Diary of a Leonardo Intern from Lilian Herrouin
This month Pulse News got the opportunity to talk to Leonardo Intern Lilian Herrouin about the exciting opportunity of working with the legendry producer Ben Hillier, figuring out SSL G’s s and the intern speciality Tea Making. You can see his amazing video of his experience at the end of this post:
Hi, I am Lilian and I was one of the lucky students to be chosen for the Leonardo Placement. It was in March that I found out the studio I would be sent to by Pulse College would be Miloco studio in London. It has 9 state-of-the-art studios and high profile client list ranging from Temper Tram to Nick Cave, it could not have been a better placement. So it’s with thrilling excitement that I arrived at the Miloco Studio’s Headquarters on Leroy Street, Bermondsey, South East London.
Chris Lambert who was my point of contact warmly welcomed me and explained to me in detail what my job would entail during my 2 weeks stay:
1.Getting the place ready for clients and staff in the morning.
2.Making sure that all sessions going on during the day in the studios were running fine. Miloco Studios on Leroy Street include the Bridge, The Engine Room and The Pool. The Pressure!!
The Bridge studio can be used in 2 different ways: As a standalone studio where a Pro Tools rig is set up and engineers are invited to bring their own gear or in conjunction with The Engine Room, which is equipped with a Neve VR60. In that case, The Engine Room becomes the control room and The Bridge acts like a live room, making it available as the main live room, live booth and dead booth.
The Pool is a studio designed by Ben Hillier, who has been the engineer/producer for Blur, The Futureheads, Elbow and Doves just to name a few.
The Pool was the studio where I got to assist sessions with Ben for Nadine Shah’s forthcoming album. The Engineer I got to work with for those sessions was Ferg Peterkin who was also working with Ben for “Sound of the Universe” the latest Depeche Mode Album.
It shows the caliber of people working in Miloco and to be able to assist a session with such Engineers’, Producer’s and Artist’s was a fantastic experience. I got to witness first had the importance of the relationship between the producer and the artist, which is vital in order to make the session go as smooth as possible. In the end this gets best results from the performer.
It was also invaluable to see how the engineer works with the producer in conjunction with the monitoring system and the Pro Tools rig. I was glad I learnt few tricks on Pro Tools that make everything work much simpler in terms of sound editing and session management.
During the week I also was asked to go to other Miloco studios in London. For instance, I went to the Yard Studio in Highbury, to bring a Patchbay over. Some new state of the art equipment was to be installed in the studio. I helped the engineers to register the new gear onto the internal Miloco network and to put the compressors and pre-amps in to racks.
At the Square Studio in Shoreditch, the house engineer Jake took me for a spin in the studio and taught me few mixing techniques that were routinely used by the external engineers. Because Jake wanted to get a more in depth knowledge into SSL G series automation, he kindly offered the let me help work that out with him. It was something I truly appreciate.
Miloco Studios are spread all over the city, it was nice to travel all over London with buses and tubes and discover the whole city. After 2 weeks, I felt like a genuine Londoner with my Oyster Card, the London City Travel card.
Overall, this experience was amazing, I got to work with top producers, got to meet and talk to lots of engineers and got to see some great performers in a real world studio session environment. Today, I feel much more confident when sitting on a session because I have experienced working with fantastic people in state of the art facilities, this will hopefully stand to me and help me in my future career.
