Simon Gibson
Surround mastering and restoration engineer at EMI Abbey Road Studios, London.
Simon has music degrees from the Royal College of Music, London and Cambridge University and joined Abbey Road in 1990. He is equally at home with vintage analogue and cutting-edge digital equipment, is able to work in any musical genre and specializes in both stereo and surround mastering.
Simon masters soundtrack albums for films, most recently ‘The Hobbit’ (films 2 & 3), ‘Into the Woods’, ‘San Andreas’, ‘Macbeth’, ‘Les Miserables’, ‘Skyfall’, ‘The King's Speech’ and the 5.1 audio versions for ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ (Parts 1 & 2).
He has mastered 5.1 music DVDs for artists, including Robbie Williams, Kylie, Sigur Ros (Heima), U2, Keane, Nigel Kennedy and the Choir of King's College, Cambridge. Recent surround mastering projects have included Wings’ Rockshow film, the legendary Argentine band Indio Solari - Live at La Plata 2008 and Final Symphony – a symphonic album derived from the music to the Final Fantasy games series.
Simon was responsible for all of the audio restoration on the Grammy Award-winning The Beatles Album Remasters (2009) as well as helping to create the individual musical lines for The Beatles Rockband Game from the original analogue master tapes. Recent restoration projects have included Wings’ ‘Band on the Run’ and ‘RAM’ albums (both GRAMMY nominated, with ‘Band on the Run’ winning the Historical category in 2012) and the remaster of the George Harrison biopic ‘Living in the Material World’.
Simon won a Gramophone Award in 2007 for the remaster to CD of the Lyrita catalogue of music by British composers. He was part of the Abbey Road team who remastered the complete studio recordings of Maria Callas, released in 2014. For EMI, he has remastered and restored archive tapes from the LP era, both classical and pop. Between 2010 and 2014 Simon and his colleagues remastered catalogue recordings in high resolution from EMI’s classical archive for release on SACD by EMI and Warner’s in Japan. This project began with recordings made by the legendary German conductor, Wilhelm Furtwangler, including his acclaimed Wagner ‘RING’ Cycle of four operas. This series of Furtwangler SACDs won the Special Project of the Year category at the ‘2011 49th Record Academy Awards’ in Japan.
Simon has been featured on BBC Radio 2's ‘The Record Producers’ and ‘In Concert’. Simon also gives talks about his work, most recently to the UK branch of the AES in London and to the students on Surrey University's Tonmeister course. Outside the Studios, Simon plays the church organ and enjoys walking, tennis and sailing.