Recently I wrote an article about how hard it is when you’re self-producing to know when you’re done with a recording. It’s hard! But despair not; in this week’s article, I’m going to offer some ideas on how to make well-produced recordings.

The easy and obvious way to make good recordings is to find a good producer to work with. Good producers have developed a 6th sense that tells them when a recording is working. It’s pretty impossible to communicate – for me it’s sort of like a sensation of something that was itching having been scratched. I assume it’s different for everyone, and similarly nebulous. But if you have one of us working for you, we will let you know when that’s happening for us. That’s a large part of what we’re there for.

But what if you can’t work with a good producer? Well, first of all, hint hint, you can – email me. But let’s say that you don’t have a budget, or you like doing things yourself, or there is some other circumstance that’s precluding you from engaging a professional. What should you do then?

My single biggest piece of advice would be: focus on the song. I know this probably sounds like “duh” when I write it out all straightforward like that, but it’s amazing how many people get all caught up in the process of making a recording and totally lose sight of why they’re making the recording in the first place. Without a song, you’ve got nothing. So put the song at the center of your vision. What does the song need? What are you trying to communicate with this piece of art you’re making? Refer back to this thought constantly and you’ll be in decent shape.

Idea number two: under-produce. Or, to put it another way: when in doubt, go minimal. The single biggest cause of getting stuck and not finishing records is the “It just needs one more thing” trap. All of a sudden you’ve got 40 tracks of acoustic guitars and keyboards and everything’s muddled and nothing’s making any sense. So: why don’t you try to see how few tracks can you use, and still communicate what the song needs to communicate? Again, it’s all about the song.

Idea number three: place artificial constraints on your means of production. Computer recording is a double-edged sword. Its infinite possibilities can be overwhelming. Something that can work wonders is to pretend that you’re working on tape. Limit yourself to 16 or 24 tracks. This will force you to get honest fast about what’s essential to a recording and what’s not.

Idea number four: place artificial constraints on how much time you have to spend on the record. If you have a fixed amount of time in which to work, you’ll be much more focused. Hiring a producer, by the way, is a great way to limit the amount of time you have, as most likely you don’t have infinite money. Although, if you do, email me.

Idea number five: trust your gut, and work quickly. This is another big one. If you can habituate yourself to working quickly, and if you can be critical and continually edit and refine your work as you go, you’ll make good recordings. Period. And you’ll make a lot of them, improving and refining your skills with each successive one.

Idea number six: be you. I see a phenomenon constantly with bedroom producers, in which they compare their work to records made by world-famous people with essentially unlimited resources, and the recordings they’re making don’t stand up. Well of course they don’t! Because it’s not a fair comparison. And that’s OK.

Just do the best you can. It’s seductive to dream about your painstakingly crafted bedroom recordings competing sonically with million-dollar major-label projects. That whole “If only I keep working on this just a little longer” thing. But, let’s be honest – that’s a long shot. So my advice would be for you to set yourself a more realistic goal of making the best recordings you can with the tools and skills you currently have – without setting up unrealistic points of comparison.

So to sum up: 1) make the best recordings you can, that 2) honor your songs as best you can, and 3) do so as quickly as possible. Then get out there and sell some copies of what you’ve made, so that next time around you can make a better recording with the skills you developed while making the last batch. Onward and upward!

{ originally published at Pyragraph }

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Okay, quick show of hands. Do any of the following describe you?

• You’ve been working on your record for over a year, and you’re feeling stuck.
• You’re creating your masterwork. It’s special, and it needs more time than average records.
• You’re into your 25th round of mixes. They just need a couple more tweaks!
• You keep hearing different ideas for what the left-hand could be doing in the piano part in the verse of this one song.
• You can’t release this album yet. It’s not perfect yet. But it’s really close!
• You keep thinking you need to change little details. Then a week later you’re changing them back.
• You’ve been working on your record so long that you’ve lost all perspective, and you have no idea how anything really sounds any more.

Does any of this sound familiar? If so, take heart: you’re not alone. Knowing when a recording is done is probably the single hardest aspect of producing records.

Now that we all have computers, recording has become to a large degree untethered from constraints of time and budget. We can just keep opening our sessions and tweaking things, in the comfort of our homes, for free and forever. On the (tremendous) up side, this is a truly revolutionary case of putting the means of production squarely in the hands of the proletariat. We all now have access to virtual studios in our laptops that can turn out results that twenty years ago you needed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear to make. Not to mention total recall on session files and mixes. It’s amazing.

On the (also tremendous) down side, if you don’t have well-developed production instincts, then every song has the potential to be a never-ending rabbit hole of infinite choice. And this is bad, for a bunch of reasons:

• On a purely aesthetic level, I have a strong belief that the strongest recordings serve as snapshots of where the people who made it were at in their lives at a specific moment in time. If you work on a record for too long, you can lose that all-important feeling of zeitgeist.
• You can destroy an interesting recording by over-analyzing it. This is a deceptively simple concept that some people fail to grasp over their entire careers. Read this paragraph again.
• Related: if you keep going back and endlessly revising things, you run an ever-increasing risk of polishing out all the quirks that made your recording unique and interesting. You know when you hear some shiny piece of crap on the radio and it’s so perfect that it’s completely soulless and devoid of any human connection? You don’t want to make that record.
• Your best work is always going to be in front of you. You have to believe that; it’s the essential definition of what it means to be an artist. So, given that: the more time you spend endlessly reworking the record you’re currently working on, the more you’re depriving yourself of the chance to move forward and discover what’s in store for you next. And why would you be purposefully depriving yourself of the chance to progress as an artist?

I sense you nodding in agreement; these things are all indeed bad. So, how do you avoid them? That’s next week’s article. See you back here then!

{ originally published at Pyragraph }

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