24 l April 2013
www.psneurope.com
studioreport Eddie Veale, December 2012 UNITED KINGDOM The great problem-solver
Following Eddie Veale’s entry to the APRS Sound Fellowship last November, Dave Robinsonjoined the studio designer and innovator as he reminisced on his long history in the business
“DOING THE thing that I found most enjoyable and interesting.” After talking to Eddie Veale
for more than 45 minutes, it’s clear that his professional life choice could have taken him up one of many paths. But sticking to the axiom he quotes above steered his
course into studio design, which is where he remains today, overseeing his staff at Veale Associates. Eddie Veale has been instrumental in the creation of many fine facilities over the years, including Dean Street Studios where he has arranged
to meet PSNEurope. But, as is always the case in recording and in broadcasting too, his beginnings were humble. Veale’s career started at the legendary Advision studio in Bond Street, joining them in the late 1960s as a technician while they relocated to a new facility
in Gosfield Street. From the start, he says, he was “helping guys with their ‘home stuff’, doing a bit of small-level consultancy for others”. One of his key early tasks was helping Dolby rationalise issues arising with earthing when studios installed Dolby A noise reduction systems. “Dolby units sat between the desk and the tape recorders so the units had to be wired in,” he remembers. Of course, once a few select studios began using Dolby noise reduction, then everyone wanted it, and demand for the units rocketed – as did requests for Veale’s assistance. “I think I helped Dolby develop their business [before] they moved onto other things,” he smiles. Advision was the importer of
an earlier 8-track tape recorder made by Scully Recording Instruments, and also became the first studio to install it. Further models appeared – 16-track and 24-track versions – which Veale says was “a good move because it kept them, and me, at the forefront of technology”. Around this point Veale met a jingle producer called Mike Vickers, who was writing music for adverts for commercial TV. “He used Advision extensively but had some issues with getting time in the studio doing his mixing….” Vickers’ request for assistance in acquiring a newly available ‘synthesizer’ for his home studio led Veale to a relationship with the New York-based Moog; which in turn saw Veale being hastened to a session at Abbey Road to fix George Harrison’s faulty Minimoog (the one you hear on Here Comes The Sun). Harrison asked Veale to help him out with his home set-up, and an introduction to Lennon as a result opened the door to what Veale still rates as one of his finest achievements: the creation of the Beatle’s Tittenhurst home studio, where Lennon recorded Imagine. “Throughout my work I’ve always supported technology,”
says Veale. “I was always making up little boxes for the engineers… fuzzboxes and compressors and all sorts of things. I’d cobble something together and give it to them and they’d go, “that’s great, but can it do this?” and it was always interesting because there’d always be new ideas from that.” In the early ’70s Veale recalls
he ran a freelance electronic business (Audionet), while linking up with an architect and another consultant as Acoustic Consultants. He was building, creating, selling, consulting, installing, problem-solving… But it was the studio design that was “most interesting and enjoyable”. “I understood how studios are used, how reference monitors are designed, what engineers wanted and so forth, and started to develop ideas about how we could develop room design.” Veale has been quoted
elsewhere as saying: “While acoustics is not a new subject, it is still a fairly new idea in studios.” He sticks by this claim. “In my early work we were using various shapes of room and treatments, shapes of room; getting bass traps that worked and trying to contain the size of them. We were doing an awful lot of experimentation at that time. “I wasn’t the only one but
probably the guy pushing it most and the next major step in advancing studios was [Westlake Audio’s] Tom Hidley coming over here [from the US] with a completely different agenda. I give Tom credit for actually waking people up and getting them to recognise that they’d benefit from investing in acoustics. It did make a step- change. He got a significant number of studios to take on Westlake designs; and when other studios found themselves lacking clout then, of course, they had to do something. He had a standard format that he used and that caused a number of questions to be asked about their approach – ‘Why don’t you do the same as Westlake?’
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