A multi-platinum producer and engineer, as well as being the Produce Like A Pro audio educator, Warren Huart recently added a 24-channel ASP8024 Heritage Edition console to his West Hollywood Harmony Studios.

Predominantly a writing room, Harmony Studios is noted in LA for recording a lot of demos. Allowing people to be able to sit down and get on with recording is therefore a key advantage of the British desk. ‘We have different producers, different engineers, mixers and songwriters coming in writing and recording ideas all the time, so we need a console that’s pretty straightforward to use. The Audient is very, very well laid out.’

‘Hundreds of songs have been created here and we have credits on so many big hits,’ he says, explaining how Harmony Studios’ intimate set-up of two vocal booths and a Yamaha C7 piano inspires creativity. Indeed, Miley Cyrus wrote and recorded ‘Wrecking Ball’ here.

With so many people passing through, the desk’s flexibility is all-important: ‘It’s about being able to move swiftly from one session to another,’ Huart says. ‘If you’re like me, you’re likely to be working on several projects at once: some of your own, some mix projects, some tracking projects – and everything in between. You need something really flexible that works really easily, doesn’t take a huge amount of programmability to be able to use and frankly just sounds good straight away.’

Coming with patchbay and Dual Layer Control for full interaction with his DAW, the analogue console is fully featured, enabling Warren to switch easily between tracking and mixing. ‘These days it’s all about recordability. The functionality of this modern desk makes far more sense than just having some nice mic preamps,’ he says. ‘The inline console just makes so much sense to me.’

Warren has been in the industry for more than two decades, and can reel off a list of classic analogue desks that he’s owned over the years – all of which he bought with earnings from making music. He hasn’t come up through ‘the normal channels’ however. ‘I didn’t have a music education, I hadn’t worked in studios – I was just a guy that played in bands and had my own studio gear.’

This was where the impetus to start the Produce Like A Pro YouTube channel came from: ‘It is the perfect opportunity for me to share what it’s really like to start from nothing and build a career,’ he says. ‘I can say, this is what I do for a living – let me show you how I got here and what I do every day.’

So Warren is not so much YouTuber, as he is mentor: ‘I learned a great tip years ago in England, from BBC Engineer, Martin Colley – an unsung hero who engineered countless John Peel Sessions, The Cult, Everything But The Girl, The Smiths,’ he offers. ‘He showed me a way to get an amazing acoustic guitar sound by using a small diaphragm mic, and that became one of my first videos,’ he says.

His interviews with industry greats also keep his YouTube stats booming; he’s had in excess of 33m views to date. Watch out for up-and-coming talent, Gary Go who’s appears in a forthcoming Produce Like A Pro interview.

You can’t learn everything immediately,’ he warns. ‘Persevere and be a worker among workers.’ A mantra that he clearly sticks to, as he also runs audio courses under the PLAP umbrella (three of which are available free to Audient product owners as part of ARC). ‘I just love being busy,’ he laughs.

Warren also has expansion plans in the offing, with a view to moving the Audient desk to his main Spitfire Studio – which means it will be appearing in the background of all future Produce Like A Pro videos.