Hugh Padgham - Behind the Gates of the Hitmaker

GRAMMY Award-winning producer Hugh Padgham’s discography is filled with some of the most prestigious A-List artists of the past four decades, including The Police, Sting, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Howard Jones, Kate Bush, XTC, Paul McCartney, The Human League, Public Image Ltd, Melissa Etheridge, Trisha Yearwood, Bee Gees, David Bowie and countless others.

He has recently been working with UK-based Gearbox Records, engineering and producing modern jazz artists such as Graham Costello and Binker and Moses. Binker and Moses’ album Feeding The Machine was just voted MOJO’s top jazz album of 2022.

Hugh is also the “inventor” of the gated reverb effect popular in 1980s and 1990s drum tracks that is still peppered into productions to this day.

Toontrack recently celebrated Hugh’s sonic percussion thumbprint in the company’s latest SDX expansion pack for Superior Drummer 3, appropriately named the Hitmaker SDX. [See page 20]

I was excited to spend some time with Hugh discussing all of the above.