We are on the Isle of Wight, which is right in the middle of the Isle of Wight, Araton.
It would be impossible to be here without something like Pro Tools.
It's not a big soundproof facility with tape machine rooms, it's just, you know, a computer
and a big desk and a load of outboard and it's brilliant.
And my first sort of big project was with Derrick B. He had a couple of number ones with Bad
Young Brother and a few things and it wasn't until much later that I ended up writing quite
a bit of stuff underneath people's tracks like Human League and that.
It just evolved really. I really like the kit, I like the noises and then sort of evolved organically.
When I was very young, around about 18, 1980, I got bought SH1, which is the
one of the early monophonic Roland keyboard. I had one of these when I was a kid.
This is a Jupiter 8 and I bought one of these for about 500 quid in about 92.
This one's been midded so it can be used with the sequencer and stuff.
Let's see if I can, before we film, so I can remember our big brother guy.
Pro Tools was the first affordable system but it wasn't so much that. It was when Pro Tools
went to TDM that it becomes something that I realised was going to be a game changer.
And I was the first programmer with a 13 slot TDM system and it just meant I got all the gigs.
I've never looked back and I've never mixed on anything since really.
My microphones, after my synthesizers, are my next favourite thing.
And I bought this off a guy in the Czech Republic whose grandad was swapped in the war.
I think it was the Second World War from an American pilot. It's an American RCA mic,
quite a famous microphone. Brilliant, sounds amazing on drums. I really love that.
This is the old mic that was used on Phil Collins in the air tonight and
it's called The Ball and Biscuit and Jack Wyatt has got a track called The Ball and Biscuit
named after that mic. I don't consider myself a businessman even though I work for myself
but Pro Tools has made it possible to organise your budgets. It just means that you can
totally base your budgets around the time constraints. I don't need to go anywhere to mix so
if there's a real budget restriction you can even mix it. If you wasn't supposed to mix it
you're just going to track it or produce it. It means you can be a one-stop basically. Pro Tools
is playing a real big part in what I'm doing at the moment. For instance the new film Rapid
Intervention I'm doing. I had a meeting in London, took my laptop with me and on the train I'd written
two of the cues on the way home. It's about an hour and a half on the train.
Instead of going to Prague to do the orchestra I'm doing it all in the box.
A few plug-ins, a bit of contact, a bit of the new string libraries.
Pro Tools 11 is going to change the industry in quite a big way I think. It's been rewritten.
So for the first time we're going to have something really fresh. This is completely 64
bit from the ground up so it's going to make the other systems out there feel really sluggish.
I know there's the fast bounce to disc so if I'm sitting here at the end of mastering records
and the record's an hour long it's taking me an hour to bounce at the moment. The new one's
going to take me, I don't know, two minutes. Someone said to me the other day about the sound
quality. I mean it's got to the point where the sound quality with the new IOs is so high
that there isn't anything to compete with really. I mean there's a lot of people out there that's
still harp on about the old equipment. I'm a big lover of the old equipment but I think that
the industry's changing and if you're not changing with it you're going to be left behind.
One of the other big changes that we've seen with Pro Tools has been the ability to use it
without expensive hardware. You can now see college students and kids playing with it and you can see
it going onto a laptop and someone's sitting in their bedroom and they're the beginning of the new
industry so it's really important that they have full access to all of this technology. I'm very
excited by what I'm able to do and offer. The difference is going to be you can take on even
more and if there's no budget for strings or there's no budget for a full band you know that you can
do it and probably do it on your laptop so I'm really excited by the future and I think it's all
getting smaller and quicker.
