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Catherine Anne Davies · Electronic Music

• Caro C:  Hello and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast about Electronic Music and all things synth. I'm Caro C and in this episode I'm talking with The Anchoress, AKA Catherine Anne Davies. Catherine describes herself as a Welsh instrumentalist and producer, with The Anchoress being her synth pop and Alt Pop project. We talk about gear, her recent nomination for an MPG award, her new but not actually new third album and working with the ethical label Last Night From Glasgow. Let's start with a taste of music by The Anchoress. This is an extract of a track called The Heart is a Lonesome Hunter from her second album, The Art of Losing, which hit the top 10 physical album charts in the UK and the number one spot on iTunes. Hello Catherine and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast. Catherine Anne Davies: Thank-you so much for having me. Caro C: Wonderful. So I'm looking forward to unpacking your processes, creativity, well there's a lot there really. So let's start with, I quite like to give a bit of context as to how you've gone from, I'm guessing being a keen musician to being an MPG Music Producers Guild nominated engineer. Catherine: Yeah. Three times now, I can't believe it. I would say, is it three times the charm or is it third time unlucky, who knows? Caro C: It's all good, it's still a recognition isn't it, of your skills as a self-producing artist. Catherine: Yeah it's been, you know, it's a real honour, especially as it's sort of peer judged as well. I've not been a member for so long either, so it was, yeah, a bit of a surprise really this year to be nominated. Caro C: So how did you get to that point then? Catherine: Well, I think I've always been incredibly obsessed with production and I guess even though people know me better as an artist, as The Anchoress, that it was always about recording for me, that was my passion. I think by now I've spoken about it so much, the fact that I don't drive still because I was given the choice for my 18th birthday between driving lessons or a multi-track recorder and I picked the multi-track recorder and yeah, I'm still a public transport user because of that and then I guess sort of even though I was spending a lot of time in studios kind of trying to get into sessions where I could, you know, offering to make tea, just watch and learn by observing, what I kind of realised was that really in order to get a proper foot in the door, I needed to have a project to kind of showcase, one I could do myself which is sort of where The Anchoress was born out of that really. Caro C: So you started off as a self-producing artist as opposed to wanting to record other people? Catherine: A little bit of both always really. So I kind of taught myself how to record and then sort of made my tentative steps at university into writing very quietly and doing my own thing and then sort of other people heard my demos who were in bands and were like, you know, who recorded that, will you record my band, so did sort of little bits here and there for friends at university and I think it was just that moment of thinking I'm actually quite good at this and other people, especially guys saying, oh no who did that, presuming I think that it wasn't me and then sort of, you know, that nice moment of feeling respected and being asked to be of use to sort of capture other people's music and there's always been that kind of to and fro in my career ever since really, that balance between making my own work as The Anchoress and then always, you know, recording and engineering other people's projects. I've literally just finished producing and mixing a really exciting album for an amazing artist and that's gonna be coming out next year so I'm always going between many things, I'm always wearing many hats. Caro C: And in terms of those studios did you, have you always had one that you would like to gravitate towards and work in, or does it tend to be more makeshift, nomadic, if you like? Catherine: Absolutely nomadic. I mean, I think the nature of budgets these days are, you know, most artists don't necessarily have the budget to do very much in commercial studio spaces so very often we'll be thinking very carefully about, you know, only going in and doing drums if we need to and then the rest is done, I'm very lucky to have built up my own studio space where I am in Buckinghamshire and I'm fully equipped here, so... Caro C: Nice. Catherine: I think that's more the norm isn't it these days, there's very few budgets that can stretch doing everything in those big spaces. Caro C: So you are doing a lot of hybrid remote working as well as in person. Catherine: Absolutely yeah and that was a real gift when the pandemic came along, because I'd been working remotely for quite a few years before that so I was in my wearing many hats sort of capacity, I'd been in Simple Minds for four years and that meant that often when I was on the road, I was having to sort of do makeshift remote sessions or kind of dial into my own album making remotely. So I was sort of quite relaxed about it when we all went into lockdown and everything sort of, everyone was panicking how am I still gonna work, how am I still gonna get things done and I just sort of carried on as I had been for the previous