This is going to be a multi-part retrospective and exposition on what it has been like being tapped to produce an album with, literally, no previous experience. In a case of “we all have to start somewhere” mixed with “I know a lot of theory” with a sprinkle of “well, here were go, then!” I charged forth with dark gusto into a land heretofore unknown and full of peril, reward, but most of all, potential.
First and foremost, you might ask how this came about. Basically, I know an artist who’s busted his hump for the last few decades and hasn’t hit a break, and was coming up on another roadblock and it all seemed to revolve around money. It was at that point that I took what little knowledge I had and, yes Ms. Mosby, “a little learnin’ is a dangerous thing,” and threw my hat into the ring, offering whatever assistance and expertise I could to help him get this record not only recorded, but produced and into the hands of fans, new and old. For the record, I had NO idea what I was getting into. This is, of course, to be expected.
I had just made the full defection from ProTools to Reaper and, as such, was currently learning the ropes with it and had no established workflow to speak of, no real concept of what I needed to do, template-wise, and no understanding of how much it was going to take to get from “artist arriving” to “handing off a CD.” For the record, we’re still not to that last point, but we’re getting there. It’s a process – that’s something you need to understand from the outset – and it’s a living, breathing thing.
1. Step one – Recording
The discussions are over and it’s time to get the musician in there. Now, there are some things to be done! I had looked over all the checklists. I had looked at all the preparatory documentation we should need and printed off individual track worksheets. I had read so many blogs, forum threads, eBooks and articles that my head was swimming. It was at this point I was eternally grateful that my partner in this venture had quite a number of years’ experience with the recording side of things. He took over the reigns for recording, but that, also, set up an interesting dynamic later on. He’s Mac based and we ended up doing all of the recording and preliminary editing in LogicPro X.
Honestly, as the mixer/producer, my role in this situation was mainly as cheerleader. I kept notes to the best of my ability and tried to keep my burgeoning cold at bay so as not to ruin many takes with a rogue cough or sneeze. Two and a half minutes never felt so long as when you’ve got a tickle in the back of the throat and a sneeze on-deck and you pretty much have to hold your breath the entire time. Since this was late December, a lot of us were sniffly, including our brilliant violinist who despite coming in and just blowing us away, had a little “snurf!” at the end of just about every run. I felt bad, but with a little editing, those were mostly editable and those that weren’t, I quickly figured out how to bury in the mix.
All in all, with all the musicians, from scratch tracks to “final takes,” it took around 7 days, spread over a couple of weekends. There was travel involved for a few, and some broken up sessions, tackling a few songs at a time, as one would expect, and it was amazing to watch, learn, and hear everything start to come together. We were hearing it go from mere ideas and hopes to an actual album with a metric tonne, as it were, of potential.
The vocals were – and still are – a significant challenge in this because the artist is not some pop diva or emo mewler, but rather an Irish folk-rocker (rebel rocker!) who had not only a fairly wide dynamic range, overall, but a strong set of pipes that took a lot of finessing to tame. It was also a voice that, as the mixing process progressed, seemed to defy all of the common “standards” and I found myself confused and searching in a lot of ways as to how to make the voice sound big without sounding thin or “crispy” which is something that you know when you hear it.
We used quality mics for the recording and thought we had it all finished. We were wrong. I was finding that I had to really work with and mess with and tweak the vocals in order to give them “life.” This went on for a couple of iterations back and forth and tweaking and grumbling. Finally, the artist re-recorded the vocals with a different mic, sent the files, and they sounded good: warm, up front, and not really needing much by way of an EQ treatment.
This brings us to a logical stopping point and leads us to part 2 – Don’t fear the Reaper…
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