INTERVIEW
High Achiever: Andy Munro
With a career as long and as varied as they come, Pro Sound Awards Lifetime Achievement winner Andy Munro reflects on his past and how a series of serendipitous events, plus a chance meeting with one of the biggest rock bands of all time, launched him into a 40+-year career in pro audio. Jory MacKay reports.
I COME from Cheshire originally and when I was in school I got into all sorts of bands. I quickly realised, however, that everything was happening down in London. I knew I needed to get myself down there somehow and figured the easiest way would be to get someone else to pay my way.
I applied to various universities in London and eventually decided to do a mechanical engineering course for the simple reason that there weren’t any acoustic engineering courses as such around at that time – this is back in 1968.
During university, to supplement my income, I was working in hi-fi stores and even ran my own disco at one point, which I built my own sound system for. Then out of the blue, while I was working for a little hi-fi store around Tottenham Court Road, this guy who was part of the Shure organisation walked in and we got chatting and he said what I ought to do is come work for them. They just happened to have a job available on their technical support desk dealing with customer enquiries. Shure at the time, and probably still, had a huge base of sponsored
PRO SOUND AWARDS
Andy Munro will be recognised for his lifetime of contribution to the pro-audio industry at the inaugural Pro Sound Awards on 19 September at the Ministry of Sound in London. For tickets visit
www.prosoundawards.com or email
sarah.harris@intentmedia.co.uk.
artists and I just got thrown into the deep end.
One day, the guys said to me, can you take a bunch of these microphones down to this rehearsal studio there’s this band called Led Zeppelin rehearsing down there. That’s when it really sort of kicked off. I got chatting to those guys and got to know them well along with the various sound crews and so on, and it all just gradually built up.
Then when I was working for Shure over in the States I signed myself up for this course called Synergetic Audio Concepts – it was the first pro-audio school to start up in America and dealt a lot with acoustics and sound system design. When I came back to the UK there wasn’t really anyone who I could see that was doing the same sort of stuff. Most audio in those days was handled by the big companies like Altec and JBL, while studio design was really down to the BBC and EMI. It was all about having great studios – great big sounding rooms. All they really did in those days was plop a microphone down and the room was so good they just put it down on tape and presto you have a classic recording.
It all started to go wrong when multitrack came along and people started to move away from what was a perfectly good technique and reinvented recording. That’s when studio design started really getting complicated. Coincidentally, that was the point where I started getting more involved in the acoustics side rather than the equipment side and the marketing.
I sort of just fell into it really and because of the contacts I had built up through my years with Shure, those first few studios I designed were for… well, I think the second studio I designed was for Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd. So again it was straight into the deep end. For me, that era in the recording industry was an amazing time.
Now we do work all over the world. We’re doing a project right now in India that is 130 rooms for a company called Prime Focus. We’ve done work with Disney, Sony, the BBC – these are really big projects – but you can trace it all back to a chance meeting with Led Zeppelin.
At the end of it all I’m just a big music fan and I get as much of a kick out of it as anybody does. That’s the motivation for me; it’s all about the music and the sound.
One of the great moments I’ve had in the past few years is the new BBC broadcasting house project because that was a completely new building. It was a billion
58 September 2013
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“At the end of it all I’m just a big music fan and I get as much of a kick out of it as anybody does. That’s the motivation for me; it’s all about the music and the sound.” Andy Munro
pound project. We were designing all of the main studios on the main floor and making them all out of glass. If you watch the BBC news you can see past the main studio and see all these other studios made out of glass. The whole building is made out of glass inside and out and it just works.
For the acoustic treatment we just hung it in the studios, which is sort of logical when you think about it. It’s the best building I’ve ever been inside of, not just for broadcasting but any
building. That’s probably our proudest moment in terms of acoustic design.
I’m very, very flattered to be recognised at the Pro Sound Awards. I’ve had such a huge response from my friends and have had over a hundred emails of congratulations from people high up in the business – engineers and producers and people who have won Grammys and Oscars – they know what it’s like and they’re just glad that somebody out there gave me an award.
www.munro.co.uk
www.audiomedia.com
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