Nick Kinnish

East Sussex based producer Nick Kinnish has been producing and engineering records since 2004, including releases from Blakfish, Youves, Johnny Truant, The Tupolev Ghost and many many more besides. Currently relocating to a new studio, ‘Harvest Hill’ in Lewes, Nick has developed a reputation for getting the best out of great upcoming artists, and we popped along to the new studio to talk the pros and cons of the trade, vintage gear and prospects for the future. 

Rock Pulse: Cheers for your time, it’s really appreciated. So how’s it going, what are you working on at the moment? 

Nick Kinnish: No worries man. At the moment I’ve just finished building a new studio, it’s called Harvest Hill and we’ve basically been getting it ready to get some bands in... We’ve just had Let’s Talk Daggers in, and hopefully Blakfish will be coming in over the next few weeks. Bad For Lazarus from Brighton who include Rich from Eighties Matchbox B-line Disaster are coming, and a new band called Swims coming in to do a single, they’re the things that I’ve got on the cards at the moment. Just looking forward to being in a new place as it’s always exciting, no matter who the band is really (laughs). 

Rock Pulse: So you’re in the process of moving into the new studio at present... when and why did you decide to make the move/expansion to Harvest Hill? 

Nick Kinnish: Well, I’ve always been quite lucky with studio spaces in that I haven’t ever really had to put any money into them, they’ve always kind of fallen into my hands. Really fortunately with this place, Dave Lynch, who’s a producer and owns the studio, got in touch with me around September and said ‘I’ve got this plan to build a new place, and I’d really like for you to come and work here’, so I was instantly like, ‘man, I’d love to’ (laughs). So just from then basically, he got to work on it straightaway, getting a building license and doing the building work, once most of the main building work was done we were in here building up a studio. It just seemed like a natural thing to have a place where we could work longer hours and that is a bit more residential, with places to stay and a lot better equipment. Bigger space, more live recording based work, having less boundaries than I did as it’s a bigger place to work in. The other studio (Eastbourne’s Serafina Studios) was always quite limiting in what you could get done, so it’s good to be in a new place where options are pretty much endless. 

Rock Pulse: Has everything come together yet, or is there still a lot to do? 

Nick Kinnish: We’ve still got a lot of gear to buy, but we’ve got our console in, which is an amazing British Calrec desk, the monitors are in and the Pro Tools HD systems are in. We’ve still got some mics to buy and a bit of outboard gear but we’re up and running, we’re at an operational level and the stuff that we’ve got is working. I’m already in a better place than I was in the old studio, just on an equipment level, which is a great start. 

Rock Pulse: You’ve had a rather busy 2009, working with a whole range of different bands... how’s the year been overall, have there been any highlights? Given the financial troubles in the UK how’s it worked out getting bands in to record? 

Nick Kinnish: Since I started working with Ondryland with Kirk Harrington as my manager at the end of 2008/beginning of 2009, Kirk’s absolutely changed the way that I work, in that I kind of work with all the bands that I really like from the UK, and I’ve always had a focus on UK music more than anything. So it’s really cool that more often than not I’ll hear a band that I really like, and then Kirk will be in touch a few weeks later and be like, ‘you know that band, they kind of want to work with you’ or ‘I’ve got them into the studio.’ So it’s been good and it’s been a really busy year, and there’ve been lots of highlights to it. Working with Holy Roar is something that I’ve always wanted to do and that’s happened, and Big Scary Monsters as well...They’re kind of like my favourite two UK labels and I’ve always liked pretty much everything that they’ve released, so being able to work with them quite closely has been a massive highlight for me. I’ve sort of moved from being the guy with a MySpace site recording bands, to working with the bands that I’ve wanted to work with, it’s been a massive step forward for me, and a great year. 

Rock Pulse: So, you started out at Serafina in about 2004... 

Nick Kinnish: Yeah it seems like quite a while ago now. 

Rock Pulse: Absolutely, six years? And since then you’ve worked with over 200 bands? 

