Ian Dent

Ian Dent, Cambridge is an experienced music producer, sound engineer, arranger and musician.

His characteristic open, transient sound has attracted a client list from a wide range of producers, agents and musicians alike, including Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Dave Williams (Cellar Door), John Renbourn and Joe Boyd. With a former client base over 900 strong, he has worked on projects for many major international record labels and a host of local Westcountry artistes alike - recording styles of music as diverse as black metal, to pre-reformation English choral music, folk and modern jazz to electronica . He has also worked on a range of projects for other international musicians and composers including Yair Rosenblum, Mordachai Sobol and Ehud Manor (Israel);  Ackim Simukonda (Zambia); Emilio Cao (Galicia) and Remi Friossart (France).

Ian is the inheritor of the last remaining effective working parts of the famous Helios mixing desk from Island Records, Basing Street Studio One which recorded many of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s rock classics such as ‘All Right Now’ by Free, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ by Led Zeppelin, and  albums by Cat Stevens, Genesis and the Rolling Stones. He has been involved in the reproduction of the Helios design.

In recent years Ian has been also been a member of the University of Cambridge and has worked with Georgina Born - Anthropology of Music, PPSIS,  and Ruth Davis - Ethnomusicologist, Faculty of Music:  On anthropological research into technology, human creativity and temporality in Icelandic and Swedish popular music culture.

An experienced music mentor with a twenty five year track record, he has successfully worked with young musicians in career development from the UK, South Africa, Iceland, Sweden and the United States.

Ian writes:  “For me, mentoring is not about giving formal instruction, or even being a good ‘role model’ in the conventional sense.  It is more about the development of a relationship in which new spaces - new possibilities - might be explored for the musician themselves to then inhabit.

As a young musician, I clearly remember from my school days at Minchenden School in Southgate, London, having a playful row with my then music teacher and early mentor - the formidable Miss Amiot - about the respective merits of the opening sections of “Die Vorstellung des Chaos” from Haydn’s “Creation”, matched against the initial bars of the doomy metal song “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath. (Total mischievousness on my part I might add!)  Her skillful and measured answer however was actually to play me BOTH tracks at the same time at volume in the music room and make me comment on what I was hearing.

Strangely, many years later, I was producing a number of test tracks with a Croatian new metal band in the studio for a major record label when that very incident literally, flew back into my mind.  The band had recorded some discordant sections to one of their songs and were insisting that they be left in without change.  It was a kind of  “f e e l   t h e   f o r c e”  experience for me as we finished the track with those sections untouched. The tapes were duly shipped, and the A&R meeting held. One of the loudspeakers apparently fell from the wall during the meeting because of the undue vibration. The company however took this as a good omen, and band were signed!

For me . . well . . I am still exploring that space . . . “