In The Studio With… Geoff Wilkinson

“My production partner Mel Simpson had a commercial studio in his basement in North London called Flame. Everything was recorded and mixed in there. He had an Amek Angela desk, which had a lovely warm sound. All the programming was done on an Atari 1024, running Cubase. The real workhorse was of course the sampler, an Akai S950. All the Blue Note samples went in there and we also used a double bass sound from that, which we underpinned with a Prophet-5 to give it some nice bottom-end. A lot of the drum and percussion sounds came from an Alesis HR16. Mel also had a baby grand piano and an old B3 organ with a Leslie in the live room which we used. Then everything was recorded to Ampex 2-inch tape on an Otari MTR90 tape machine and mixed to DAT tape. Compared to what is available today it was extremely low tech, which just goes to show that ideas are always the most important thing.”