Last week I had my first experience of working with a professional music producer working in the studio. In past times I have edited my own demos in my own studio but this was an entirely new and fascinating experience!
The previous week we have laid down all the raw tracks for seven original songs. Now it was time to review each instrument and vocal and to check that everything worked in unison. Fortunately Carl Rosemond has decades of working with bands and made sure that we matched the best possible microphones to voices and instruments in the original session, so the individual tracks already sounded pretty good. I began to appreciate that before any final mixing stage it’s essential to forensically check every part of every track. This may seem from an outside perspective to be incredibly time consuming, but as the afternoon progressed everything began to sound better and better. After a few hours the developing tracks sounded vastly better than the original raw takes.
I also began to appreciate the value of thorough rehearsal prior to stepping into a recording environment and to recruit the best possible musicians. The rhythm section of Garry on double bass and Rich on percussion was as always rock solid and helped us work at a really productive pace. When I first saw the studio I though “Wow we are all in fairly close proximity” but crucially I began to appreciate that this became a massive advantage as we were essentially replicating how we had worked in practice situations. In recent years digital technology has developed at an extraordinary pace and now as Carl pointed out my Tascam 24 track has more technology and features than his original hired studio which cost thousands of pounds! Watching a music producer at work is like watching a master chef. They are acutely aware of the importance of every single ingredient that needs adding or subtracting. In some processes Carl would comment “Now it’s going to sound worse before it sounds better” and he was 100% right! A large part of the day was spent on the a capella track “Amish Frame of Mind” which consisted of myself and Jessica on vocals and Rich on handclaps. Carl described as “a supremely brave choice to record” as with an a capella song there is vocally nowhere you can hide! The UAD plugins worked brilliantly in developing these tracks and bringing them to life in an entirely new way.
The second main track of the day was “There’s Only One of You” which is one of my favourite tracks to sing with Jessica featuring the entire band. It’s a simple song with great lyrics and in my view a terrific example of a three minute well-constructed song. The final verse is sung in harmony and this works especially well. A number of people who have heard demos in previous months have remarked that one of the strengths of the band is the harmony vocals and this is a great example of this in action.
This coming week I’ll be back with Carl looking at the remaining five tracks from the first recording session. The plan is to have a promo disc completed by the end of the year and then to return to studio to record the next batch of tracks in early January 2015. When I think about all that’s happened in the previous 12 months, to quote Jerry Garcia from The Grateful Dead “What a long strange trip it’s been!”