few years and yeah, I was never busier to be honest than in that period I think, 'cause I was sort of already well set up to work in that way and it's opened up a lot of doors for me really to be able to work with people who are in New York when I'm in London and I think it gives that flexibility as well to those of us that are working parents that we're not having to physically necessarily travel to other locations, which I'm really passionate about too because obviously we don't have as many women in studios as perhaps would like to be there. Caro C: Especially if they're parenting full-time as well. Catherine: Yeah, I think studio hours are not necessarily all that kind of parent friendly but, you know, I really tip my hat to, you know, people that I've worked with like Bernard Butler, who kind of introduced me to the idea that, you know, studio sessions didn't have to be, you know, midday till midnight. I remember when I was sort of working with him a couple of years ago, we made a collaborative album together and him saying oh we've gotta be done by three 'cause I've gotta go and pick my daughter up from school and it was just a really lovely moment to recognise that it didn't have to be the way that it had always been just because people said that that's how it had to be. We were so productive and we got so much done in those condensed hours, so I'm quite passionate about that when I'm working with my own clients now, to kind of say you know, what suits you, what works around, you know, your life and what other sort of responsibilities that you've got. Caro C: Well just in terms of creative process, like there might be some people that are better at just doing a two hour intensive session as opposed to a twelve hour session. There's lots of variables that mean that it doesn't need to be that rigorous, you know, 12 hour session. Catherine: Absolutely. I mean I've really strong memories of being at the Strong Rooms back here, I dunno, probably like nearly 10 years ago now and doing about an eight hour marathon mix on and just probably only listening to the drums for about those eight hours and it was, you know, you get to about two in the morning and you can't hear anything anymore and you are exhausted and you are not focused and yeah, I think at that particular moment in time, it was almost a badge of honour to sort of see, you know, who can go the latest, who can be the most burnt out and it, yeah, it did lead to a sort of physical and creative burnout for me. So I very much sort of prioritise a process that is balanced in terms of work and life now as I have a daughter myself and yeah, it's so far so good, it seems to be working and I think it's also attracting the right kind of collaborators and clients to me too, that want to work in that way you know, there's a real need for it. Caro C: Great. I wonder if you have your own kind of like personal philosophies around miking up drums or any kind of production stuff like that where you really feel like, this is the way I like to do it, I don't wanna do it those other ways. Catherine: I think probably what's key to my personal production philosophy is my love of creating tonal palettes and I think the importance of the chain when you are originally capturing the sound, so I have a big microphone cupboard that I've accumulated over the years and also the importance of the pre-amp for me, that colouration that's added in at the very beginning and I know a lot of people are really passionate about mixing and kind of making those creative decisions further down the line but for me perhaps it's somewhat inspired by the Albini kind of school of thought, it's that moment of what you're capturing there, you know, the colours, the palettes on the canvas from the beginning and I'm not saying obviously that's in any way unique but I think I was hugely influenced by a lot of the more old school techniques that I picked up when I was kind of learning on the job and I was really fortunate to learn from a lot of really incredibly adept engineers who were quite old school, you know, who are used to, you know, working with tape, definitely not working in a hybrid format and their endless patience with me asking lots of questions when I've been on sessions with them and that's really rubbed off on me. I certainly notice when I'm lecturing now, so I lecture one day a week on a Master's in Production, that a lot of the ways that I work are considered to be quite quote unquote old fashioned and a lot of the techniques that I kind of take for granted are dying out which is, I try not to be sort of too rigid about it, I think you know, progress is an important part you know, adapting to new technologies. I guess the trademark of The Anchoress in terms of my production is probably that density and complexity and I'm always running everything back out and re-amping it and running it out through outboard gear and there's, I mean I'm sure there's a ton of it that is not discernible to the average listener but for me it's a huge part of me being satisfied and interested in the process. So you know, I'll often be sat there with my Watkins Copycat or with the Leslie Cabinet running every single track through that and then deciding which bits I'm gonna use. So re-amping is another thing that's very key for me as well. So yeah, I guess quite old school techniques. Caro C: Yeah, I