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July 22, 2005
Lone Wolf No More
I used to be a “Lone Wolf” musically. I liked to do everything alone. Maybe this former preference had its root in my training as a classical pianist. After all, I would take lessons one-on-one with the teacher; practice alone (especially at college, where I would use a practice room and lock myself away from the rest of the world), perform alone, study new music alone, and ultimately compose music alone.
Alone In the Studio
When I started SCM studio in 1990 (then called the “S.O.L.O. Productions Studio”), I still worked alone. I used to produce accompaniment tracks for original songs, and by using MIDI and a bank of synths, along with my Atari 1040ST computer (!); I was able to produce these backing tracks all alone. I didn’t have the right equipment for recording vocals yet, so I very rarely had anyone in the studio with me.
There's People in Here With Me!
Around 1996, we added some ADATS (multi track digital recorders), and some new mics, and started doing entire recording projects in-house. Now I had actual people in the studio with me! I had to quickly learn how to make these musicians feel comfortable, and how to work on an arrangement with someone watching and / or helping me.
At first, I would ask the artist to let me work on their tracks alone, and have them listen to them when they were done. Well, not everyone wanted to work that way. Many artists wanted to be involved in the creative process right from the start. They wanted to collaborate.
Learning Musical "Give and Take"
I had to learn how to accept input on the musical direction that a track or an entire recording project was going to take. I had to learn how “bounce” ideas off of another musician or group of musicians, and how to deal with the ideas that they would try out on me. I had to learn how to accept valid criticism of my ideas (and throw away the ones that truly didn’t work!), and how to objectively evaluate the ideas from the artists.
Once I learned how to do these things well, guess what happened? The quality of my work (the arrangements, the performances, the mixes, everything!) took a dramatic leap upward! This is not to say that my work was bad before, it just lacked a certain “something.”
To this day, Sheryl and I encourage every artist who records with us to get involved in the creative process right from the start. We try to draw out of them every idea they might have about their songs, and how they want to present them. We have found that very few artists have absolutely no idea regarding how they want their songs to sound. Sometimes they may have trouble finding the right words or terms to express their ideas, but we have yet to fail in finding out what an artist really wants to hear. We take the time to listen.
Posted by leon at July 22, 2005 11:32 AM