LEWIS JONES

In our ongoing series in partnership with the legendary Abbey Road Studios, you put your recording and mixing questions to the famous facility’s in-house engineering talent. Up this month is engineer Lewis Jones, whose credits range from Mura Masa’s Love$ick to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Jones began life as a studio engineer some 20 years ago at Lansdowne Recording Studios where he cut his teeth on a huge variety of sessions spanning jazz, film scoring and rock bands.

Then, in 2006, he joined Abbey Road, where he’s worked as assistant and engineer to some of the world’s biggest film composers, including Michael Giacchino (Jupiter Ascending, Doctor Strange) and Alexandre Desplat (The Grand Budapest Hotel).

Terence What are some of your favourite pieces of gear in the Abbey Road collection? And why?

Lewis Jones If I had to pick one mic, it would be the Neumann U 47. Because it has this nice, round, warm fat sound that generally works nicely, particularly on vocals. We’ve got quite a few of them and it doesn’t matter which one you use. They always sound good.

I’ve just been working with a young Australian artist called Cloves. She’s about to release her second album. She had been tracking her album elsewhere using an SM7. I don’t want to badmouth the SM7, which is a great mic, but she wanted to come to Abbey Road to out try some of our mics. And she used an AKG C12 and Neumann U 47 and a U 87. And she decided, with a combination of Neve 1073 and an LA-2A compressor, to go with the U 47 because she thought it added so much more character, depth and warmth to her voice, than all the mics she’s used previously. We just recorded vocals for six tracks for her new