did spot some beefy drums. Catherine: I say beefy drums, like I would absolutely say all credit to Dave Eringa, who has mixed the last couple of my records, who's obviously known for his fantastic drum sound, so I can take absolutely no credit for that but that certainly happens in the mix rather than in the production but yes I'm a big fan of bombastic, epic walls of sound. Caro C: Awesome. So you must have collected a lot of stuff along the way. Catherine: Yeah, so certainly when I was in Simple Minds and I spent a lot of time on the road over those four years in hotel rooms or waiting to go on stage and I certainly developed quite a bit of a toxic eBay habit I think back then and so this is like 2014 to 2018, there were a lot of analogue vintage synths that were cheaper than they are now and I started collecting those and to be honest I spent the vast majority of the money that I earned being in Simple Minds on building up my studio, which has meant that I'm fully self-sufficient now, which was a blessing again not having obviously foreseen that would be in a pandemic and in lockdown for a good deal of two years from 2020, it meant that I was just fully set up, you know, there's bigger conversations here about where the industry is going and I think there's the threat of AI and streaming's kind of chipped away at a lot of revenue streams, so it's more important than ever that we can be streamlined in terms of, you know, what we're spending out on recording budgets and having all of my own gear and being almost entirely self-sufficient apart from recording drums, that's the only thing I'll always go to another studio for, you know, it means I can make records without spending vast sums of money to get the results that I want. I mean I have spent vast sums of money, it's just sitting here in gear. That's my pension. Caro C: Yeah. How do you like to record your piano then? Catherine: So usually I'll set up two pairs of microphones. So I'll have a pair of U87's and then a pair of Kohls. So I like that kind of interplay between the clarity that you get from the U87's, that brightness and then the Kohls gives it kind of that, I'll blend that in in the mix, so that kind of warmth and that, those microphones just have a, it's impossible to pin down what they sound like other than only the 4038 sounds like that, so that's my go-to configuration for the piano. Caro C: And that's both in the front if you are using an upright or you are using a, tend to try using a grand? Catherine: So I tend to use, I have two acoustic pianos here, I have a baby grand, a Challen which cost me £350 on eBay, it cost me more to move the piano into my house than it cost me to buy it and that's the piano that you hear on all of The Anchoress recordings and it's just got this really nice characterful, you know, it's not a perfect piano, it's not a Yamaha, it's not got that crispness, but it just has a real something about it that I love. And I also have the Challen upright as well because I'm a big Beatles fan but to be honest I very rarely use that, it's mostly the baby grand. It's something about that in the room that has the edge for me over the upright. Caro C: Wonderful. So can we unpack the story of Communion as it started off as an album that you recorded in one day with a female trio I believe. So it originally came out in 2011 but it's about to be re-released, is that the right word for it? Catherine: That's right. Well it's finally getting a proper release I would say. So it is quite an interesting record really because it predates me kind of taking control as a producer and engineer. So I was really starting out very first tentative steps in 2011. I didn't have very much money, I'd moved to London and was doing kind of demos here and there with producers and doing sort of what the industry expected. Had a bit of a development deal with A&M at the time and then sort of being put in with different people to sort of see what would work. I think they once got told they thought I might be the new Duffy, which I wasn't quite sure how to take. I think there was a lot of pigeonholing of women at that time that you could just sing and even though they had signed me on this development deal off the back of my own demos which I had recorded myself, there was no conversation about me recording or producing myself. But I did hit upon a really lovely working relationship with Liam Howe at the time and he suggested let's get you into Church. I know you can't afford to do anything more than a day. I've got my friend Rich Wilkinson, he's gonna engineer it 'cause he's got a room there and then I just went in with a bunch of my friends who played the strings and we did it all live in an afternoon, which is incredibly scary. I look back at it now and it's a complete anathema to the way that I work now in terms of my process and the amount of time and editing and takes that I would do to make a record now and for a long time I was quite embarrassed by it and kind of buried it to some extent. It didn't come out properly at the time, it just had a very limited sort of CD pressing and NME made it like one of their cult albums of the year. I mean, we were just selling it over the counter in Rough Trade, it was all very DIY and sort of, there weren't really the options then to sort of, you know, press on vinyl yourself or anything like that. And then when