My name is Michael and welcome to my portfolio website and blog. Here I document my adventures in cinematic music creation and more.
Hope you have a nice stay!
All in Mastering
British rockers SkyQuaker have been busy! With their debut single "Queen Kong" only being released 5 months ago, they delivered me their impressive follow-up single "Thank God for Rock and Roll" in record time…
Mike and Aurora have been busy working closely with these two fine gentlemen to produce and release their debut single “Queen Kong”. To the left we have Ben ‘Ferdy’ Ford and on the right, we have Steve Hope-Wynne.
Mike was aware of SkyQuaker for some time, Mike has worked with Steve and Ben both directly and indirectly for years, but being engaged solidly on other projects, Mike struggled to find the time to dedicate to the song… Until October anyway when Steve Hope-Wynne finally caught his attention with a demo mix and asked if he would engineer the song. A drum and additional guitar recording session with George McFarlane was already setup at Echo 7 Recording Studios in Ewell, Surrey for the following week and Mike attended. After a successful session Co-Producing and generally having a good laugh with everyone at the studio, it was down to work on the mix, master and release…
Clare Estelle strikes again with her awesome new sensual gothic love song “Sacred Night”. The track is another successful collaboration between Clare Estelle and Steve Hope-Wynne. As before with Clare’s track “Somehow”, Mike was asked to assist in dealing with final Pro Tools session to take the track through the final mix and master.
The track sounds stunning and in awe when viewing the cover artwork! The track is available to buy and stream worldwide via this link. Until next time, do keep your eyes peeled for Clare’s latest news and releases on her website.
During the final months of 2017, Mike was contacted by his friend and colleague Steve Hope-Wynne to see if he would consider getting involved in the production of Clare Estelle's collaborative track "Somehow", and if he would contribute some musical elements of his own.
The pair had been working together and experimenting and bouncing ideas off each other for a while; Clare had composed the music and written lyrics alongside performing piano, acoustic guitar and some percussion. Through various collaborations, Clare then sourced Irish whistle (Sam Piper), drums (Stuart Hemphill) and bass guitar (Phil Smith) with Steve adding electric guitars and a variety of his own vocal section recordings.
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I was recently given the opportunity to work with Baroque Pop/Rock band Black Noire to produce, mix and master their debut EP, "Tales of the Unaffected" and am pleased to announce that that work is now complete!
Black Noire is made up of Daniel Smith (Guitar/Bass), Emily Jackson (Keys/Piano/Orchestrator) and Darron Connett (Vocals/Lyrics) and from the very beginning I knew it was going to be an interesting project...
I agreed fairly early on that I would work on the post production for the EP, I knew Dan killed it on the bass and what with Emily being my VP over at Aurora Eclipse Productions, I was fully aware that the project would be different and merge genres to create an interesting listen; I had nothing to be worried about, if only just a just little intrigued by what they were cooking up in the writing rooms.
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Had a great few sessions in the studio recording with Brighton based Thrash Metallers Demental for their upcoming single ‘Hatriotism’.
We recorded the single in the larger studio at City College East, Brighton which uses an old Audient console (originally used at Olympic Studios by the likes of U2 and Brian Eno to name a few). While I love the console, we did have some initial problems! The console had been overheating which meant that the studio door had to be left open throughout the day and fans permanently facing the desk, fine for us but maybe not so great for others trying to work with Thrash Metal blasting through the complex ;).
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