750mph's Sam Ashwell on taking 'Audio Photographs'

Very few eardrums reverberate as sensitively to the world’s sounds as those of Sam Ashwell, head sound engineer and creative partner at sound studios 750mph. Here, Tim Cumming tunes in to a champion eavesdropper who’s constantly taking “audio photographs”, is wary of falling down rabbit holes of over-complex tech, and can be nearly deafened by birds singing in a forest

Sometimes you see them – the one person on the bus or train who isn’t plugged in to their smartphone, oblivious to their surroundings and the random soundtrack of people on the move – fragments of conversation, traffic sounds. Those that aren’t tuning out their surroundings are more than likely to be someone like Sam Ashwell, sound designer extraordinaire at 750mph, the audio post wizards based in Golden Square, Soho.

“I spend a lot of my time listening to the world as I’m on my journeys around places,” he says, from one of the plush mixing suites at 750mph. “Listening and taking it in. A quality of a good sound designer is having the ability to listen to the world around you, and to make audio photographs, so when you’re presented with a job, and they didn’t shoot any sound, and there’re cars whizzing past or horses riding through a forest, gunshots … you need to have a snapshot of what you have to do to make that sound.”

The sound of a stroppy alien

In a way, a sound designer is a spy, eavesdropping on the world of what we hear and don’t often notice, learning what makes it tick, and how to remake it perfectly in the studio. “I’m always interested in listening to the world,” says Ashwell. “On trains, I love hearing dialogue weaving in and out. When I’m walking in a wood, the birdsong – no one believes how loud it is, but when you’re standing there in the wood, it can be deafening. Put that in a job, and they’ll say, no that’s definitely too loud. Or I sit on the beach, listening, figuring out perspectives, wondering, ‘How could you fake that?’ I enjoy the challenge.”

As for field recordings, and testing soundscapes for specific jobs, Ashwell is more inclined to simply listen and absorb. “I’ll go round recording things when I need them,” he says. “Sirens – you can never have enough good UK sirens; a lot of the library stuff is American. But you have to have a break – we do 10-, 12-hour days, five or six days a week – seven sometimes.” He laughs. “Sometimes you just want some peace and quiet.”

Ashwell joined 750mph in 2000, straight out of college, aged 22, so the last 17 years have seen him move from technical assistant, through to junior, then senior then head engineer and now partner.

He studied sound engineering at Kingston University (“My whole family work in advertising and film, and I used to go to film sets a lot when I was young, and at 16 or 17 realised sound design was a thing.”) and also worked as a DJ and collected music tech. “Ataris, midi and Akai samplers, old digital synths, stuff from the 80s and 90s. Then, as computers got more powerful, I got into plug-ins, and all that hardcore modular stuff that’s basically programming to make music.”

The world, the industry, and the tech of sound design has changed dramatically since Ashwell started out. “We were using original Fairlight kit, 24 track. There were no plug-ins. We were using VHS and cassettes – there were no MP3s. We had dial-up, but there was no broadband. The runners were really running.” In some ways, he misses the relative simplicity of that era’s kit.

“The more advanced a technology gets, the more you can do, but the more you can go down a rabbit hole, too. You can do a lot more but a lot more can go wrong. People say, it must all be so much quicker now, but it was quicker when you could do less.” The relentless arrival of new tech, new software, and new plug-ins is formidable. They all have to be mastered and road-tested by Ashwell before being released on his clients’ work, or upon junior sound designers.

The most useful, he says, are the latest innovations in restoration, in cleaning up and getting rid of noise on shoot sound, making good things that would have once been unusable. And then there are the plug-ins Ashwell uses to generate otherworldly sounds for sci-fi settings, including one of his favourite recent spots, Alien for Volkswagen (“a really scary alien becoming frustrated and having a tantrum like a toddler”).

Audio to appease the auto geeks

The biggest challenges, says Ashwell, tend to involve cars. “Especially when they haven’t recorded it, and it’s an obscure model you can’t find any recordings of, and you have to get the right one or all the car geeks will go mental.” This is when a trusted battalion of sound recordists comes in to the frame, slapping contact mics all over the vehicle. “On the exhaust, in the gear box, underneath, in the front. All these different bits of the car. I just listen to what they’re doing and soak up the sound design possibilities.”

At the heart of his sound design philosophy is simplicity. Don’t go for unnecessary complication. “If you just have two reverbs, you work with them to make them sound good. I’m a firm believer that you can do 90 per cent of all your work with reverb, dynamics and EQ [equalisation]. If you understand how dynamics, compression and EQing works then that’s the bulk of your work.”

What he will insist upon is autonomy when it comes to knowing which sound design to choose. “Doing it by committee is not always a success,” he says. “I fight my corner – and I usually know when I am right. But I also know the point where to stop fighting. But that’s my job – to know when it’s right. And people hire me to do my job.”