I signed to my new label Last Night From Glasgow just at the end of last year, we did have a chat about, you know, what there was in my back catalogue that I might be sort of willing or eager to revisit and interestingly it was because one night I was trying to get my daughter to sleep and she was asking me to sing more lullabies and I was just so tired, so I put it on my phone, this old album that I hadn't listened to for years 'cause I knew it was quite gentle and just me singing with a piano and as I was listening back to it, she's falling asleep. I thought, that's actually not as bad as I thought it was. You know, I think I had a lot of this idea that, you know, you are always gonna make better work and anything that you did in the past won't be as good as what you do in the future and I think in sort of subscribing to that idea, I'd sort of misjudged what was really great about it, which was this passion and naivety that I had back then and although sonically it sounds nothing like The Anchoress just to be clear, it certainly doesn't have that progressive art rock sound to it but you know, we were limited by what we could capture live, which was just me on a Steinway and then the cello, viola and violin, that I think the songs themselves are not a million miles away from some of what would be on the debut album, for instance. But it is just a really lovely moment in time and I feel I'm really grateful, I guess, that it's finally coming out on vinyl. I mean, that's an amazing thing, something you made in an afternoon and suddenly, you know, pressing up like 3000 vinyl and people wanna hear it, it's lovely. So yeah, I'm readjusting my relationship to my juvenalia, I think, as they call it. I'm feeling a bit more comfortable airing my early work that might not be perfect, but it is what it is and I think it's an important record. I mean that sort of in the literal sense of how I got to where I am now. Caro C: And so will you revisit it and will it be renewed I guess, or upcycled, however you want to put it for live. Catherine: I might do one, maybe one but I think I have quite sort of quite a lot of difficult memories associated with the record too, partly because my dad was dying of a brain tumor at the time and those songs for me have an enormous emotional resonance. I dunno if we'd be able to get through it on stage, but I think we might pop one in the set and I'm going on tour this sort of Spring and Summer and always have a little acoustic moment in the set. So yeah, I'll squeeze one in probably there and hope that I don't lose it while I'm playing, 'cause you can't sing and cry at the same time. Caro C: I know it's quite tricky. You've also said something about you're particularly interested in working with this label because of their ethics. Can you unpack that a bit for us? Catherine: Yeah. So Last Night From Glasgow are a not-for-profit label, so they work in a sort of, I think this is their words, not mine, they would say that they work under sort of socialist ethics and that they believe that the people who should be making money out of music are the people who create it, who write it and play on it. So it's almost an inversion of the previous major label style deal that I was on previously in terms of percentages. But even down to just the way that they operate, it's all very, if you're not happy at any point, you can leave, all very kind of handshakes rather than signing any contracts. And they just have a really lovely ethos that feels like a community and it essentially is the community of people who are part of their, who offer their patronage to the label, who are sort of the semi owners of the label as well and I just felt very drawn to their ethics. So all of the vinyl is pressed locally, so we're trying to do away with a lot of the excessive carbon footprint that comes with pressing vinyl. Like many people, I had had my fingers burnt by some of the more major labels style approaches to foregrounding profit over wellbeing and I just felt a little bit tired of that and didn't want to dive into another situation that that wasn't necessarily making me feel good about my soul. So yeah, I'm really, really happy to be working with them and excited to get the reissue out there first of all, before we get a new album done. Caro C: And are they actually based in Glasgow? Catherine: They are indeed, yes. Yes. And the vinyl pressing plant I think is literally like 30 minutes down the road. So it's all very local. Caro C: And they're using bioplastics as well, aren't they? Catherine: That's right, yeah and in terms of sort of, even though we do have some different colour variations, the way that it works is nothing is wasted. So if they're pressing something in blue for someone else and then we will decide okay, well we want another vinyl variation, then what will happen is all those scraps of blue that are on the floor, they'll get thrown into the white for mine and then you'll get a blue and white marbled vinyl. So yeah, it makes me feel happier about something obviously, that can never be a perfect situation when you are, you know, making something out of petrochemicals. Caro C: I wonder if we could delve into your synth collection then and kind of like your journey with synths, because am I right in guessing you've come from more of an acoustic piano background and then you've delved into that