London, U.K. (March 5, 2026)—BAFTA and Grammy Award-winning composer, songwriter, producer and keyboard player Andrew Hale has outfitted his private Owlspace Studio in northwest London with a Harrison 32Classic 32-channel analog mixing console.
Hale, who joined Sade (the singer and the band that also bears her name) shortly after their live debut in 1983, previously employed a computer-based production setup at Owlspace, which he has operated for more than 20 years. Now, he says, “With the Harrison desk as a centerpiece, I’m able to write and record with very little friction because of the freedom it gives me and the ease of workflow. It provides a way of using electronic equipment, keyboards and drum machines and have all those present in a manner that makes my workflow super transparent and easy.”
Hale won his BAFTA Award in 2011, along with co-composer and orchestrator Simon Hale (no relation), for the soundtrack of Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire video game. These days, he says, “I do music for a wide range of things, including fashion shows and I still DJ quite a bit. But I’m always playing around. I just love all this old equipment. It’s like coming into the lab every day.”
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The new console, complete with 64 bi-directional channels of Dante and premium A-to-D and D-to-A converters, acts as a centerpiece for Hale’s creative activities, enabling him to access and route any source in the studio and adjacent live space without moving from the sweet spot between the monitor speakers.
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Over the years, Hale has switched his studio between a console-based and computer-based workflow a few times. “Now we’re in a world where people are going back to hardware, and you want to hook things up together and have say six keyboards, two drum machines, some guitar pedals and a Eurorack modular setup all running at the same time,” he observes. With the 32Classic at the center of his workflow, “It’s almost like running a live 32-track session, putting everything through a fantastic sounding signal path and getting it into the DAW via the console’s integrated Dante audio interface.”