If there’s one thing that engineers and producers need above all, it’s a good mentor and role model — and they don’t come much better than MPG Icon Alan Moulder.
Alan Moulder has enjoyed a remarkable career as engineer, producer and studio owner, and a more fitting recipient of the 2024 Icon Award from the Music Producers Guild is hard to imagine. He and producer Flood recently stepped away from running Battery Studios in Willesden after more than 20 years. Now operating from a smaller space in North‑West London, Alan is still as busy as ever, these days concentrating mainly on mixing.
Alan’s industry recognition is, of course, largely down to his body of work, with an incredible list of credits that includes My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails, The Killers, Arctic Monkeys, Led Zeppelin and many, many more. However, the award also acknowledges another facet of his career: his role in mentoring newer stars such as Catherine Marks, Adam ‘Cecil’ Bartlett, Caesar Edmunds and Andy Savours.
The Golden Generation
Like most engineers and producers of his generation, Alan himself learned at the feet of established figures. “I started at Trident Studios in 1983,” he recalls. “The original Trident was owned by the Sheffield brothers and it was very posh. In the ’70s it did a lot of Bowie, Elton John and other big records. Then It was sold to one of the engineers, Stephen Stewart Short, and a guy called JP Iliesco, who was a publisher, and Rusty Egan, who was the drummer in Visage. Stephen was the engineer and he trained us, and he was probably the most naturally gifted engineer I’ve ever come across. But he was a taskmaster.
“I was there for four years, and at the time I was there, Flood was the head engineer, Spike Stent was there, Cenzo Townshend was there, Steve Osborne was there, a programmer called Andy Wright was there, Adrian Bushby was there. We’d all work together, but Stephen was the main guy who trained you. And it was a baptism of fire! If he saw any potential, he’d take you on to be his assistant, and then, a little later, his engineer. We used to call it tour of duty, because some didn’t come back!
“And it was long hours in those days. You’d work lots of 24, 48‑hour sessions. My first day, I turned up at nine o’clock in the morning and left nine o’clock in the morning. And it was tough, but it was really good fun. You could treat people a lot differently in those days, but I don’t regret any of it. It toughened me up.”
In At The Deep End
The training that Alan received at Trident wasn’t for the faint‑hearted, but it enabled him to move into the hot seat surprisingly quickly. “I engineered my first session after, I think, seven weeks, just because somebody turned up and didn’t have an engineer. I was then doing a freelance album after seven months. It was a jazz album, produced by Martin Hales. And the great thing was, Martin was a good engineer, so he really wanted a glorified assistant so he could listen. If I got into anything that was over my head he could help me out.
“Although it was very competitive, people were always very willing to help you out. Nobody would ever want to see you sink. If you made a mistake, it would travel around the studio like wildfire and everybody would be laughing at you — but they’d do anything they could to save it. And of course there was no Pro Tools, so when you were dropping in to record, if you didn’t get it right, there was no Apple+Z. It was gone. So, it was more nerve‑racking in that way, but also a lot simpler in that you didn’t have to do all the file backups and things like that.
“If you were working with one of the studio engineers then it was their job to train you. But if you were working with an outside engineer, a freelancer, it wasn’t their job to train you, so you’d have a different dynamic with them, and because they didn’t know the studio you would help them navigate their way around it. And some were helpful, some were brilliant, some were terrible. You could learn a lot from bad engineers how not to do things. You’d make mental notes: I’m never doing that! I can’t remember the names of any of the bad ones, but I remember I worked with an American mixer called John Potoker who was very inspiring to me.”
In The Wild
After four years engineering at Trident, Moulder found himself moving into writing and production. Here, role models were less easy to find. “Martin Hales was probably my first mentor in terms of production, but I ended up then just jumping in. One of the first things I produced was my wife Toni Halliday’s solo record, which I produced with her. So that was a foray into kind of writing and producing. I was doing a lot of dance music, but then I started doing more indie, or alternative as it is now. And that’s when I started getting more and more work.”
Alan Moulder’s current mix room is designed around his distinctive hybrid approach: he still uses a lot of analogue outboard, which is printed back into Pro Tools.
Already something of a mix specialist even early in his career, Alan Moulder received in‑house training on Trident’s SSL consoles. But the ’80s were also a time of rapid change, and when it came to MIDI and other newer technologies, there was no option but to dive in head first. “You’d have to learn yourself. When the Atari ST came out, programming was obviously the way things were going. As soon as my wife got her deal and was doing her solo record, I had to learn it. It was a great opportunity to take time off and learn it well, writing, rather than under the pressure of being on the session. Because you didn’t have a lot of time. You were working all the time. That’s how I got into using samplers.
“My first time with Pro Tools, I think, was on The Downward Spiral with Trent Reznor. And that guy knows how to use a computer. Working with them, suddenly it was like: wow, the bar’s gone massively up. And I came back and straight away bought a Mac, and it was the four‑channel Pro Tools of the time.”
One of the consequences of going freelance was that Moulder no longer felt part of an institutional structure where knowledge was shared. “At Trident, your job was to train the assistants there, but then when I went freelance, you’d just be a jobbing engineer going around studios. And it wasn’t your job then to train them. You didn’t want to overstep the mark in terms of what was appropriate or what wasn’t. But then Flood and I set up Assault & Battery Studios. And then suddenly you got your assistant...”
Battery Power
Recruiting assistants at Assault & Battery — now known simply as Battery — wasn’t an altruistic endeavour. They were needed to make the studio function, and initially, Alan says, little thought was put into how best to train them. As it turned out, though, the contrasting styles of Moulder and Flood created an excellent learning environment. “Flood and I are quite different. By then, I was mainly mixing, and Flood was still doing many productions. I have a very focused way of working and Flood’s anything goes — kind of the opposite. So it was great for the assistants to work with both of us and get different ways of doing things.”