world? Catherine: Actually, probably my first piano was a Casio keyboard. Caro C: Aww, excellent. Catherine: So I'm completely self-taught, so my parents didn't have the money to pay for me to have piano lessons, although I did beg over many, many years and we had a piano in my house for about six months and then that got given away. My dad was a bit of a hoarder and would sort of house things temporarily for people. But we, you know, never had piano lessons, but I did have a Casio keyboard, which is this kind of little dinky battery powered thing and it wasn't until I got to university that I started to teach myself how to play. I spent part of my student loan on a keyboard from Argos. It was probably completely insane to decide that I was gonna learn how to do this thing but it's very much in keeping with my ethos that if you wanna do something, teach yourself, don't tell anyone about it and then in a couple of years sort of come out and go, ta-da. And it's the same with synths, really. That happened very organically you know, I'd be in studios and get to play something, ask a lot of questions about what it was set up, a little search on eBay, wait for something to come up and, you know, that wasn't extortionate, and then buy it and rinse and repeat and in that way, I've kind of ended up with a core collection that I feel very happy with and I haven't taken it to excess. I know some people get a bit sort of collectory over their, rather than using them and I was very mindful of that. I wanted them to have utility and a lot of the synths that I got was partly to serve my time in Simple Minds 'cause I was obviously having to learn and recreate the sounds that appear on those classic records you know, get that kind of classic 80s sound. So I've tried to stick to the rule if I'm not using it then resell it and I actually haven't bought it since, for about two or three years now. I feel very proud of myself. I've got no more room either at the moment, although I'm expanding. I'm just started building my studio so maybe there might be room for a few more once that's finished. Caro C: I know I could hear that little demon going ooh, has it been two to three years? The next thing you know... Catherine: Well you can never associate that appetite can you, just one more, especially when it's synths because they're so much fun. Caro C: Yeah, definitely. So could you pick a favourite? Catherine: Probably two, my OB-6 and Prophet VI. I think so many songs have been sort of generated because of just fiddling around and exploring the sounds and for me that's what is utilitarian about synth? It's okay, this is new to me, what ideas is that going to kind of create for me in terms of songs? So when I get something, I'll sort of open it up, flick the power on and then almost immediately start to generate ideas, so I still try and retain that real kind of playfulness about music making rather than sort of thinking I'm never gonna read the manual, that's never gonna happen. Caro C: Wonderful. So you mentioned there about yes, there's going to be a full release and the reissue of Communion, including vinyl, but you also mentioned something about a new album as well. Catherine: Yeah, I'm about halfway through making a new record at the moment, just been quite a slow process because I only put out Versions last year. Just feels like every time I start on a new record, something else comes along to slightly distract me but I've been making tentative steps to do that. I've been recording my drums down in Wales at the Manic Studio and then everything else has been been done here in my own studio set up and then we've got some guests that have been contributing remotely, which is all very exciting and just really kind of letting it take shape very slowly this time rather than having sort of a preexisting concept. The Art Of Losing, my last sort of studio album, I think was very much born out of this idea that I'd been going through a really difficult time and this theme of death and grief and loss had really dominated my life and therefore dominated the music that I was making and I didn't want to repeat that, I needed a little bit of emotional distance as well from processing, you know, death of my father, the birth of my daughter, et cetera. So I've let this album have a little bit more breathing space and I also wanted to be more collaborative because The Art Of Losing was such a solo endeavor, I wrote it on my own, I produced it on my own. It was only when it went to be mixed by Dave Eringa that sort of anybody else heard it and it felt so personal and I didn't want anyone's hands on it at all and I think what I've realised is how isolating that can be and how actually quite that can be quite detrimental for your creativity. It's also quite lonely way of working, so I've tried to be much more programmatically collaborative with this album and that's partly meant getting Dave to mix some things as we go along and I've also reignited some collaborations that I've had with artists that I've worked with before. So there's a track on the album with Band Spectra, Robert Manning who, we did a song, we co-produced a song together last year called Human Reciprocator and we loved working together so much that we've actually done another track for my album as well and that's been wonderful working with him because he works exclusively with