George is a recording engineer, producer and musician. He now works mostly from his own studio in Newton Abbot, Devon.

As well as providing expert recording, mixing and mastering, he has abundant musical skills often adds cello, keyboards, strings, percussion or bass guitar to clients’ tracks. His musical ear stems from his upbringing – his father was principal baritone at English National Opera. George studied cello and piano at the Royal College of Music. After the musical training, he received an engineering training from Jerry Boys (ex-Abbey Road) and many world-class producers and engineers who passed through Livingston Studios. George quickly achieved chart success with Coldcut, engineering the huge Number 1 gold smash ‘The Only Way Is Up’ by Yazz at the age of 21. Other hits rapidly followed with James Brown, Lisa Stansfield and The Soup Dragons, whose massive worldwide hit ‘I’m Free’ he produced and engineered.

He engineered for producers such as John Leckie, Brendan Lynch, Gil Norton and Mike Hedges, and worked at all the leading London studios including Abbey Road, AIR, Olympic, RAK, Townhouse, Strongroom, Miloco and Metropolis. In the 1990s George had enormous success working with self-producing artists such as Bernard Butler (‘Stay’ reached Number 12 in the UK) and Teenage Fanclub (‘Ain’t That Enough’ was their highest ever charting single). Primal Scream’s single ‘Kowalski’ reached Number 8 after he mixed it. George also engineered remixes such as Gabrielle (‘Rise’), New Radicals, The Corrs, and Mary J. Blige, and has worked with Mike Oldfield, Porcupline Tree, Blur and Texas. He recorded Appleton, produced Jake Shillingford’s Exile Inside, French recording legend Johnny Hallyday, and worked with the Opera Babes. He also recorded Darius, mixed Blue, and engineered Steve Winwood and 22-20s albums. George travelled to New York to work with  Longwave and in London worked with New Radicals’ Gregg Alexander.

He designed and built Bank Cottage Studio in 2005. Lucky Soul were first through the doors and returned late 2006 to finish their acclaimed debut album. They came back in 2016 for George to mix their acclaimed Hard Lines album. Since 2005 clients have included Andy Yorke, The SheBeats, Rhythms Del Mundo, Slade, Ocean Colour Scene, Stornoway, Frank Turner and Tony Iommi. George recorded the Classical Relief For Haiti single at Metropolis and mixed and mastered it (playing the bass guitar part too) at Bank Cottage.

In 2016 George recorded Paul Carrack (Ace, Mike & The Mechanics) and the 300-strong London Hospices Choir at Abbey Road for the charity record The Living Years which was the No.1 selling CD single for two weeks at Christmas, and recently devised and played cello arrangements for Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath). 2016 also saw the release of Nikki Loy’s Pivotal album which George produced and played a number of instruments on. More recently George has mixed and mastered a live album for Frank Turner, and mastered an album for Cathal Coughlan (formerly of Fatima Mansions).

George has also branched into composition and performing, with some notable success in production music for TV. His co-composition Extra Time was featured on ITV1 UEFA Champions League Weekly and ITV1 Guinness Premiership. His works are published by Warner Chappell, Sonoton, The Artful Library and KPM. His works have been used in commercials for Coke, Woolworths (Australia) and Philips.

Parallel to the recording career has been a substantial contribution to pro-audio journalism, with ongoing reviews and interviews for Resolution Magazine and RecordProduction.com with interview subjects like Tony Visconti and Pete Waterman.

“The Soup Dragons worked with George over 3 fascinating and exciting years. His innate musicality and peerless technical expertise helped us transform our slightly chaotic kaleidoscopic dreams into solid musical reality with what seemed hardly any effort at all- and always with a patient smile on his face! Thanks again, George!”
Jim McCulloch (Soup Dragons)

©2024 Copyright George Shilling 2024. All rights reserved. Website by OX1.

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