Technology has changed to such an extent that, perhaps ironically, the hardest thing for new assistants to get to grips with was the SSL console, with its text‑based green‑on‑black computer display. “It’s really got its own little way. It was quite difficult for people to get their head around the thing, because it wasn’t a computer in the sense that they knew it — although it’s just signal flow, because people don’t really use the automation now on those desks.
“But when it comes to it, at the end of the day, it’s all about your ears and tuning how you hear things. So that hasn’t changed.”
Although most of Alan’s work these days is mixing, he keeps plenty of guitar effects and amps at hand.
Getting An Education
In the ’80s, there was almost no formal education available in recording; most studios hired school‑leavers and trained them on the job. Today, although there are far fewer studios and far fewer jobs, it seems as though every university in the land offers a degree in Music Technology. On balance, Alan thinks this is a good thing. “When I started, there was only the Tonmeister course at Surrey University. You had to have physics, maths and music A Levels, so there was no chance for me to get in there. So it’s open to many people now, which is good.”
However, he also warns that a degree course alone isn’t enough to equip young engineers for a career in the studio. “If they come to you after they’ve done a course, that shows to me a good attitude, because they’re not coming out of college and thinking, ‘OK, I know it all now.’ They want to take it a bit further and learn, actually in a proper recording studio. Learning in studios, even with bad engineers, you learn different things. It’s teaching you how to behave in a studio, which is very important. You don’t learn that at college: when to speak, when not to speak, the kind of bedside manner that’s best to make a creative environment. Flood said to me: as an engineer, you’re an invited guest, to kind of make the travel go easily without overstepping your mark.
“When you go to a college you will learn from one or two teachers and their ways of doing things. Whereas when you work with lots of different engineers, you learn lots of different techniques, and you pick and choose what you want, and that becomes your sound.”
Carrying The Torch
The engineers who came through Battery in the 20‑plus years in which Flood and Moulder ran it have been a diverse bunch. “Some came straight out of school, some came from colleges; I’ve had a few from LIPA, they always seem really good. Catherine Marks was a qualified architect and she just decided she wanted to work with Flood, and then I took her on after that. John Catlin, he was going to go to LIPA but decided what’s the point if I can bypass that and save myself the debt. So it’s a mix of both.
Alan Moulder: All the assistants we had have totally different personalities, but there was a similar thread of attitude.
“All the assistants we had have totally different personalities, but there was a similar thread of attitude. That’s the main thing: their attitude, their desire to learn, their desire to work. You give them a task, and rather than just do it to the minimum, they did more. Just willingness and good attitude really. You can learn all the other stuff.
Two generations at Battery Studios: from left, Catherine Marks, Alan Moulder, Flood and Caesar Edmunds.
“I think we did pretty well at Battery,” concludes Alan Moulder, and the track record of its alumni backs him up. “Seeing Catherine now, she’s up for a fistful of Grammys [boygenius, whose album she produced, was nominated for seven and won three]. She’s got a room around the corner here and we still work together on things. I’ve just mixed a Picture Parlour track for her. And Caesar’s on speed dial for any trouble that I have. And he’s very patient! What I’ve given to him, he’s giving me back. We’re all still in touch and there’s still a good camaraderie between us. And it does give me a lot of pride.
“What was great about Battery was the camaraderie and the sharing of ideas. As well as the tracking room and the mix room, there were programming suites, and so everybody would be milling around. You’d bump into people and you’d say, ‘Oh, God, I’m really struggling with this.’ Somebody would say, ‘Have you tried this?’ If you had a computer problem, there was a whole army of people around to get ideas from as to what to do. And the same thing with sonic problems, or somebody would say ‘Try this plug‑in,’ or ‘Try this piece of gear.’ It was great for collaborative work. So, as long as you can have a compound where there is a heart, then I think you will get that team of people come out.”
Assisting At The Mix
Mention of mentoring in a studio context calls to mind tracking sessions, with the put‑upon runner or assistant rigging mics, coiling cables and catering to the whims of the musicians. But Alan Moulder finds it equally valuable to have an assistant during mixing. “I was mainly the mix assistant at Trident, I did much more than I did tracking. And mixing, in those days, was more boring, in a way. It was all work at the beginning setting it up, then it was making tea and coffee and fetching sandwiches until four o’clock in the morning, when it was time to print and do the recall. Whereas now, you are involved more. I can be working on something and give Finn [Howells, Alan’s current engineer] tasks to do for me on my B rig. Maybe MIDI mapping, editing or timing; even mix tweaks. So I think they actually get more involved now than they used to, but it is different. You don’t get the highs that you get tracking, where you’re setting things up and things are being created, and you don’t get some of the lows where it’s just not happening and you’re banging your head against the wall thinking what to do. It’s a lot more level.
“There’s a point during mixing where I just like to sit on the settee and have them drive, so I can hear. I get it to a point where it’s probably 80 or 90 percent there, and then it’s much better for me to sit away and either dictate what’s done, or get their input too. The thing I did learn from Trident was that they gave you a lot of responsibility early on. So, getting assistants to flex their muscles in terms of their ideas and how they hear things is great. It becomes more collaborative. They get more control and more input. It’s better for them, and I can learn things as well.
“If there’s something I do that I don’t normally do, I will draw attention to it and show why I’ve done it. Or I’ll say, listen to this. I’m a great one for A/B, with/without kind of thing. Or like I’ll get Finn or whoever I’m working with to sit here and A/B and see if they can hear what it’s doing and whether they think it’s better or not.”