Record producer and mixer Romesh Dodangoda has always had a soft spot for rock music, and has worked with an array of guitar-wielding bands including Funeral For A Friend, Bullet For My Valentine and Motorhead. He reflects on working on Bring Me The Horizon’s Grammy nominated album, Amo, and why his Genelecs have made themselves right at home at his Cardiff recording studio.
Dodangoda’s love of all things guitar music started when he heard Oasis as a boy. Picking up a guitar, he learnt as many of their songs as he could, and he’s never looked back:
“I had this obsession with getting the guitar sound I wanted to come out of the speakers, and once you go down that path of getting a bit nerdy with guitars, I think I just naturally fell into the studio side of things,” recalls Dodangoda, who joins Headliner on a Zoom call from his studio in a very drizzly Cardiff.
“I joined a band when I was younger and I always used to love going into the studio, and recording that stuff always fascinated me. The whole being in a band thing – I wasn't really bothered about.”
Determined to get into the studio side of things, Dodangoda set up his own studio on the side of his house and slowly built up his inventory of equipment.
“Whilst I was working out of that studio, there were some bands that came in and we did a few records together. The bands that I was working with started to do really well, and then people started calling me because they wanted me to work on their records. I think it was from there that I thought, ‘right, I'm gonna do something with this’.
"I would lock myself in the studio all day, so it was something that I loved anyway! It was around that time that I was starting to see the records that we were making actually connecting with people. I think that was probably what made me realise that it was going to be more than just playing around in the studio.”
Things really shifted up a gear when he worked on Kids in Glass Houses’ debut album, Smart Casual, which really resonated with fans and performed well in the charts.
“A lot of people loved it,” he says with a grin. “It was quite an exciting time in general because I’d be making a record with a band and there was another band just starting to blow up at the same time, so lots of things were happening at once. I think I probably tried to look like I was not intimidated by it,” he chuckles.
His CV only went from strength to strength, and his enviable back catalogue includes recording the Grammy nominated #1 album, Amo from Bring Me The Horizon, and he’s also worked with Funeral For A Friend, Bullet For My Valentine, Motorhead, Twin Atlantic, Monuments and Busted.
“I've always been about guitar-based bands,” he acknowledges after I reel off just some of his past guitar-wieding projects.
“I’m a guitarist, so that's always been something that's excited me. I love hearing big guitars on records, and I've always tried to do the two things that I love, because I can put a lot of myself into it then. Equally, there are times when I'm working on a project and it brings in an element of a genre that I don't work in, but that's also exciting for me because it allows me to be out of my comfort zone a bit.”
Dodangoda found himself in just such a situation when he was asked last minute to mix Busted’s Pigs Can Fly Tour 2016 live from Wembley DVD, which led to him mixing the Bring Me The Horizon - Live At The Royal Albert Hall DVD.
“I was in New Zealand doing a masterclass when I got the phone call to mix the Busted DVD, and they needed it back in 15 days,” he remembers. “
That was a hard one to organise, but I really love how that one turned out. The Bring Me The Horizon DVD was a massive challenge because it all depends on what they've got going on in the show. Sometimes a live show can be quite a simple thing, but Bring Me The Horizon was the band playing with a full orchestra and a choir, and I had to make all that sound big.”