How I Work
Most of what I believe about making music comes down to one idea: music is something that happens between people. Someone plays, someone answers, and the music changes in the room. Most of the job is listening closely enough to catch it. Everything else, from the song to the microphones, follows from that.
The song
Before any production decision, I want to know whether the song holds up. Played on one guitar or one piano, in a room, does it still carry? If it does, it will survive any production: sparse or dense, acoustic or electronic, any style you like. If it doesn't, no production will rescue it. It will only keep the listener busy.
I've seen this change firsthand at international songwriting camps. Until about ten years ago, most writers arrived with an instrument. Now many arrive with a laptop and a sample library, and the demos come back sounding finished, almost mastered, and strangely alike. The polish is there. What's often missing is the song underneath it.
Talent over correction
As a producer, what I'm looking for is talent: real emotion, a story worth telling, and a way of playing or singing that belongs to one person. Today, almost anything can be tuned, quantized, and corrected. Each correction makes a performance a little more perfect and a little less interesting. Taken far enough, you're left with something that sounds like everything else.
I'm not against the tools. I use a click when a track needs one, and film scores run to picture by nature. But on records, I like tempo that can move because the people playing it move, and dynamics that go where the player takes them.
Two things quietly flatten a lot of modern recordings. On a MIDI instrument, velocity tops out at 127: past a certain point, playing harder changes nothing. And loudness-driven mastering squeezes the range from the other side. Between them, much of what a performance actually did disappears. I'd rather keep it.
Rooms, microphones and sound at the source
Records from the fifties and sixties often sound like the rooms they were made in: the studio's walls, its echo chamber, its particular equipment. Home recording in the eighties and nineties opened the doors to an enormous amount of creativity. In the last twenty years, though, more and more productions have started to sound the same. I like a sound that belongs to a particular room, player, or instrument — rather than to a preset.
That's why I care so much about the tools that come before the performance, not after it. I often record with vintage microphones. They bring warmth and a larger-than-life sound into today's digital recording. The first time I put an old Melodium 42B in front of a singer, it changed how I thought about ribbon mics, and it started a collection that has grown ever since.
Much of my signal path is analog, with tube amplifiers, tube spring reverbs, and transformer-balanced gear, while the recording itself is digital. Old and new side by side, each where it does its best work.
I like to experiment. But I also like to arrive at a sound that is right when it's recorded, so it doesn't need to be rescued with heavy EQ and processing afterward. Getting it right at the source is what makes the experimenting affordable.
Playing together
Whenever I can, I record musicians playing together in a room rather than assembling parts one by one. Often I'm one of them: on many recordings I play instrumental parts myself, on guitar, bass, or keyboards, and I bring in the musicians and engineers a production needs.
Whether it's a demo, a script, a rough cut, or a room full of musicians, I start by listening: to the material, to the people who made it, and to the noise in between, where something beautiful often begins.
Have a song or a record in mind?
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