Jake Miller on American Gods and his Neve "rug pull" moment

Record producer, mixer, engineer and songwriter Jake Miller is used to being on the move, so he was more than ready to get back into the studio following a lengthy working-from-home stint. He explains how he hit the ground running at Snap Studios, recording a promo single for the new series of American Gods.

“I have more or less the same cliché story that everyone has getting into studios,” admits Miller, who’s speaking to Headliner from L.A. 

“I hung around with some bands, and I was the least talented musician as a kid, or at least wasn't willing to practice my instrument as much as everyone else was. I definitely really loved music and I was obsessed with it, but I guess my parallel love for computers and technology fed into it. 

"Eventually I was like, ‘Okay, well, all my friends are better guitarists and piano players than me’, so I found my way over to studio recording.”

Based in Queensland, Australia at the time, a teenage Miller begged a local studio to let him help out, which saw him gain experience in engineering, mixing and programming – eventually leading to him being mentored by Guy Sigsworth in London, and becoming a familiar face at studios including Abbey Road, RAK, Strongroom and Snap Studios as an engineer, mixer and producer.

“I remember thinking, ‘I’m not coming to London to assist anyone anymore, I just have this job now!’ Guy really leaves you to your own devices; he might give you some feedback on a mix or whatever, but really it was like trial by fire. It ended up being more of a masterclass and like a musical education.”

Recently Miller worked with his good friend Hugh Brunt (composer, orchestrator and co-artistic director and co-principal conductor of the London Contemporary Orchestra) on an unusual audio book recording of Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood’s Ness – a part-novella, part-prose-poem, part-mystery play revolving around a figure called The Armourer, who is leading a ritual with terrible intent on a salt-and-shingle island inside a ruined concrete structure known as The Green Chapel. However, something is coming to stop him…

“It’s a very ominous story set on this island which is an ex-military base called Ness, and they wanted to do a score that fit it,” he explains. 

“Hugh doesn't do anything in half measures, and he really wanted to go for it, so he came up with this idea of going to the island to do a lot of field recording and incorporating that into the score.”

The team not only went to extraordinary lengths to get on-location recordings from the setting of the book – they then processed them using almost exclusively period-correct EMI technology.

“It’s an unusual project – there is not usually a score for an audio book,” Miller points out. 

“The concept behind it was to use as much period-correct equipment as possible, and EMI used to supply audio / sonar equipment to the military. Anyone in London knows the place with the most EMI stuff laying around is definitely Abbey Road, so there was a lot of playing with this tape machine there. A lot of the recordings had been sped up and slowed down and pitch shifted, so in the spirit of the project we did the pitch shifting, all-analogue. 

"We would spend a lot of time with a spreadsheet and a tape machine putting things on and off tape at various speeds. We went through and very systematically reconstructed a very digital approach to these recordings and how they were treated, and recreated it all with tape.

Miller has been using Neve desks and preamps in the studio since his university days. He still recalls the very first time he used a 1073 preamp:

“I was probably around 18, and my mind was just blown because suddenly it sounded like all the records that I listened to,” he remembers. 

“One of my formative experiences was hiring a pair of 1073s and a C-24 mic, and it was a rug pull moment where I was like, ‘Oh shit, I'm really gonna need to up my game with what studios I'm getting into because this is obviously the way to sound more professional and more like the records that I'm trying to sound like as a starting out engineer."

Miller recently recorded a promo single for the new series of American Gods with London band Gengahr, recorded at Snap Studios on their ultra rare, 1972 Neve 5316 recording console with mic pre/EQ modules based upon the legendary original Neve 1081.

“Everything on the track (apart from a couple of things in the box that were added a bit later) was done through the console, which was part of why the day was so much fun, because I'd spent all year working from my home studio where maybe I only have two channels of something, so I have to ration it and re-patch things all the time if I want to use it again for something else,” he explains.

“Suddenly having all these channels was great because I could just put everything on the console. As a starting point it was nice to put everything in there and go, ‘Yep, it all sounds good. Neve consoles are quite ubiquitous in the studio world,” he adds.

“I used one in Flux Studios in New York when I was working with Guy on a project, and that was brilliant. The thing that's really great about using an old desk is the luxury of having one desk that has a bunch of great EQs and pres on it, and you can just move along without thinking about that stuff. 

"It's great for workflow when you're being tasked with a million other decisions and you have something that's reliable, and you know that none of it is going to sound wrong or bad. Then you can really get on with the job on the creative side and not worry about if you’ve got exactly the right pre – if you've got 32 of them on a desk and they all sound really good, then that's just one thing taken care of all day!

“It was just nice to be back in the studio with people again,” he reaffirms. 

“The desk being the centerpiece of it was definitely a reminder that this is a really fun way to do things, because it's easy to get wrapped up in being in your own studio where you develop your little workarounds for everything.”

American Gods image via Amazon Prime Video