Mix Engineer Cenzo Townshend has installed a pair of PMC twotwo.5 nearfield monitors in the mix room at Decoy Studios (www.decoysound.com), the White Mark-designed facility he established in a converted barn in rural Suffolk.
Since moving out of London in 2013, Cenzo has rarely stopped working, mixing hit singles and/or albums for a star-studded list of artists, including Florence and the Machine, The Maccabees, Christine and the Queens, Franz Ferdinand & Sparks, George Ezra, Kaiser Chiefs, Maximo Park, Jake Bugg and James Blunt — the list comprising an anthology of recent modern popular music in all styles from You Me At Six to Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
The recording facilities at Decoy have also been much used in recent months due to their proximity to Framlingham, the home of Suffolk’s most famous recent export. Singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran recorded some of the tracks featured on his smash 2017 album ÷ at the studio, and his recent collaboration with James Blunt, the single ‘Make Me Better’ from Blunt’s new album The Afterlove, was also completely recorded (and mixed by Townshend) at Decoy.
PMC twotwo.5s have been added to the reference monitors permanently installed in the mix room. Cenzo Townsend, said the following about his latest addition, “I think the PMCs are wonderful and sound great”. “I like the twotwos when I’m working on vocals,” he goes on. “They really open up the top end of vocals, specifically — if I’ve overdone something, if it’s a bit unnatural in the high frequencies, or a de-esser is grabbing, for example, they reveal that to me instantly. At the low end, I can work very quietly if I choose, but still hear the definition between the kick drum and the bass — and the PMCs will very quickly reveal to me if I’ve got phase problems between the two. The other week I was struggling with this very dense track, and wasn’t sure how best to proceed. I decided to play the mix-in-progress on the PMCs. Quite quickly, I was able to identify and make some small adjustments which opened everything up.”