Antonia Gauci: If You Build It, They Will Come

Sydney-based engineer, mixer, producer and artist, Antonia Gauci cut her teeth at Sydney’s legendary BigJesusBurger Studios and Studios 301 before taking a leap of faith and going freelance. She shares some key advice she’s learnt along the way, and why she’s never looked back.

Gauci is very precise, joining Headliner for a phone interview from Sydney at 18.11 exactly.

“I’ve got a very small home setup here, but I can still go to my studio which I'm lucky I can still visit,” she says warmly. “It means I can still maintain some kind of sanity and work through everything at the moment!”

Gauci got her start at Sydney’s BigJesusBurger Studios and Studios 301, assisting for industry heavyweights including Scott Horscroft (The Presets, Birds of Tokyo), Eric J Dubowsky (Chet Faker, Flume, Odesza) and engineering for Kevin Shirley and Cold Chisel. It turns out what inspired her to pursue a career in the studio was a small, local newspaper that she happened to see when she was at school.

“On the back was an advert for The Australian Institute of Music to study recording music, composition, musical theatre and artist management. It just seemed interesting so I thought I would apply, even though I knew literally nothing at all about it! I got accepted and then I just kept going from there by picking up things and learning from people along the way.”

At the same time, Gauci built on her skills and independent network, working with the cream of Sydney’s emerging artists. She now works out of her own room at Golden Retriever Studios in Marrickville, making it a hub for the community of artists and producers she has established. Gauci admits that going freelance was “absolutely terrifying,” but well worth the leap of faith.

“Someone said: ‘if you build it, they will come’. So I found somewhere to work out of, I put a laptop in it, and then I just told people, ‘I'm doing this now, so hit me up, let's do something, let's record’. I just got people in here, and one thing led to another and now I'm fully reliant on freelance stuff, which is quite an incredible thing after leaving a properly paid position.”

Gauci has made it a priority to feed that knowledge back into her musical community, becoming a mentor to aspiring artists and music professionals through the New Age Noise and All Girl Electronic programs in Sydney, as well as running mixing workshops for Electronic Music Conference, Music NSW and Music SA.

Gauci is well aware of the low statistics when it comes to females working in the studio, but certainly doesn’t refer to herself as “a 'female' producer or engineer” – she just wants to be known for her work, as it should be.

“I definitely do champion women and those who just want to have a go at this, because it can be absolutely incredible as a career,” she stresses. “It’s important to show people that it is possible; I think that only 2% of engineers and producers are female or female-identifying, and that definitely needs to be not such a low number.”

Her hard work paid off after years of grafting, and her credits include working with artists such as Kesha, Lil’ Yachty, What So Not, Troye Sivan, DMAs, Vallis Alps, Japanese Wallpaper, Body Type, alongside a growing client list of Australia’s most promising acts.

Gauci was there for the writing session between Ryan Lewis and Ben Abraham for Kesha’s emotional 2017 comeback single, Praying – engineering some of the track which was then taken overseas and worked on further. She’s not 100% certain on all the specific things they kept from that day, but she knows for a fact that they kept the choir that she recorded.

“It was so incredible,” she recalls. “Working with Ryan and Ben was great. I got to see them do their thing – everyone writes music the same kind of way, so to watch them have doubts and breakthroughs and all that kind of stuff was so cool. I felt really proud after that session because I had just started full time engineering at the studio. When you get a little notch under your belt, you think, ‘Yes, I can do this. This is awesome’.”

A year and a half later, Gauci ran into Abraham on the street, who told her the song was finally coming out.

“That was really cool because I didn’t hear about it for ages. It's always nice when I can tell my parents, ‘I did this’, and they say, ‘I actually know what that is!’ Because half the time they have no idea what I'm doing,” she laughs.

As many producers and engineers will know, it’s commonplace to have a project shelved for a while before it sees the light of day, which she shares is the case for a Black Eyed Peas record she worked on with will.i.am, as well as another session with Abraham for a Macklemore track.

“Unfortunately that's just how it is sometimes...ideas change, music changes,” she shrugs good naturedly. “The Black Eyed Peas session was one of the first things I assisted on when I joined the 301 family. It's always so cool when you get to be in the room and see how people do stuff, because you get this sense of reassurance that you're on the right path.”

Gauci notes that even though they were in a multi-million dollar studio at the time, she saw that sometimes keeping it simple yielded the most effective results:

“The band would come in and Will would send them voice memos, and then they would build stuff off his voice memos. Later he'd come in and track the vocals, so I saw that you can cut records and do production around stuff like that. It's not impossible. Everyone has access to an iPhone or some kind of voice memo recording type of thing.”

Gauci’s DAW of choice is Pro Tools, and for outboard she wouldn’t be without her two Neve 1073s:

“They just sound so incredible,” she enthuses. “There's the option to saturate things by turning up the input, and you can play with EQ – it’s so easy to work with. If you put anything through them they sound incredible, and it just makes my job easier. I'd be lost without them and they are so much more spectacular than I ever could have imagined. I don’t buy stuff unless I'm 100% sure. I love to buy one thing that I know that I will never sell and that's also a good all rounder for everything that I need to do.”

When speaking to fellow producer Marta Salogni, talk turned to plugins. Salogni recommended Waves’ H-Delay plugin for Gauci’s master bus, which she’s been trying out since.

“If I need a pretty standard delay, the H-Delay has always got me covered for whatever I need. I love getting in and automating that feedback on it just to ramp up into sections here and there. It's become my go-to, although I also use the CLA-76 compressor on everything all the time.”

When it comes to giving advice to aspiring engineers and producers, Gauci says to stop putting it off and make the leap, and to use whatever gear you can get access to:

“Definitely do whatever you can, even if it's a small thing like using GarageBand and recording through the laptop microphone – you can still create something that's interesting and unique. Just jumping in is the best thing; don't hesitate on it,” she smiles.

Main image credit: Rik Saunders