How did you first get involved with Real World and Peter Gabriel?

I was taken on by Real World when I was still in school when I was 17 years old. I was trained up here and this became my college, if you like. I worked as an assistant to David Bottrill who was engineering for Peter at the time.

I think our readers might be surprised to know the wide range of projects that happen at Real World. What kinds of work has been going on recently?

We are still staying very busy, which is great in the current climate of budget cuts. The studio has been through many changes over the years, and recently we have also become a film post production studio. We still have the Production Room and smaller Millside Studio for music work, but the Big Room studio has been modified to do large film dubbing, too. One of our live spaces has been made into a smaller post mix room. So we are getting film projects and music projects at the same time. We just had Amy Winehouse at the same time as Hellboy 2 was being mixed for example.

There was this great band in last month called Dub Colossus which was dub music from Addis Ababa. Now we have Sade back working on a new record, plus a great band from Serbia doing an amazing crazy Balkan Fusion recording and it seems to be mostly in 11/8 from what I can hear.

What musical projects have you and Peter been working on in 2007 and 2008? You mentioned you recently worked on the soundtrack for Wall-E. What else can we expect to hear this year?

Yes, we have done a great song for the new Pixar movie which is was co-written with the very talented Thomas Newman. We have also been busy re-looking at new material that's almost finished for the new record, plus looking at an interesting new collaboration project.

How is the creative process of working with Peter? I don't picture it as being run of the mill in the least (no pun intended). When it's time to work on a song, like the one you did for Wall-E, what is the process of recording and production like?

Peter is not known for being as fast as other artists but I don't think he releases any bad music. So he has a high standard of working and developing ideas. Things can be very fast in the studio though, the main problem if any is having too much choice of music to work on. Peter is very much in the moment, and likes to discover things by mistake more than thinking about them too much. So you do have to run about a lot and be fast when needed, yet also be very patient at times when things get slow. So the process is varied, as you never know what Peter will do next. He is very good at making accidental events the start of a new idea, be it playing the wrong drum loop and suddenly being inspired to sing over it, or finding that a synth patch does something odd when you hold down too many notes, to the extreme where a harmonic hum from a cable can be made into a drum part like we used as the main groove for the song "My Head Sounds Like That."

We had the pleasure of visiting Real World recently. It seems like such an idyllic setting, out in the English countryside--the kind of place where you could lose track of what day (or even year) it is. How do you think the setting you're in affects the work you do?

Our studio is a great place to lose your self in creativity, yes. It was built on Peter's idea to have the studio surround you and to be comfortable in it. I remember how people would comment on how strange it was to have so many windows in a recording studio. Now it seems normal, so I think we've set some standards over the years.

You've mentioned that you've used RX to remove creaky floorboard sounds from a video for Amnesty International. Tell us more about this—what is this project all about and what is your role in it?

There is a new project that Peter announced for Amnesty to have local artists perform in their own cities all over the world. Peter did a big world tour to promote human rights in the late Eighties, and now they want to make it more grassroots so Peter is supporting this. Your readers can learn more about Amnesty by following this link. In the video we did, Peter was standing on a creaky floor board and we managed to get rid of it with RX. It was amazing!

How else do you find yourself using RX. What tools in RX do you find most useful and why?

We use RX all the time for many reasons. The normal fixes that it does are very simple to perform. Getting rid of bad noise and distortions that used to be a right pain with other software is quite perfect and very fast with RX. I think most software in some ways is made to make you look good, so that you can do things that other people cannot because they have not mastered it. With RX however, the interface is so simple and graphic I find there is no learning curve involved, you just get on with doing the tasks.

Also, what is great for us is the fact that Peter can now see the noise more and therefore be creative with it. He likes to make grooves out of hums and buzzes and harmonic distortions, so RX lets us clear things up but it also lets Peter be able to pull sound apart. It gives you a whole new way of looking at and thinking about sound that lets you really go deeper. RX is not just a clean up tool for us—it is a great sound sculptor.

Visit Real World at www.realworldstudios.com.