Mark Ralph on Years & Years' King: "you always remember your first number one single"

One of the UK’s most in-demand producers, Mark Ralph has struck up long-term working relationships with the likes of Clean Bandit, Years & Years and Georgia. We talk about his start as a session guitarist, becoming a producer, and how he once ended up at Ronnie Wood’s house for a jam session. And speaking of sessions, we get the scoop on which Waves plugins Ralph goes to when it's crunch time.

“I was born in Stoke on Trent and I did live for two years in Slough,” Ralph says. 

“My dad, funnily enough, worked at Eton College. So I ended up studying classical guitar there, even though I'm state school through and through! I started playing guitar when I was six — I'd already learned to copy Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and people like that. So obviously, when you learn to play by ear, learning classical guitar is not a very enjoyable experience.”

This led to Ralph spending several years as a session guitarist, perhaps a high-pressure job that would be great preparation for having big-name artists in his studio years later. Gradually, he went from this line of work and being in a signed band, to “working at a music hire company – for example I installed a mixing desk on the set of Tomorrow Never Dies. 

"It was just a carrying-gear-around sort of job. But I never had an education in this sort of thing, so I learned about desks and how to assemble gear while doing that.”

Ralph’s trial by fire saw him, over time, become one of the very top producers working in the UK. It’s always fascinating to ask such a figure what they see as their career highlights.

“I think you always remember the first time you have a number one single,” he shares. 

“King was a song that I wrote and produced with Years & Years. Very early in my career, I ended up in Ronnie Wood’s house in his basement recording Cilla Black with him on guitar. And I hadn’t long been doing the production side of music. And there I was with a couple of legends jamming around in a basement in one of their houses.

“And then the Georgia album record that I did called Seeking Thrills, which came out a couple of years ago, was a case of Georgia and I getting together over a period of time, and just having the biggest amount of fun in the studio, making guilty pleasure music. I didn’t have any kind of expectations for the record, but it was a smash hit, Mercury-nominated, A-listed on the radio and all the rest.”

A significant weapon in Ralph’s arsenal are his extensive collection of Waves plugins. 

“The world of plugins is almost becoming infinite now,” he says. “It's not like buying vintage analogue gear where there's a finite number of bits of gear you can buy. Waves, for me, have always covered so many bases. They’ve always sounded the closest to some of the outboard gear that I've used.”

Agreeing that the plugin world is, indeed, pretty infinite, Headliner asks which Waves plugins Ralph tends to naturally use the most in sessions. 

“The CLA 76 is my favourite of the compressors,” he says. “And that one tends to get a lot of use. I have various physical compressors and it gives me what those give me in the real world. 

"I use Smack Attack — that's a really, really good plugin for transients, it’s probably the best transient designer that there is. It's really versatile. The way that you can alter the transient but also alter the release of a waveform is excellent.

“I love R-Bass. I've always found that to be a very useful way of enhancing certain frequencies in the bass. OVox as well, that one’s a good go-to. And then the SSL series compressors, including the mix bus compressor; I mean, I've got an SSL E Series desk, so I do have those channels, but the Waves recreations of those are so similar to what I've got on the desk that it’s really quite seamless to use.”

Next up for Ralph is plenty more studio time working on new music with Jax Jones, Clean Bandit, Years & Years, while also working with some more up and coming artists, so keep a listen out to hear the fruits of his labour.