modular synths which is not something I do at all. So there's this real kind of reciprocity in terms of him bringing something to the table that's completely fresh and new and then making me feel really excited about making music, which is how it should be, I think. Caro C: Wonderful. So do you record your own vocals? Catherine: I do, I do. And then people find this baffling because they say oh how can you do it, I really find that impossible, but I've always been very good at being quite self-critical and I don't know whether this has to do with being autistic. So I have this ability to detach from things emotionally and I've always thought that I am the best person to comp and edit my own vocals because I am so brutal. So while it is quite psychologically demanding to do that, I can't imagine handing the reins over to anyone else, I think especially when you are sort of working on something that it is so much your own vision, which I think is integral to the way that I work as The Anchoress, I really, I may have been called a control freak by some of the people in the nicest possible way that I've worked with, but I think everybody understands I have a very clear sense of what it is that I'm trying to do and that I will invite people in, of course, to do what they do and what they're best at but that ultimately is my vision and yeah, it can be quite draining after a day of recording, but I have a process now, I've kind of whittled it down to, I'll only let myself do sort of six takes maximum and then I'll take a break and then the next day I'll edit and then if needed, I might kind of splice in a tiny bit of tuning if it's needed but I'm very much opposed to that really still, as I say, quite old school and it's the system that works for me and I guess if it's not broke, why fix it? Caro C: And do you have a favoured vocal mic and also signal chain as well? Catherine: I do. I kind of really settled on the U87, partly because I bought a pair of them for recording the piano and I guess it sort of just seemed like a default choice but I guess what is not default, what's probably quite particular to my vocal chain is I always record through the Chandler REDD.47 mike pre, which is actually what I'm speaking through right now and that's become my kind of go-to vocal chain. I do think it just gives, while the REDD.47 is adding certain kind of coloration and warmth, the U87 for me it's capturing a kind of breadth of frequency so I don't have to be making decisions about the eq. It's also a great universal mic for anyone's vocal, so I just leave it set up at all times. So if I've got someone else coming in, I don't need to make a decision to pick something else. It does mean, however, probably maybe I should get rid of some of my other microphones, but I mean, sometimes I make a more unconventional choice and I did do a vocal on the last record through the Kohls on the track Heart is a Lonesome Hunter and that added a real kind of intimacy and it just has this really interesting texture to it when you use it on vocals, obviously it's not supposed to be used as a vocal mic and you have to be very careful, obviously it's a ribbon mic but it, you know, I think sometimes just throwing up a microphone that you wouldn't expect to use and I am quite mindful of that, I do have a default vocal chain, but I tried to sort of say to myself, come on, let's change it up today you know, use a commentators mic. I've got an old BBC commentators mic I got off eBay for like £60 and I use that for backing vocals often. I think then you've already done half the job for the mixer, which is, you know, you're introducing these different textures, you're not just having the same kind of vocal quality across everything, but then equally, I think it's important to have that consistency of vocal chain for the lead vocal because obviously that's the first thing that registers with your, you know, your average listener, so it's about that balance again between playfulness and experimenting with the gear that you've got versus sort of having something recognisable and identifiable that delivers a quality of audio that you're going to need. Caro C: Yeah, my friend and fellow musician and engineer, Mandy Rigby was helping me on my last album and we talked about that balance between the adventurous and the familiar. Catherine: Yeah well I guess I would say probably say I'm adventurous with my backing vocals, less adventurous with my lead vocals these days, obviously 'cause time is of a premium as well and you don't wanna have to go back and redo things. I mean, I remember some of my early sessions when I was working with producers that I'd been put with and I won't mention any names here, but you know, the amount of times it would end up having to go back in and redo a vocal because fundamentally what they'd done was not right and it was not of quality. So people would bake in compression whilst they were recording you and we just get these horribly compressed vocals that were unusable, so I learned a lot from sort of what not to do actually, to not overcomplicate things. So for me it'll always just be the pre and the mic. I won't ever, I will never use a compressor whilst I'm recording for that reason and it's probably just because of that one session that really just put me off. So I don't ever do that which I know is quite unusual. Caro C: So you