Pre-Recording Tips
Tackle preproduction responsibilities Practice songs until near-perfect performances are the norm. Tune and repair all instruments and gear. Determine the aesthetics of the sound you want to capture.
Survey the scene: To narrow down potential studios, talk with other bands and do research online to hear engineers' final product.
Get on the same page: Talk to engineers about their taste in music and recording, and provide examples of sounds you'd like to emulate. Determine personal compatibility with engineers.
In The Studio
Choose a producer wisely: “[A producer] you can communicate well with is more important than the gear they have. I would say Steve Albini can do things with a four-track that a lot of home-studio owners that spent 50, 60 thousand dollars cannot achieve.”
—Adam Knight, AKAudio
Get the right headphone mix: “You should hear yourself well and not feel ‘crowded’ by the volume of other instruments. If needed, try the ‘one ear off’ technique; leave the headphone off one ear to hear your voice acoustically in the room. The type of mic chosen and the mic’s placement should match rather than alter your voice and it should capture your best sound.”
—Jeannie Deva, vocal coach
Behind the Glass (Producing/Engineering)
Make mistakes: “Every young engineer should spend at least three months just working on 4-track so they get to learn how to make decisions. If you make a wrong one, it doesn’t matter. You’re not performing life-saving surgery. Mistakes can be good.”
—Ken Scott, producer-engineer (the Beatles, Pink Floyd)
Believe in others: “If you care about manifesting [an artist’s] vision, you have to jump into the trenches with them. And when you connect on a deep level, you feel like you’re living again. When you believe in people, it goes beyond the music; it goes beyond the art.”
—Danny Jacob, composer (Phineas and Ferb)
Be a therapist: “There’s always that point when an artist decides that they don’t like a song anymore. They’re being irrational. They really like the song but they’re stuck. You’ve got to be a therapist and a strategist. Sometimes you have to go to another song and then come back to it. Other times you have to say no [to a break] and stick to it. For [Katy Perry’s] ‘Teenage Dream’ we rewrote the lyrics seven times.”
—Benny Blanco, producer-songwriter
(Ke$ha, Maroon 5)
Less is More: “[Producing] takes a lot of listening, a lot of practice and trying not to do too much to a mix. I still do new stuff on different mixes all the time. Figuring out what [a mix] doesn’t need is more important than what it needs.”
—Colin Leonard, mastering engineer
(Kimbra, Wale, Justin Bieber)
Respect the artist’s music: “You’re not there for your individual sound. You’re there to shape something for the artist and, more specifically, for that particular album. … Sometimes it might be a big, heavy layered thing, other times it might be sparse. Ultimately it’s the artist that’s going to live and die by the album. It’s about what they want.”
—Joe Chiccarelli, producer
(Frank Zappa, the White Stripes)
Get a manager: “Many producers and mixers who are red-hot say, ‘I don’t need a manager.’ That’s exactly when you need a manager, because you need someone to keep feeding the logs into the oven, the coal into the steam engine.”
— Joe D’Ambrosio, Joe D’Ambrosio Management Inc.
Don’t crush your mixes: “The bane of mastering engineers is that people bring in mixes that have been crushed with an L2 or some converter that takes away all of the dynamic range. That’s one way to make it loud, but it also kills the vitality.”
—Pete Doell, mastering engineer (Adam Lambert, Frank Gambale)
