Dave McCracken talks to Kevin Paul about his impressive career as a songwriter and Producer, from his early years at Sarm Studios with Trevor Horn, where he worked with Ian Brown and Depeche Mode, before being signed to Roc Nation, where he recorded with various Hip Hop artists and co-wrote two tracks that were recorded by Beyoncé.
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:26 - Helping New Bands
04:53 - Working With Goldie
08:47 - Sarm Studios And Ian Brown
09:52 - The Role Of The Producer
12:11 - Achieving Realism With MIDI
14:45 - Learning Through Experience
17:57 - Working With Beyoncé
20:14 - Getting Bands To Relax In The Studio
22:01 - Contributing To Lyrics
23:16 - Favourite Plug-ins
26:29 - Having An End Destination For A Track In Mind
Dave McCracken Biog
Dave McCracken is a songwriter and producer who launched his career at Sarm West studios. He's worked on four Ian Brown solo albums - Golden Greats, Music Of The Spheres, Solarized and My Way.
Later he was signed to Roc Nation as a producer, where he worked with various Hip Hop artists. His songwriting collaboration with Amanda Ghost resulted in two songs being placed on the Beyoncé album "I Am... Sasha Fierce". He has also worked with Kanye West, Mr Hudson, Depeche Mode, Seal, Chrissie Hynde, Hugo, Ohland, Swimdeep, Sports Team, Pip Blom and Sebastian Schub.
More recently Dave has started to assist in the development of new, upcoming bands.
https://www.instagram.com/mccracken23/
Kevin Paul Biog
Kevin Paul started his career as a DJ but quickly found his passion was sound engineering. His first audio job was at Soho Studios in 1991, moving to Konk Studios six months later, where he worked alongside successful producers and engineers such as Bob Clearmountain, Adam Mosley, Pascal Gabriel and Gil Norton, as well as bands such as The Kinks, Galliano, Terrorvision, UFO and Elastica.
After working on archiving the Depeche Mode back catalogue in 1994, he was offered an engineering role at Mute Records’ in-house studio, which eventually lead to a position as Head Engineer, which gave him access to the entire Mute Records roster. Highlights include mixing Goldfrapp’s “Felt Mountain”, David Bowie’s “Hours” and Nick Cave’s “No More Shall We Part”. He also worked in 5:1, mixing Moby’s “Hotel”, Goldfrapp’s “Black Cherry“ and more for DVD.
In 2004 Kevin went freelance and re-mixed the entire Depeche Mode and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds back catalogues for SACD/DVD. Since 2008, Kevin Paul has been in charge of mixing and remixing performances at the iTunes Festivals in the UK and Germany. He has mixed over 100 artists to date, including Adele, Ed Sheeran, Alicia Keys, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The XX, Calvin Harris, Foo Fighters, Jack White, Linkin Park, Florence & The Machine, Deadmau5, David Guetta, Jessie J., Norah Jones, Oasis, Mumford & Sons, N.E.R.D., Lykke Li, James Blunt, KT Tunstall, Hot Chip, Paul Weller and many more.
He continues to record, engineer, produce and mix many projects in music and film, runs the mixing and surround mixing modules for the Masters Degree course at UK’s Westminster University and divides his time between London and Berlin. Recent works include the International selling new album by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and mixing the latest album of Denmark’s “Dúné” with the first single premiering at the Danish Music Awards, plus the latest iTunes Music Festival.
http://www.kevin-paul.com/
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