Nick Kinnish: Yeah, when I started out, it started out recording friends’ bands and then they told their friends in bands, it just spiralled. I used to do day long recordings with bands because they had no money, and I didn’t really feel that I wanted to charge them too much... I wanted to charge a fair amount but I didn’t want to be like ‘this is going to be loads of money,’ I just wanted to work. So bands just rolled in and out, it would be about four bands in seven days, constantly recording. A lot of them were probably awful, horrendous bands and probably some terrible recordings at the same time, but it was a learning process all the way through. Hopefully everybody was happy. It’s a little bit different how studios work nowadays in that you can’t get a job in a studio making the tea, and picking it up from everyone else, so it was a lucky scenario that I got to learn on the job constantly, and the bands got better as I got better. It felt really natural and healthy, rather than being dropped in the deep end and getting stuck with something, I was always my own boss so I was never being told off or in trouble for doing anything wrong, it worked out really well (laughs). 

Rock Pulse: Awesome. So has your approach to production changed a lot since then, developed naturally? 

Nick Kinnish: It’s definitely been a natural development, you just learn from your mistakes as you go. You’ll try something out, and if it hasn’t worked it’s just another tool in your repertoire. I’ve always felt that recording is sort of like problem solving in that you’re given a scenario, and you’ve got to find the best way to go about it; so everything that you try is another tool that you can use. One thing might not work for one band but it might work fantastically for someone else, or a different instrument, over time you develop those. And I find myself going back to things that I learned years ago that I dismissed as not working, and trying them all again, like a mic placement or the way that we’ve set the band up. There’s no right or wrong in production and that’s the tricky thing with it, when I listen to a record sometimes I think... I might put on a record and think ‘wow that’s really treble-y’ but it’s not actually bad. It’s a funny game because there are no rules. There’s no, ‘this has to be like this and this has to be like this’, you can take it anywhere. 

Rock Pulse: It’s entirely subjective. 

Nick Kinnish: Exactly, it’s 100 percent subjective; you’ve just got to find the right point for the right band really. 

Rock Pulse: You’ve long worked as a freelance producer/engineer across the South East... 

Nick Kinnish: Yeah I’ve always been freelance essentially, I had a stint at Brighton Electric working as a house engineer there, but that again started as freelance work, because a band were from over there, interested in using the studio but with me, and I got along with the owner of the studio really well. That led to some really cool work as well, with Architects, and that ultimately brought about the work with Johnny Truant. Working over there was really cool, but largely freelance, it’s always been off my own back, until James at Brighton Electric came along and Kirk came along. It can be a bit unstable as you’re not getting a daily wage or anything, you’ve got to monitor that you’re not having really dead spots with nothing, otherwise you can’t do it. 

Rock Pulse: I’d imagine that it takes quite a while to get used to working different studios? 

Nick Kinnish: Well, I’ve always been lucky having Serafina Studios to use because basically no one ever used the place, and as I worked there I got the opportunity from the studio owners to develop it for my needs a bit more. So I’ve always had that place to go, but it’s always a bit strange, coming here is a big change. Just things like the way that things sound, you’ve got to learn very quickly. Like at Brighton Electric, the first time that I went there I just got dropped in the deep end, the studio owner said ‘I’ve got a band, do you want to come and do it?’ and I said ok; I turned up and there was nobody else there to help me, I was like ‘how do I talk, where do I plug this in?!’ (Laughs). That’s the hardest part of using different studios, getting to work without wasting your time, and without making the band feel worried that you don’t know what you’re doing! I find though that with a really good studio, if you just stick to the methods that you know, you can’t really go wrong, you know that if you use the right mic on the right thing... if you do things in a textbook manner you should always be alright. By the time that it gets to the critical point in the mixing, you’ve probably mastered how things are sounding and what works best anyway. It works out ok usually but it’s definitely quite scary moving around (laughs). 

Rock Pulse: What are the elements of production that you find most rewarding and enjoyable? Like all jobs there’ve got to positive aspects and less positive aspects, but do you know what you enjoy most about producing/mixing? 

