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On Friday 14 January 2022, the legendary Chris Kimsey will be visiting Confetti to teach a masterclass on recording to straight to tape for our third year Music Technology degree students. Chris will share invaluable knowledge and experience from his impressive 47-year career recording and producing some of the world’s most iconic records.
About Chris
Chris is a renowned audio engineer and producer. He’s worked on over 300 albums throughout his career and with countless artists, including, The Rolling Stones, Led Zepplin, Paul McCartney and many more. Despite his ties with classic rock, Chris has also worked on a variety of other genres, including reggae and world music.
What students can expect from the straight to tape session
Chris will be using the skills and techniques he developed with bands such as The Rolling Stones to teach and instruct our students on how to record straight to tape. Unlike modern recording techniques, where takes can be deleted and re-recorded, recording to tape requires crucial decision making and the confidence to commit to your ideas. Chris will go through the pros and cons of those decisions and how best to navigate them during a session.
Students will be recording on to stunning Studer tape machine, of which there are only a few in the country. The session will give students the opportunity to work with relatively rare equipment that is inaccessible to a large proportion of people studying elsewhere, giving them unique experience to draw from when they begin their career.
The band being recorded will be made up of our talented degree level Music Performance students, who will be encouraged and directed by Chris in order to get the best possible performance from them.
After the recording session, the recordings will be exported to WAVs for any Confetti degree student to access and mix. The shortlisted mixes will be sent to Chris who’ll choose a winner! The winner will receive a great audio interface by Focusrite, who are one of the leading manufacturers of music recording equipment in the world.
Mixes can be submitted to john.meredith@confetti.ac.uk up until 28 February. Files must be submitted in WAV format using wetransfer.com.
Chris Kimsey said, “I’m truly excited to share my 50 years of knowledge and tales with the Confetti students in making million selling recordings with the Rolling Stones, INXS, Peter Frampton, Ten Years After, Marillion, Killing Joke, Peter Tosh, The London Symphony Orchestra, The Gipsy Kings, SOL Collective and many more.”
Curriculum Lead of Music, John Meredith said “We cannot wait for Chris to come and show us all how he captured recording history with legends such as Led Zeppelin, The Stones and INXS: to have someone of that calibre do a straight to multitrack tape recording with our students really will be a truly special event, and Studio 1 is already purring in anticipation!”
Here’s how to take part
Tom Mapes will be selecting musicians as the band to be recorded, but if you want to be part of the engineering team, email Ken.Liston@confetti.ac.uk by the end of this term.
Request files from mid-January by emailing john.meredith@confetti.ac.uk
