Episode 461 – Legendary Engineer Ken Scott, Bandcamp Numbers, And UAD Plugins Unchained

My guest this week is legendary engineer/producer Ken Scott, who has a list of accomplishments and credits that are almost too long to list. After getting his start at Abbey Road Studios as a teenager, Ken went on to become one of the five engineers for The Beatles, as well as for solo projects for John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr.  Ken was the producer/engineer for four of the most revered David Bowie albums, along with hit albums for Elton John, Supertramp, Duran Duran, America, Missing Persons and many more. He was also instrumental in giving the sound of progressive jazz a harder edge with his work with Jeff Beck, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Stanley Clarke, and Billy Cobham. I was lucky enough to work with Ken on his memoir Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust that outlined his illustrious career. We even did a project in the studio together so I got to know him pretty well. A lot of the typical questions that Ken would get we already covered in the book, so I tried to go in a slightly different direction during the interview. In Part 1 of the 2 part interview, we spoke about him going back to Abbey Road Studio 2 to record again, his views on immersive audio, finding Bowie outtakes, working in the box, his favorite plugins, his feeling about Autotune, and much more.  I spoke with Ken via Zoom from his home studio in the UK. On the intro I’ll take a look at how Bandcamp has become a major music platform, and how Universal Audio disconnected its plugins from its hardware. var podscribeEmbedVars = { epId: 84986682, backgroundColor: 'white', font: undefined, fontColor: undefined, speakerFontColor: undefined, height: '600px', showEditButton: false, showSpeakers: true, showTimestamps: true };