Nick Kinnish: I know the things that I definitely get irritated with... My favourite part of any session is getting to the finishing point, you get that time where usually the band has disappeared for a few hours because they’re bored of sitting around clicking away on a mouse, and I’ll do loads of work on the mix. They’ll come back and everything will really start coming together, and it’s really exciting. But there are other times... I try to keep things quite organic, like I don’t force people into making perfect takes all of the time, if a drummer’s doing a track and a part’s just not happening I don’t sit there and force them through it, I don’t want to make it painful for them. It gets really tiresome if you’re going over the same thing again and again and again, it’s so demoralising for me and for the band as well, just sitting there going play, record, play, record over and over. And vocals as well, lots of bands come in with ideas of having tonnes of harmonies and these crazy vocal parts, and I’m always like ‘just sing it as you want it to be,’ rather than creating an idea in your head; I want to capture the most organic thing, the original thought, rather than some crazy bastard creation (laughs). 

Rock Pulse: Trying to capture the band as they truly are? 

Nick Kinnish: Yeah, rather than them taking the opportunity of the studio to totally change something... I totally agree with embellishing things in the studio as that’s the opportunity you have sometimes, but when people just go over and over the same crazy idea that they’ve had, and that isn’t really all that fantastic anyway, it can be really tiresome. I always try not to get uppity with people because that’s the worst thing that you can do as a producer, being standoffish, but that situation is when it gets tricky. 

Rock Pulse: Would you say that that’s the predominant approach that you take to recording, a kind of naturalistic approach or live sound? 

Nick Kinnish: Yeah, like I’ve said elsewhere I have this funny boundary where I want things to be really polished, but I also want them to be really raw. The two disciplines of recording that I really like are really slick metal, and really raw, Steve Albini style recordings, so if I’m mixing a heavy band I’ll listen to a few other bands; sometimes I’ll listen to something by Andy Sneap, like Arch Enemy, and then I’ll listen to something really raw like the new Young Widows album that has a really amazing live sound. I’ll try to find a place between it. I like each instrument, each part, to have its own slightly heightened sense of reality, a slightly over the top style, but without taking away from the band actually playing and sounding like a band rather than having triggered, metronomic drums, I try to avoid that if I can. But sometimes it just calls for it. I don’t ever do pre production; bands send me demos but I don’t get them in and go through each song, working them out. I like hearing a song as each part comes in, letting it build itself, because that’s almost how you’d write the song in a practice room. One person has their part and then another person puts the parts together, and I kind of want the same thing to happen again. Half documenting and half creation at the same time, (laughs) it’s kind of a funny way to put it. 

Rock Pulse: I suppose it’s a really difficult balance, as a lot of really interesting stuff comes out of unfocused jam sessions, musicians just enjoying themselves, but on the other hand they have to have a sense of direction and focus to make a record work. 

Nick Kinnish: Yeah, I feel that a lot of the time that’s my job, to keep bands focused on what the goal is, finishing a track without deviating too far into weirdness. Like if you’ve seen ‘Some Kind of Monster’ (infamous Metallica documentary) they went into the studio with no music written at all, and I couldn’t think of a bigger waste of time and money. Just write some good songs rather than jamming for nine hours at a time... I’m sure that works for some people, but in the way I work it doesn’t. 

Rock Pulse: Without veering off into some kind of obscure Europe cover or something... (laughs) 

Nick Kinnish: Without veering off into weirdness, and the thing is that when you do that, it might not seem wrong (laughing). You listen back the next day and say ‘what were we thinking?’ But the way that I work money doesn’t permit, and there’s no time to just go crazy with stuff; maybe that’s why I work that way, because I’ve always been limited on time. With the other studio it’s always been ‘This has got to be done this day, this has got to be done that day’ and I’ve just learned to work in that manner, doing it quickly and doing it well rather than going crazy and doing lots of strange things. I think that it’s a good thing really that I can just get on with it without months and months of obscure recording. 

Rock Pulse: Are there any contemporary producers, or recent releases, that you’ve particularly admired for their production style over the last year or so? 

