Telling an audio engineer to listen is like telling a doctor to heal. Of course we’re going to listen! How else do we get a great-sounding recording?
You’re good at listening to the music, but how well do you listen to the artist?
I’m producing an EP for a really talented singer-songwriter named Whitney Winkler. She asked me to play acoustic guitar on the project. Once we had the guitar and scratch vocals recorded, she went home and left me to add various elements to the songs to fill them out.
Her songs have a killer groove to them, so I naturally thought some light drums would be perfect. I worked for a couple hours, programming a quirky little drum groove and recording some extra percussion.
She had mentioned that she really liked the song “I Won’t Fly Away,” from my album, which features a very unique blend of acoustic instruments with a hip-hop-sounding drum loop/percussion. So I thought I’d take this song in that direction.
The song quickly took on a very different feel. I kinda liked it, but before I dove in and booked a bass player and really committed to the arrangement, I emailed Whitney a bounce of what I had done so far.
