John Leckie on Record Production

John Leckie tells George Shilling that young musicians know too much. They arrive understanding the desk, the monitors, the publishing and the streaming split, having done an engineering course, and he thinks they should pick one thing and be extraordinary at it. What is missing in current music, he argues, is virtuosity, because nobody's attention stays anywhere long enough to develop it.

Semi-professional equipment existed when he started but was never used in a real studio, so he trained on proper desks in proper rooms. The attraction of the job, he says, was that driving a big desk was the closest he would ever come to flying a spaceship.

He has never wanted a studio of his own. One built to his standard would cost a fortune he never made, and he would rather keep visiting other people's rooms.

In Abbey Road's second studio, Dark Side of the Moon was mixed on monitors with almost no bass response, and the bottom end could only be heard with a head pushed into a corner of the room. Alan Parsons simply knew the room, which Leckie offers as the argument for experience over equipment.