GEOFF PESCHE: MASTERMIND

The man behind some of Abbey Road’s most beloved records talks mastering and why the vinyl resurgence means he needs a top turntable in his studio.

Geoff Pesche’s career began on a motorbike. After leaving school in the late 1970s, when the snarl and grimace of the London punk scene would reach its inevitable peak, he took up a job as a motorbike messenger at Tape One Studios, shuffling tapes through the buzzing cultural capital of Camden. His role at Tape One quickly grew from delivering tapes to copying them inside the studio’s new mastering room.

Mastering is the final stage of the music production process, where the hours of hard work and creativity laid down onto tape or hard drive by artists during recording are tonally tweaked and balanced before being etched into CDS, uploaded to streaming services, or pressed onto vinyl. Over three years, Tape One’s mastering engineer taught Pesche the ins and outs of the process before letting him loose with some clients of his own.

Pesche quickly built a name for himself, cutting the vinyl lacquers for the best selling 12-inch record of all time, New Order’s “Blue Monday”, as well as the platinum selling album “Brothers In Arms” by Dire Straits. He went on to work for some of the UK’S top studios including Utopia, Masterpiece and Townhouse Studios, mastering a string of hits that includes the most played radio record of all time, Kylie’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”.

Today, Pesche works at London’s worldrenowned Abbey Road studios, where he shares a room with fellow mastering magician, Christian Wright.

“Mastering is like hairdressing, really,” says Pesche. “Christian and I have two very different styles, so there are lots of people who work with him, but won’t even get in a lift with me, and vice versa. It’s really all about repeat business – I often won’t see an artist for four years. For example, I’ve only met Kylie twice, but I’ve been working with her since 1995.”

Recently, it seemed as if the delicate art of mastering a record had been forgotten. The much touted wide dynamic range of CDS had been dropped in favour of a compressed sound (at least in rock and pop). But just as it seemed digital music would dominate the music industry indefinitely, a surprising thing happened – vinyl made a comeback.

The idiosyncrasies of physically tracking a stylus through a groove demand a different mastering process (add too much bass, for example, and the stylus can jump out of the groove), not to mention accurate turntables on which to audition mixes. That’s why the Technics SL-1200G turntable is now a key part of Pesche’s workflow in the studio.

“The records are cut on a lathe, which is the best vinyl equipment for playback and cutting, but at home, you don’t have it,” Pesche explains. “I have to cut things that will play on this and that, so we need a domestic setup – but that is too far away from the quality I need. Now, with the new Technics SL-1200G, I have something almost as good as the lathe.”

Pesche auditions masters by playing test pressings on the lathe, followed by the Technics SL-1200G, and then by a cheap turntable. If it sounds good on all three, the master is roughly correct. “Then I take it home, and play it on my own Technics turntable, says Pesche, “which I got for my 21st birthday. It’s still working perfectly 36 years later!”

So what makes a great record player, one suited to Pesche’s exact requirements?

“It’s about a stable platter”, Pesche explains. It’s the aluminium brass topped platter that gives the SL-1200G deck its weight. It needs to have great connectors, which the SL-1200G does. It also has a new motor mechanism, so there’s no round flutter or rumble. And it’s built like older Technics turntables: rock solid.”

“It also has a great tonearm, which is crucial”, continues Pesche. “A turntable has to play the record and give a fair representation back to the amp. It mustn’t colour things.

So ultimately, the SL-1200G is a great reference turntable – and it’s now very well used.”

Go to abbeyroad.com/technics

“With the Technics SL-1200G, I have something almost as good as the lathe”