stereo master tapes. I remastered the bulk of the stereo tracks alongside Steve Rooke [senior mastering engineer, Abbey Road]. Paul Hicks and Sean Magee remastered the mono tracks. Before we did the actual transfers we trialled different setups for going to digital. We did a series of blind tests with different tape machines, op amps and convertors at 192kHz, 24-bit. In the end we went for a Studer A80 using test-tone tape from 1972. It all ran into a Prism ADA-8XR for digital capture.”
As The Beatles are possibly one of the biggest bands you could ever have to work on, we wondered how Guy and the rest of the team tackled what must have been a very delicate job. Guy broke the general process down for us: “Transferring, archiving and a lot of listening was involved, while noting down elements we needed to address – things such as mains hum around and within pauses in tracks, clicks and vocal pops. We’d then go to Abbey Road’s restoration engineers Simon Gibson and Andy Walter. They used Cedar’s Retouch and Cambridge. They’d fix the bits, then we’d insert them back into our new master. Back in the mastering suite we would then run the new master out via the ADA-8XR into the EMI TG transfer console.”
The team effort behind the remasters is something that Guy is keen to make clear. He tells us how they stayed on track: “We’d always A/B test the original vinyls, the original CDs from 1987 and any other sources we could find. We wanted to constantly check that what we were doing made them sound better. The remasters do sound different, but we think we managed to get them to sound their best and hopefully appeal to a new generation of Beatles fans.”
The Fay days
Bill Fay has been absent from the music scene for some time. He had two albums in the late 60s which are full of great songwriting, high-end production and lovely instrumentation, including piano, guitars, vocals, brass and strings. So we were surprised when Guy told us he was finishing up Bill’s new album – but he told us that Bill needed some persuading to come back onto the scene…
Guy’s friend Josh Henry was responsible for this. He had been brought up on Bill’s work as his dad would play it around the house as a child. Then, through sheer determination, Josh managed to get Bill and an excellent band together to record a new album. The timeframe was short – and even shorter for Bill’s parts. Guy reveals: “We had ten days, but Bill for only four hours over three of those days to record vocals. He’d come in and do just two takes. He didn’t want to preview anything we’d done already, he wanted to experience it for the first time as he sang, which I thought was a really beautiful thing.
“We did two takes on everything and recorded 12 songs. This album reminds me of the Cash stuff Rick Rubin did, in the way that there is a fragility to his voice but it also has this incredible gravity and tone that is amazing.”
Given the classic style of music being recorded, Josh and Guy decided to go for authentic kit as well. He gives us the spec: “Most of it was recorded live down to tape onto 24-track at 15IPS without Dolby. Josh and myself are big fans of recording to tape. We’re really big fans of the warmth, space and dynamics that you get in those late 60s and early 70s records. We had drums, keyboards, guitar and bass all recorded live. Bill also sometimes sang and played piano in the live room at the same time. So we had to plan around the spill coming from the drums onto the piano, as there are no booths in the main live room. After some experimentation we figured out how to get it to work for us in a nice way.”
On song
When we looked at Guy’s current project list we could see that he’d recorded a few tracks for Ed Sheeran’s debut album. He was also finishing work that day with another singer/songwriter called Thom Cross. We asked him where this type of work started from: “I suppose it started with Stephen Fretwell; I worked on his first album at Abbey Road. I think it was something like 20 days and 20 songs. He had a great band who were really well rehearsed. He had the vision to record everything as a live take and that’s what we did. In those situations I’m more of a facilitator. I don’t see myself as a producer in the classic sense of the word really. I’m not going to start pulling people’s songs and arrangements apart and put them back together again. For the most part, artists have been living with these songs for months or years so they’re pretty happy about the arrangements already, but obviously if there are things in the arrangements that I feel could be approached differently I’ll flag it up. So it’s more that they come to me with an idea of how they want stuff to sound, citing references which become the basis for how they’d like their songs to be. I think that’s one of my strengths, really; if they play me something and say they want the drums to sound like that, I’d know how to get the sounds they want –with a little experimentation.”
Guy recorded Ed’s tracks in Studio 2 at SARM studios. He told us about the setup used: “I used the Shure KSM53 ribbon mic on his vocals. For the preamp I tried an API and a Neve 1073, but after an A/B I preferred the ISA 430. I didn’t have to EQ it, just a little filtering of the bottom end as that mic is quite full-sounding. I had a TubeTech CL1B on the insert for compression. We just did simple acoustic songs, really – one live on the piano and another with him on his guitar. Then I mixed three tracks on my HD setup at home. I do love working in places like here at Snap, but my home setup is pretty good for when the budget might be smaller or if we have spent the majority of the budget on the recording process itself. It means that I can have the mix instantly recallable at home and revisit stuff quickly. In fact, I mixed Thom’s EP at home and here today at Snap. Today, I’m going to run all the stems through the console and print the mixes to half-inch.”
This feature first appeared in Music Tech Magazine issue 102
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