BIO
Craig D. Williams

Mixer|Recordist|Producer

I have been fascinated with sound as long as I can remember, playing ‘radio DJ’ with my parents double cassette deck. So when the opportunity came to get involved in radio as a presenter in 1988, it was too good to pass up.
I found an 8-track Multitrack tape machine at the station going mostly un-used, instantly igniting my recording career, crucially before the analog world of tape machines and mixers would all but die. I didn’t need much encouragement to fire it all up and start experimenting.

 

I’d dabbled with music recording with some friends along side the radio production work, but it was my radio production work that got the attention of a radio programmer passing through my town listening to the station, leading to number of country radio jobs in South Australia and New South Wales.

 

It was in Broken Hill where I got involved with a local band in my spare time and really enjoyed producing albums for them. This led to a desire to understand the music production process in greater depth, so I signed up to study at SAE.

 

From SAE I went on to work in commercial radio stations SAFM, Triple M, and 5AA in Adelaide South Australia, before landing a job in Adelaide’s newest recording studio, Hippo Audio.

 

Here meeting producer Henry Seeley, eventually saw me recording live albums for Planetshakers, leading to an opportunity to assist Grammy winning mixer J.R. McNeely on a number of mixes for those same albums at Mixmasters studio. An experience that no amount of study could match, and would solidify my passion for the recording studio.

 

Moving to Melbourne, Australia, in the mid 2000’s I spent 6 years producing commercials for radio, including multiple commercial award finalist entries for DMG Radio Australia’s nova100 and vega91.5 (now Smooth FM) The then number 2 & 3 FM radio stations respectively in Melbourne.
I also co-wrote performed and produced jingles and recorded and mixed artist performances, (The Fray, Colin Hay, Diesel, Ed Kowalczyk, Tim Finn, World Party, Dashboard Confessional, Sara Bareilles among others) for DMG Radio Network Australia.
The notoriously close radio deadlines have honed my ProTools engineering, editing and mixing skills to a mandatory lightning speed, going so far as to develop my own editing and shortcut/macro system for Pro Tools utilising a Razer gaming keypad to further increase speed and accuracy.

 

Remaining heavily involved with Planetshakers, I operated live FOH and monitor sound, and tracked all of their live album recordings from 2001, to mid 2009, engineered post production on various live and studio albums and continued working with Henry Seeley and J.R. McNeely during mixing in various SSL K, E, and their own G+ series equipped studios. Working with the SSLs developed a great appreciation for their sound, automation process and workflow.

 

Moving to Hong Kong, one of the world’s busiest and most condensed cities in 2010, I spent the best part of three years recording and mixing projects for Hong Kong, and Mainland Chinese artists, working regularly with producer Josef Tse, while keeping in touch with the western world and mixing a number of Australian and UK based projects.

 

Looking for a change of pace, in late 2012 I relocated to Manchester UK, and more recently to Oxford, where I mix projects for UK, US, Japanese and Australian artists from my dedicated mix suite located in a small historic town in Oxfordshire. Utilising various UK studios for larger recording projects.
Recent mixing projects include Lifehouse Tokyo, !Audacious, Ikon, and The Identity.

 

At the same time I’m continuing to tour as a FOH and Monitor Engineer. Some recent live FOH work includes !Audacious, Futur and Matt Hill, and Monitor Engineer with with Planetshakers and David Gest Soul Tribute Tour (Dina Caroll, Russell Thompkins Jr, Deniece Williams, Peabo Bryson, The Tymes, Freda Payne, Melba Moore, and Fern Kinney.)