A few years ago, when I was an in-house engineer at Metropolis Studios in London, I assisted on a session that has become kind of legendary. I’ve heard it talked about on the radio. I’ve had people describe it to me without realising that I was there. It’s been odd, but then I knew before we started that it would be something different.

I was, on and off, assisting on a Scott Walker album that was being made at Metropolis. Most people will have heard Scott’s incredible voice from the hits he had with the Walker Brothers in the 60s and 70s. “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” is my personal favourite, but there are lots to choose from. Later in his career I think it’s fair to say he tended more towards an Avant Garde style and away from pop music, and this led to some incredibly interesting sessions for me, assisting him and his co-producer while they put his album together.

For the day in question, I was told it was going to be a percussion session. Knowing Scott, I wasn’t expecting congas and tambourines - I guessed this would be something a bit more unusual than that. I called Pete (who was both co-producer and engineer) a couple of days before so I could find out what we were doing, and he told me that a carpenter would be coming to construct a wooden box that we needed to mic up, and there would also be a side of pork that needed to be punched, and some bits of metal in a bucket of water. Now, if you’re someone who works in Foley then this might be reasonably normal, but in a music recording studio this was all pretty wild, and I had no precedent or mental template to draw from for how this was going to work.

Mics for a drum kit I could do in my sleep, same with recording guitars, a string section, brass etc. This was all going to be new though, so it required a different sort of preparation. I needed to set up a lot of options, and have them ready to slide into place, swap around and be flexible with. There would be no time to set anything up once people arrived as a lot of time would be taken with experimentation whilst the percussionist was in place, and watching an assistant plug-in and line-check microphones is not conducive to creative experimentation!

By way of preparation, I remembered some of the best advice I’ve been given, which was in the first few months of working at Metropolis as the bottom-of-the-rung new assistant. The engineer I was working with said that there are no major transferrable skills between assistant and engineer, and also pretty much none between engineer and producer. Besides the interpersonal relationship ‘vibe’ stuff that you learn from being in lots of sessions, there aren’t a lot of crossovers between the roles that would mean being in one would prepare you for the next. But the one thing that you can do, which will give you a chance of being asked to take a step up the career ladder, is to be thorough. If you are completely prepared for a session as an assistant, and pre-empt client demands by figuring out what they will probably need next, there’s a chance you’ll be trusted to do a bit of engineering when they need someone. And as an engineer, if you’re always delivering the right sounds, and are ready to record before the artist is every time, then if they’re looking for a new producer you might get the call.

It sounds like a really boring thing to focus on, but being thorough and being organised is actually one of the most important skills in a studio. Or any job to be honest. Being thorough and organised means that the other people in the studio don’t have to worry about whether you’re doing your job, and because they can trust that you are, they can focus on their own job. And, whether you work out of a big multi-room facility or your bedroom studio, that trust is what gets you more gigs, and gets you better gigs.

Anyway, back to the percussion session. With no experience of these ‘instruments’ which would guide choices of microphones and mic placement, we set up a range of sonic options as the best approach. If we had a wide choice of mics, and they were all up and running, then Pete and I could easily swap them around and get to the best sound without slowing down the session. If I remember rightly, we had both a vintage Neumann U47fet, and a newer Neumann U147 – both good condensers for emphasising bottom end (and a choice between tube-driven and non-tube). Then we also put a couple of dynamic mics up – an SM57 and a Sennheiser MD421 I think. Then a variety of potential room mics – Neumann pencil condensers, Sennheiser e609 dynamics. Probably a tube pair as well. The mics themselves aren’t important to the story really – you’re unlikely to be recording a 6ft square wooden box being hit by a brick any time soon – but the point is really about being as prepared as you possibly could be for any scenario. Be ready for what you think will happen, have spares if you can, and expected the unexpected.

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