Nick Kinnish: There’s been a few actually, I’m kind of slow on catching up with new records and I find out about them a little bit later, but I kind of like that because I hear it and I’m like ‘oh fuck, everyone else is into it too’(laughs). This year with the new Thrice record, I first heard it when I was in Detroit, in a skate shop... and there was a track playing in there. I heard it and went up to the lady in the shop to ask who it was, I’d never done that before; she came back and said that it was some band called Thrice and I was like ‘oh wow, fucking hell.’ That album sounds amazing. The last time that I heard them was a long time ago, they seemed to disappear off the map, and then the new record ‘Beggars’ is just awesome, really really cool. Really weirdly I was talking to Dave, the studio owner, as he’s a producer as well but in a very different vein of music, and he said that he knew the guy that had done their last album. And the new Converge record as well, ‘Axe to Fall,’ Kurt Ballou is a hero. Everything that he does sounds amazing; I really relate to what he does on a production level, I strive to attain the kind of intensity that he captures. He’s quite fortunate in that he’s got the band, his own band, so he can work as much as he likes making it sound incredible. Then some of the records that I really liked this year are records that I got to do myself like the Shapes EP, I’m so happy with the way that that came out. And working with the mastering engineer Alan Douches, he’s worked on so many records that I’m fanatical about, like ‘Calculating Infinity’ by The Dillinger Escape Plan and the Converge records, every Converge record he’s mastered. Everything came out really well as they’re a great band and they’re so tight, and they had really great ideas about how they wanted everything to sound. We got a really good mix together and sent it off to him, and when it came back all of our jaws dropped, it was just incredible. I listen to that EP all the time, it’s really pleasing and I feel like I got it just right, for once (laughs). 

Rock Pulse: Things seem to be really coming together for them at the moment, touring with Glassjaw... 

Nick Kinnish: Yeah that’s amazing; it’s the coolest, when I heard that I was just like, ‘Fuck!’ They’ve been over to Japan as well which was awesome, and their record is out in Japan which is crazy, it really weirds me out to think that somebody can buy something with my name on it in Japan. There’s been lots of other crazy stuff that’s happened this year, but that was really really cool. 

Rock Pulse: On a technical note, for the studio geeks out there (laughs) what kind of setup are you running, or planning to run here at Harvest Hill? 

Nick Kinnish: At the moment we’re running this Calrec C2, it’s like an old broadcast desk from a radio station. Calrec’s a British company, you don’t see them everywhere but they sound incredible, quite similar to a Neve, so that’s a massive part of the studio. And then we’re running Pro Tools HD 3, I’ve always used a lower down system before so it’s a massive bonus to be able to use an amazing Pro Tools. Gear-wise we’re still buying up a lot of stuff, but we’ve got all of our amps and things, a lovely 60s Ludwig drumkit and nice Yamaha piano out there. We’re still hunting eBay and looking in stores for mics and gear, we’re buying a couple of Empirical Labs distressors which are these really amazing compressors; Dave uses them day in and day out with the stuff that he does but I don’t really get to all the time, so that’s going to be cool. We’ve thought since the beginning, Dave more so than me because it’s kind of his place, but since day one he’s had it in his head that there’s no point buying anything new because the old stuff that they made before, the vintage gear, holds its value so well and ultimately sounds better than new stuff. Rather than hunting through music shops online we’re looking on eBay for classic, vintage gear, we’ve buying up some API preamps and looking for some nice Neumann mics, just as things come along rather than having this big box coming from studio spares or something, we’re going to try and have a studio with no bad gear, all really cool vintage stuff that we want to use. It might be a bit overwhelming having all that great equipment everywhere, we’ll be spoilt for choice. 

Rock Pulse: It should help develop your own kind of aural stamp, using all that vintage equipment... 

