See all in Music Features

Doing it live

Music Features

Sounds of the underground

What goes into producing a record and doing it well for you?
There’s two things that I don’t ever have enough of to actually produce a record. I’m really much more of an engineer than I am a producer, although I tend to get credited as a producer more than I feel as though I deserve, and I think that that’s actually a bad thing. The two things that I need most as a producer are trust and time. And while I do usually have a fair amount of trust from the bands, I rarely have enough time, and that’s just because I can’t give away my studio time and they don’t have the budget to spend months and months with me. I really can’t produce a record without spending a lot of time on it. To me, producing a record means you start from the very basic elements, you start your involvement with the band before they’re done writing songs and you spend a lot of time just demoing things, working on the songs, dismantling things that aren’t working in the songs and reassembling them. I usually only do a few of those type of projects each year. It’s pretty rare that a band would have the time to spend with me to be able to do that. It’s also really important that they trust me because as people are writing songs they get really attached to them and the more time they spend on them the more attached they get to them. Even if a song isn’t working or something in a song’s not working, the more time they spend with it, the more ownership they develop over that art, the less apt they are to change it, and the less apt they are to see it in a new way. So, I think one of the roles of a good producer is to bring an outsider’s perspective to an idea, or a first listener’s perspective and say, “No, that doesn’t work. You’re fighting that.” And I hear that all the time with the bands I’m recording and it’s not very often that I have an opportunity to change it. Maybe I have the time to change a few major things, but generally I’m just documenting what a band’s doing at that time and the way they sound together playing in a room and not really breaking it down into its most pure elements, which is ideally what I like doing the most. I thrive a lot more on the creative process than I do on the technical process. Even though I’m a nerd, the technical side of recording, of doing take after take and getting a performance perfect, and getting the ultimate perfect guitar sound, that stuff is certainly necessary and I love hearing it, but it’s not something I dream about. I dream more about creating exciting music.

• Share:
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•