also mentioned about teaching as well and I wonder how that works when you talk about your own recording production process being quite, dare I say, introverted and that therefore means a bit nonverbal to then being able to transfer that and communicate that to students. Catherine: Well, I'm very lucky in that the institution utilises me for my strengths, which means that I mostly work in one-to-ones with the master's students. Caro C: Oh, nice. Catherine: So I'll sort of get half an hour allocated with each of them and we'll sit down and we'll talk about, you know, what it is that they particularly are kind of looking for insight into, so I'm not necessarily sitting there and dictating to them, you know, I work this way and this is what you should do also. But I guess it's about, you know, if they're curious about synths and they want to talk about synths, that's what we'll do. If they're interested in vocal production, you know, then we'll go deep in, into that. If they're interested in drums, then we'll talk about that and I've been lucky to, when I first started at ICMP on the Production Masters, it was on a module around applied production techniques, which is obviously my favorite thing so much more kind of gear orientated and I think what's really interesting is working with the majority of these students, some of whom have been engineers for 10 plus years and have then come to study a masters. Others, you know, are coming straight from an undergraduate and something completely different. It's just the breadth of experiences that they have. But I would say predominantly you know, a lot of them are working in the box, so I'm not trying to impose upon them an unrealistic set of expectations or gear list that they've got to buy because I think what I'm really passionate about is that music production is democratic and accessible to everybody and I know that I'm really privileged and lucky to have been able to accumulate the studio gear that I have, but that that is not a reality for everybody and certainly not immediately, nor should it necessarily be something that they want and that, you know, you can create incredible tracks and records with, you know, just using the default plugins that come with Logic. I think it's all about and this is what I guess starting on a multi-track recorder taught me, if you can make the best of the equipment that you've got, don't use it as an excuse to not make music, you know, and when I was starting all I had was, I think they had 10 tracks on the recorder that I had and you had to bounce everything down if you wanted anything more, you had the onboard effects, that was it. So whilst obviously I've progressed since then to get to choose a whole multitude of ways of working, what I really benefited from was the reduction of choice that I think working on, yeah, while it was digital great, but essentially this very old school way of working where you have to make those decisions quite quickly and you have to commit to something. So when I work with students, it's all about finding out, you know, how do you want to work, what's possible for you right now or in the next year and not sending them away and saying well, you really need to buy this microphone 'cause that's not going to be useful to them. So it's more about trying to find a path through for them to what they want to achieve and that's a whole different range of ambitions from people that want to be producers who are making records for bands to people who are predominantly on the Masters because they want to develop their production skills further as an artist, so yeah it's, I find it very reinvigorating and I'm always learning from them, they're always introducing me to music that I wouldn't otherwise have heard. Caro C: Yeah. So you enjoy that kind of contrast really with your own more individual kind of process? Catherine: Oh absolutely. I mean I always say, I don't think you can work more than three days a week on your own record. So that one day a week that I'm getting exposed to all of these incredible artists, producers and you know, the music that they're inspired by, that's feeding my creativity in turn. It's quite selfish in a way. Caro C: Reciprocal hopefully. Catherine: Yes but I've definitely, I think I'm just quite passionate about underlining the fact that I think they used to be this idea that, you know, it's those that can't, teach and that's absolutely not the case in the kind of creative academic industries that everybody who is working at ICMP for instance, is a working professional, you know and they've been taken on because they have a vast wealth of experience and knowledge because they do it for their job and I think the students really benefit from that, rather than people who are teaching theoretically and don't necessarily have that real world experience. Caro C: Yeah, wonderful. Wow, well thank-you so much for unpacking various aspects of your work and yeah, wish you all the best with your continued adventures in music. Catherine: Thank-you so much. Caro C: Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for further information, as well as links and details of the other episodes in the Electronic Music series. And just before you go, let me point you to soundonsound.com/podcast where you can explore what's on our other channels. This has been a Caro C production for Sound On Sound.