Nick Kinnish: Absolutely. Whenever I’ve been in a band before I recorded and chose a studio to work from, I always looked at the equipment list first... there are loads of studios out there that don’t have any good gear at all, but still do fairly good stuff and are busy, but I’d always look for the right names and the right pieces of equipment, and I think that’s important, not just on an eye candy level... I think that if you’re paying for a studio, you should be using pro gear, I don’t think that you should be using home user stuff. There’s nothing wrong with all of that stuff, but within a professional setting you should always use professional gear. Maybe just because I’ve always worked in a studio I’ve become a little bit of a snob about it, but I think that it definitely makes the difference. So many people come in to record with me, perhaps on their first time in the studio, and they’re almost wearing the scars of their home recordings, they’re worried that it’s not going to sound right because they’ve tried it themselves and it hasn’t worked... say they’ve tried recording vocals and it hasn’t come out very well. So they’re worried because of the things that have happened before, because they haven’t had the equipment. And that’s the great thing when they come into a studio and say ‘I did the exact same thing and it sounded crap,’ and you say that it’s not necessarily down to their skill level; though that’s definitely important, obviously, a guy with a Dictaphone is going to make a better recording than a monkey with a Neve. But it’s important to have good stuff, it needs to run along the lines that a studio has to be full of great gear. 

Rock Pulse: It’s a definite step up from what they’re probably used to. 

Nick Kinnish: Sure, it would seem mean to charge a band however much a day to use stuff that they could easily buy within the range of what you’re charging them for a recording. 

Rock Pulse: Otherwise it could be a bit like a glorified practice space in some ways. 

Nick Kinnish: Yeah, you want to have a nice environment to be in. It’s kind of like if you go into a shop and are treated really well by the staff, you feel like that’s a really wise idea because when you’re spending money you want it to feel like it’s important, so being in a good environment is really important to making a record. Knowing that there are no weak links in the recording chain is a big deal... the rule is ‘garbage in means garbage out’ and you’re only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. Not having that means that if anything is bad then it’s either my fault or the person playing, everything else is fine (laughs). 

Rock Pulse: So you’ve got the studio coming along really well now, have you got any ideas as to what else you might be working on this year, or is it more a case of seeing what comes along? 

Nick Kinnish: It kind of is every year, a case of seeing what will come along. There are a few plans for a few things, like my manager has been talking to Shapes about flying over some awesome American producers to come and work at the studio to do their new album, and I’ll be engineering that with them, I should hope (laughs). That should be really cool, and I think that Blakfish are going to come in and do a single fairly soon, which we’re still waiting to find out about, Bad for Lazarus also who I’d imagine will be doing a load of cool stuff this year. I have a thing where the bands that I work with, I tend to work with quite frequently... it’s not always like that but it tends to be that I’ll work over a small timescale with a band and they’ll come in to repeat that, and then sometimes they’ll disappear off to do an album or they’ll do a full album with me, and that’s the greatest honour really, that they’ll come back and use me again. And that it’s not just because of the cost (laughs) but because they like the end result. It probably won’t be too different from last year, I’m looking forward to working on a lot more releases as that’s really where it’s at. When you’re in the studio you want to know that your work is going to be appreciated by people, so the records that I did last year and are coming out this year, I hope will bring some new work in. Like the new Throats record, I haven’t heard a bad word about it yet which is awesome; I’m hoping that last year’s hard work will pay off a bit more this year and I can go on like that. 

Rock Pulse: Finally then, if someone was looking to get into producing, or the technical side of music, is there any advice you’d give them or experience that you’d suggest that they get? 

Nick Kinnish: I’d say just start small, with any kind of business you can always go big, start small and don’t get above your station with it. It’s one of those things that you can’t read a book and be good at it, you just have to keep going. For me I don’t feel like I’m anywhere near getting things right every time, after I mix a record I don’t like to listen to it for quite a while, you’re always learning and every time that you do something, even if it’s for an hour, if you try something new or retry something that didn’t work before, you’re developing. To constantly develop is the most important thing, just always using your skills and seeing every recording situation as an opportunity to use the skills you’ve learned and to try something new, which is what I always try to do. I’ll do the things that I know work and also try something different, and if it doesn’t work, it’s a little bit of work and it’s alright, you can always go back and do what you know. Always try to do the conventional thing, but learn for yourself at the same time. 

Rock Pulse: That’s great, cheers, 

Nick Kinnish: No worries, thanks. 

For a full bio and selected discography of Nick’s work, visit:www.ondryland.com/producers/nick/nick.html

If you’re interested in working with Nick, get in touch with kirk@ondryland.com.