When you’ve got a song that really gets you excited, a great recording & production can make your hair stand on end. Yaknow, “how it feels to chew five gum”.
And this process of 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. It’s so rewarding. But recording your music is always a super personal and often vulnerable experience – so it’s my job to be the ol’ midwife and make this process as smooth 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.
I work from my recording studio just outside Folkestone, Kent (the UK one), and use a beautiful vintage analogue console & killer mics to always make sure we’re capturing magic right from the source.
It’s a compact but comfortable, versatile space that lets us get inspired while working quickly when inspiration strikes.
I planned out and built a ton of room treatment that helps the acoustics in both the live room and the control room remain really natural and neutral – which essentially means we don’t have to worry about fighting weird resonances in the rooms and can instead focus on getting great performances!
The console’s a 28-channel Cadac J Series – it was originally developed for high end theatre use but has been highly prized in the studio for almost as long as it’s existed due to its incredible sound. It’s clean and versatile while sounding harmonically rich, full, and musical – which, from an audio engineer’s perspective, is a bit of a holy grail combo for a piece of kit. In other words, it’s useful and Not Boring.
Even though the J Series was released in the early 90s (so about as vintage as me), it really represents the culmination of audio hardware development from Cadac’s inception in the late 60s – essentially taking the best elements of 60s & 70s recording “mojo” and cleaning them up to be more useful for modern low-noise applications.
I’ve developed a relatively keen ear for Gear That I Like, and a lot of that has been due to building up a really quality mic collection featuring 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. Some of these are super spenny, but the most expensive mic isn’t always the right one for a particular job! I’ve instead 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!
If you’d like to chat about a project, drop me an email!
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.
