Italian-based AIR Studios engineer Gianluca Massimo is a skilled recording and mixing engineer with a versatile body of work spanning film, TV, and music genres and formats. His recordist credits include Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department and Red (Taylor’s Version), as well as the orchestral version of Paolo Nutini’s Take Me, Take Mine for Amazon Music.
He joined AIR as an assistant in 2019, where he built a strong foundation in recordist and assistant roles on award-winning scores including Hans Zimmer’s No Time to Die, Alexandre Desplat’s Pinocchio, and Rob Simonsen’s The Whale. As a score editor, he has worked on iconic film and TV titles including Stranger Things, Good Omens, Elvis, and he was recently an additional score recordist for 2024 horror film, Nosferartu.
Here, he delves into his role on Coldplay’s recent song, All My Love, and the band’s 10th studio album, Moon Music, how he tackled recording a live Yungblud session, and working on AIR Studio’s iconic Neve consoles, which are essential to his workflow.
You were the strings engineer and recordist for Coldplay’s recent track, All My Love. How did you approach recording the strings for this track at AIR Studios?
That track specifically was very interesting, because the track was pretty much ready from the get-go. Songs tend to change a lot during the recording process, but that one never really changed, because it is basically a classic. We originally recorded strings months before, with a normal layout and a normal-sized orchestra, and then when we got to finalise the song, they were looking to make it more intimate, and we ended up re-recording the strings because we had a relatively big ensemble before. So we replaced what we recorded months before with much smaller sections.
It's about 11 players, but it was all a bit last minute, so we had the whole room set up for the band. We had to mic the drum kit, bass guitar, acoustic guitar, piano and the vocal booth. The room was pretty much all taken but we managed to carve out a little space and approach it as a very simple way of recording it, even mic-wise. So we were not going bananas with a gazillion mics, but were using the right things in the right spot, and the result is stellar.
I love remembering what happened in that moment when we approached that song with that little ensemble: they started playing, we got the levels right, and in the room, there was this sense of, ‘it's a classic’. It has become a classic and the song has taken off. It was a beautiful sensation.