Heff Moraes is a producer and engineer based in London who started his career at SARM Studios. Heff's credits include Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Will Young, Paul McCartney, Sade, Annie Lennox, Rush, Simple Minds...
Heff was mentored at SARM by (the then chief engineer) Stuart Bruce, so it was really great to bring them together to discuss the recording industry and how it's evolved in their time with some great conversation about working with Trevor Horn, Steve Lipson and many great artists and producers.

Heff is now busy working on ATMOS mixing and is Head Engineer at Tape London and consults with PMC which is why the conversation took place at their London demo studio - and the enormous number of speakers on show! A big thanks to PMC for the use of their studio.
The video runs for an excessive 1 hour 45 minutes as the conversation was so wide ranging, covering the early days of SARM Studios to current production methods including mixing for ATMOS. This is an engineer's conversation in the studio that has been captured with so much interesting information the decision has been made to put the complete conversation up but we have added key points at the following key points:

00:00:00 Intro
00:04:20 Starting work at SARM Studios
00:08:08 Working with analogue tape and recording basic techniques
00:13:20 The Recording Engineer has to remain calm
00:17:50 Making calls as a record producer and decision making
00:25:00 Hardware vs Plugins and how it changes artist performance in recording 00:31:35 Working with Annie Lennox and Steve Lipson
00:40:30 Live sound mixing at Central Park
00:47:17 Frankie Goes to Hollywood re-recording and Grace Jones
00:53:30 The Art of making Cheesy but Great Records
01:00:00 SARM as the centre of the UK Music Industry with George Michael etc 01:02:15 Now there are more music studios than ever
01:08:40 Early days mentoring from Jill Sinclair
01:12:00 Helping young people with their music and production career
01:30:00 Budgets for recording are shrinking
01:36:30 Advantages of working on mixing desks
Special thanks to Stuart Bruce for taking time out to meet and host this feature - do check Stuart Bruce's interview here on our site.