One of YouTube’s top producers recalls the moment his Neve console overheated while working with a big-time band – and how he dealt with it

Warren Huart is the founder and face of one of the biggest music production YouTube channels, Produce Like A Pro. And everything he’s learned has come from a lengthy and successful career working with huge names including Aerosmith, James Blunt, Korn, and many more.

So with such a stacked breadth of experience, it’s only natural that Huart has run into his share of studio mishaps in his time. One moment – which he details in a recent episode of MusicTech’s My Forever Studio podcast, came when he was working with rock band The Fray in Las Vegas, and the Neve VR console he was working on overheated, causing him to lose the function of all of his auxiliary sends.

The incident happened as the band were recording a cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Happy Xmas, War is Over at Las Vegas’s Studio at the Palms. “We were there, we had a kids choir coming in – we had one day,” Huart recalls.

“The studio was fantastic, but unfortunately, the air conditioning had gone down on the Neve VR console. If you know anything about VRs, they run really, really hot. So the centre section basically just overheated, and all my auxiliary sends went down. So I had no way to send headphone mixes. So I had to walk into the live room to talk to the band for three hours.”

Huart explains that he managed to keep up the facade that nothing was wrong to the extent that the band never questioned why he was continuously entering and exiting the control room.

“Not at one point, thank God, did they ever say, ‘Why aren’t you doing this talking through our headphones? Why haven’t we got our headphones up yet?’

Recording studios are nests of different technology working in unison, so there’s bound to be mishaps and failures every now and again. But Warren Huart says it’s how one handles it which sets apart professional producers.

“Never have I ever blamed a studio,” he says. “It’s an interesting one because you’re opening up such a can of worms here of conversation, because when I put a video up, I get a comment like, especially if I’m playing back a song of a genre which is maybe not favourable to a huge portion of our audience.

“There’s one thing about Produce Like a Pro that we do, is we are completely agnostic. We’ll have a hip-hop song followed by a death metal song, followed by a country. But people say, ‘How do you work on this thing?’ And you’re just like, ‘You’ve got to adjust your opinion. If you’re going to walk into a situation criticising the band or the music or the studio or the gear or whatever. And they’re like, ‘I’m not sure why I’m not working.’ Look at your question.

“You don’t have to walk around going, ‘Everything is unicorns and rainbows,’ don’t get me wrong. But you need to walk into a situation where it’s a positive experience for the artist.”

MusicTech’s My Forever Studio podcast – created in partnership with Audient – finds artists, producers and engineers designing their fantasy Forever Studio, in which they can select six items with no regard for cost or limitation to build their dream creative environment.

However, hosts Chris Barker and Will Betts impose some strict rules: they must only choose six items for their studio, and must do so wisely. There will be nostalgia. There will be anecdotes. There may be gags. But there will be no bundles!

Subscribe to My Forever Studio on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and check out all episodes so far via MusicTech.