Taking musical ideas from sketches through to a fully produced set of recordings often feels like magic. Literally creating something beautiful and tangible out of nothing. However, recording your music is always a super personal and often vulnerable experience – but when it’s going right it feels amazing.
So it’s my job to make this process as effective & pleasant as possible. Sometimes that means some gentle encouragement and sometimes it means suggesting a different approach, but this is always in service of the music. It’s always ultimately your music and your call – if you’d like something done, I’ll figure out how to get it done.
Wherever it makes sense to do so, I love to work by layering on top of really great live takes, so that we’re always working from some of that live-captured magic.
I currently work from different recording studios in Kent – which helps me to find the best space to suit your needs & budget. Sometimes we just need a nice space for acoustic guitar & vocals, and sometimes we need a space for a whole band and a concert grand piano – being able to make this choice based on the needs of the project rather than the limitations of one particular studio is a huge benefit for the music.
I have a fairly extensive mic collection of my own that I bring to sessions, so we’re never at the mercy of which mics a particular studio has available on the day.
This collection features top line mics from state of the art companies like Austrian Audio (the new, higher tech AKG), AKG, Ear Trumpet Labs, Sennheiser, Shure, Audix, and more. I’ve invested in mics that I know I can trust to sound great because getting it right at the source is always the best way to start.
I’m here to help you get your songs from ideas to real life polished recordings that you can be proud of. Sometimes all that’s needed is a nice space, a set of great mics in the right places, and capturing that one great take – but at other times we need to really flesh a song out to maximise its emotional impact.
I can help with adding percussion & instruments (bass, guitar, piano/keys/synth, drums, etc.) as well as string and orchestral arrangements. I can also play a bit of violin & cello when they don’t need to be a big deal, but I have friends who are actually good who I’d much rather rope into sessions when needed!
Pricing for recording sessions is offered as my fee (usually as a day rate) plus the cost of the studio. The studio costs can vary based on which studio we opt for, but I’ll be able to offer some options after we talk about what you need!
If you’d like to chat about a project, feel free to get in touch either via my Instagram page (below), by using the contact form.
Having a great-sounding space really is fundamental to the sound of your recordings. It can be kinda hard to describe the problems that bad room acoustics have on your recordings because it’s something that you never really need to consider – that is, until you become a recording & mixing engineer.
Perhaps a way to describe room reflections is as sort of like heat. You need a certain amount of heat. But if you have too many reflections in the wrong frequencies – such as where we biologically most understand human speech (broadly between roughly 800Hz-3kHz) – then those reflections cause overheating. In other words, the important bits get overcooked! And this makes those important bits either less intelligible or far too harsh (or both).
This may be less of a problem with one particular track in a recording but it becomes a huge problem when you layer this “overcooking” across all the tracks that go together to make up a professional modern production (which can easily be upwards of 24 tracks for a “simple” production).
Bit of a rogue analogy, but recording in bad spaces is kinda like getting served a burnt bolognese. It’s still a bolognese, but it’s not gonna taste very nice. And you can try to address things with EQ corrections, de-reverbing, de-humming, de-essing, etc., but you’re still going to be left with a burnt bolognese (now with some extra sugar and a fair bit of some weird spice that you can’t really place).
A £2000 mic isn’t just priced at that point because of brand reputation (though that certainly factors into it) – it’s priced at that point because quality isn’t cheap. It takes a lot of research & development as well as a lot of expensive components & skilled manufacturing to create a mic as good as a Neumann u87 or an Austrian Audio OC818.
But do you really need good mics?
Well, yes. Because “good” is relative to requirement. A £100 Shure SM57 is a good mic for a lot of use-cases (such as snare), but it’s not a great mic for a lot of other use-cases (such as most vocals). The aim isn’t to spend as much money as possible, but to build a mic collection that allows you to be versatile with how you capture performances.
Think of mics as fundamental tools of the trade. A good carpenter/sculptor can make a perfectly fine carving with a sub-par set of chisels, but they’ll be able to make that carving much faster and more accurately if they don’t have to keep re-sharpening those chisels.
