Canadian Musician - May / June 2020 | Page 59

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