A bearded 'cave-dweller' he may be, but don't be fooled into thinking music producer Graham Waller is stuck in the past.

Nor is a trip into his musical lair of the "mix cave" a journey into the dark, because this is a studio with a difference, and from inside the view of the Medway music scene and beyond is surprisingly panoramic.

Muscle Shoals, Alabama; Abbey Road, London - perhaps one day they'll add the 'mix cave' in James Street, Gillingham, to the list of the world's musical wellsprings.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves - for now I'm heading down there to chat with "Soundbeard" himself, and see what he can do with my own song.

To begin at the beginning, Graham's musical journey began when he was growing up listening to his dad's records.

"I always remember first hearing Queens music and thinking it was the best thing in the world," he recalls. "The power, the emotions, the delivery, just all of it - and I've been chasing that feeling with discovering new music ever since.

"I started playing in a band when I was 14 and then went to Ranscombe Studios with my band at the time “Fusion” which was an eye opener in terms of how records are made."

Ah, Ranscombe Studios - another mythic cave in the Medway music landscape - and it was here Graham cut his teeth, starting out in 2003 under the guidance of Medway music legend Jim Riley.

Trends have come and gone since, but a recent shift has seen bands adopt the old preference for recording live.

"It's nice, because it's the way I used to do things" says Graham. "That's they we used to do it at Ranscombe. The onus was on getting it right. Then over five or six years it started getting very sort of 'we're doing the drums, then we're doing the bass, then we're doing the guitar, then we're doing the vocals' and I think it starts putting it under the microscope a little bit. It kind of starts losing some of its magic. I'm glad it's going back to doing live in a room, and getting the vibe back into it."

That means straying from the Mix Cave of course, and Graham has variety of larger studios he collaborates with around Kent - while other projects have seen him heading out to venues, like a musical hunter-gatherer, to capture live sounds.

But the music landscape is ever changing, and with the rise of the internet comes strange new possibilities.

One recent project even saw Graham collaborate with "a band that doesn't exist" - an online musical collective, many of whom have never played in the same room.

"They come from Australia, Germany, US, Manchester, London, Italy," says Graham. "I met the singer and bass player because they both came down from London - it's weird how cohesive it is because nobody has ever met."

If that sounds weird then don't even stray into the realms of YouTube drummers, but Graham's main dealing is with Kent bands - from Jamie Johnson to Elvis impersonators to the hundreds of original bands like Black Gabanza, Freedom Cage, Billy Childish, Kid Harpoon and Graham's own outfit GlitterWølf.

"I try to keep my finger on the pulse and go to local shows," he says. "The problem here is that all the good venues are going - Beacon Court, The Barge, Tap n Tin - there used to be a live band there every week and they had their own record label, but now it's just a student bar. There's still Poco Loco, the Ship's doing good work, there's City Wine Bar, places like that, and the Red Lion in Gravesend. But a lot of musicians are just doing covers - which is sad."

If the venues are struggling, the drive to create is still there - as strong as it was back when all those classic rock covers were vague melodies in the back of unknown musicians' minds.

And so artists continue to write tunes, and places like Graham's studio remain more important than ever creative hubs.

Perhaps his studio is less a "cave" and more a tardis - and Graham a musical time lord crossing through eras, taking sounds and techniques from around the world and different times.

Which brings us back to the new song, Life Ain't Easy - a country-tinged rock number that probably fell of the back of Neil Young's pickup truck in 1975 - but which after going through the magic of the mix cave, sounds somehow newer, arguably.