RECORDING
Dom Morley engineered on Amy Winehouse’s number-one Back to Black album, Mark Ronson’s Version and Record Collection,
Richard Ashcroft’s These People and Keys to the World, the debut album from Nick Cave’s Grinderman, and singles for Adele,
Morrissey, JP Cooper, and Estelle, amongst others. He has also engineered or mixed for Rag’n’Bone Man, The Staves, Rumer,
Keane, Birdy, Lemon Jelly, Jeff Beck, Sting, I Am Kloot, The Verve, and Underworld, as well as working with The Police on the
pre-production for their world tour and recording and mixing the audio for series for Channel 4 and Island Records.
www.dommorley.com. www.themixconsultancy.com.
By Dom Morley
How to Really Make a
Professional Record
in Your Bedroom
There’s been a lot of discussion in recent press
about bedroom-made hit records since Billy Eil-
ish and her brother left the Grammys ceremony
needing a wheelbarrow to carry all their awards.
The fi rst headlines are predictably the
most sensational and the least accurate –
“made entirely in her bedroom” and so on.
Slowly, the picture comes more into focus as
the professional mix engineer and mastering
engineer fi nally get a mention. So, it turns out
it was recorded in a bedroom and fi nished
elsewhere. Fair enough. It’s a great sounding
album so it was well recorded. But this does
beg the question: how do you make a gen-
uinely professional record without leaving
your bedroom?
Well, fi rst we need to decide what “pro-
fessional” means. We could talk subjectively
about sound quality for days (internet forums
are your friend if that’s something you actu-
ally enjoy) but I’m going to simplify things
by saying a “professional” record is one made
by or with professionals – people who make
their living doing the thing they have done
on your record. At this point you’re probably
wondering one of two things: either “How
are they all going to physically fi t in my bed-
room?” or “How much punishmnent can my
bank account take?” Thankfully, neither of
these questions are relevant anymore, as a
new paradigm in music making and profes-
sional collaboration is emerging.
per cent of it), and with rent-to-own options on
software, you can use the best software synths
immediately and keep your costs in-check.
But what if you want real drums and gui-
tars, for example, and not just samples? In
an ideal world, you’ll have professional play-
ers on your track without the huge cost of a
quality studio for the day and the musicians’
daily rates. Well fortunately, online session
musicians have built that ideal world.
For example, if you’re looking for drums,
you could work with Emily Dolan Davies
(Emilydrums.com), a pro drummer who
has toured with everyone from Bryan Ferry
to Cher Lloyd. When she’s not on the road,
Emily is in her studio recording drums for art-
ists all over the world. You just send her your
track, have a chat about what you want her
to play, then she sends back her profession-
ally recorded stems for you to slot into your
session. Likewise for guitars, Damien Nolan
(Damiennolan.com) does remote sessions
when he’s not playing for artists like Pete
Townsend or Jacob Banks. He’ll play on your
track in his studio surrounded by an array of
guitars, pedals, and amps. He sends you the
fi les and they just slot into your track. You’ve
still not left your bedroom, and you can get
these players on your track for way, way less
than the cost of a studio and their normal
daily rate.
Mixing & Mastering
Instrumentation
Let’s start with the recording process. If you’re
looking for samples or synths then it’s now
cheap and easy to access the tools that you
need. Subscription services like Splice and
Loopmasters allow you to just download the
samples that you want to use (rather than buy-
ing a whole pack and discovering you only like 5
Now your track is recorded with pros and
it’s time to mix. This is where Billie and her
brother Finneas handed the reins over to
professional engineers and the tracks left the
bedroom. If you have the budget to do that,
then that’s great, but a lot of us don’t, and a
lot of us would also like to be able to do it all
ourselves. Well there’s help here too. Some
mix engineers will come to your studio and
help you with a mix on your set-up. You’re
paying for them for the day, but you’re saving
money on a big studio and you’re getting
that professional quality from your bedroom.
Alternatively, you could use The Mix Con-
sultancy (Themixconsultancy.com), which al-
lows you to upload your tracks to one of their
Grammy-winning engineers who will listen
to your mix and send you detailed feedback
on things that can be improved and how to
do it. You make the changes yourself, but this
is for a fraction of the cost of getting a profes-
sional mix engineer to do the work.
After mixing comes mastering, and it’s
always best to get a fresh set of ears on your
mix at this stage. In an ideal world, we would
fi nd a great mastering engineer to work on
your track. Again, this can be done online for
much less than in person.
Now you could go down the ultra-cheap
route of the automated mastering websites,
but in this exercise, we want to work with
real professional engineers, so what are our
options? Well fortunately, some of the best
mastering houses in the world like Abbey
Road and Metropolis in London now off er
low-cost online options. You don’t get to
specify when your track is mastered and
you don’t get to attend the session, but in
some cases, you can pick the engineer you’d
like to do the job. Often, the cheapest option
doesn’t allow you to choose the engineer,
but from my experience in these facilities,
there isn’t an engineer amongst them who
isn’t excellent at their job.
So, we’ve not left our bedrooms and we have a
professionally-made track. It’s a brave new world
out there, but if you don’t fancy going out in it,
you can still be quite productive.
CANADIAN MUSICIAN 59