This blog is part 5 in an ongoing series. If you missed it, jump back to part 4.

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So I waited for the link that didn’t arrive. I had to reach out a couple times before I eventually heard back from the producer about scheduling the session. 

Whereas our first interaction was at the end of March, I didn’t actually receive the information to schedule our appointment until May 10th. By then, the first appointment I was able to book between his schedule and mine was not until June 12th. Which is just to say, we would be getting underway with the project a little later than I thought we might be, but I was still rolling with it, taking the experience for whatever it was. 

June 12th arrives and as I’m collecting my things together for the session, I hear back from the producer only to find something has come up and we’ll have to reschedule. 

What a bummer! But I get it, stuff comes up. 

The session gets pushed out now to the 19th of June. About a week, so not too bad. 

The 19th arrives and I’m a little anxious because I’m worried it’ll get canceled again. Fortunately, it didn’t. 

I arrive at the building, a pretty old and rundown office building somewhere just outside of Toronto. The state of the building didn’t really phase me; It’s generally good practice to not make it terribly obvious that you have a recording studio or to dress it up in such a way that entices people because it makes your unit a bit of a target for theft. 

I’m early as usual and I piddle around outside for a bit before going in. I really try to respect scheduled meetings and understand it from both sides. For myself, I like to be pretty early because early is better than late, especially if it’s a new location I’m getting to and am unsure about things like parking availability. For them, I like to be just on time or only a wee bit early, in case they have previous appointments or other things they’re doing before they expect me. 

I get up to the correct floor and knock on the door. The producer greets me and lets me in after I explain that I know I’m a little early, maybe 10 minutes or so, in case he’d rather me wait outside. I’m let in and he’s finishing some things up, but we can get started soon, we’re just waiting for the engineer. 

Cool, no problem. 

I use the spare time to casually glance around the space we’re in. 

It’s not that it’s not a recording studio per say, but it’s not what I think of when I hear someone say they work out of one.

When I think about professional recording, there is a certain criteria that should come with it. A live room. Acoustically treated walls. Isolation booth(s). A desk of sorts where you’d control your DAW from. Outboard gear. Cables to connect it all together. 

I looked around. Kind of an assortment of personal items in the first half of the room which separated from the second I now sat in by a sliding glass door. I guess you could use that first room as sort of a live room, but it didn’t seem to be one. There was a door to a room beside one whose window was curtained off, which I supposed could be a small isolation room, but I wasn’t sure. The room I was in had a standard office desk in it and beside us, what seemed to be a small vocal isolation booth. Regardless, we were in a building with many shared tenants and I didn’t imagine anything too loud happens in this space.

An Apollo duo like mine sat on the desk. 

So, yeah it’s not exactly what I’d call a pro studio, but you can get away with a lot with this type of set-up, and I wasn’t sure at this point if we’d be doing all the tracking in this space or how we’d approach the song. Hell, we might not even use any acoustic instruments outside of my own voice for all I knew, so I wasn’t too fussed about it although I will admit I was a little bit let down. 

I have not given myself the opportunity to record myself in a true pro studio as of yet and it’s a big goal of mine to do so. I thought this project might be the first of those, but I’ve been wrong before. 

Otherwise there were a bunch of plaques on the wall from successful projects and Billboard chart print outs to acknowledge any big hits. Michael Jackson. Britney Spears. Joe. The Cheetah Girls 2 soundtrack. N’Sync. Photos of Elvis in a professional studio with, I assumed, the producer’s grandfather. 

Despite my confusion about the set-up, I certainly wasn’t about to question someone with these types of accolades. 

We waited for some time with the producer periodically mentioning things like, “He (the engineer) should be here soon.” 

Eventually enough time had been wasted sitting around before he suggested we just get started without the guy. 

Fine by me. The clock was ticking. 

The producer stated again we could start with something fresh or work on something I had started, and again I explained I had some I’d like to show him that I had started but if they didn’t suit him, we could start something new from scratch. 

I mention that again because I was already starting to have my doubts about the project being worthwhile for me, but especially every time that I felt like we were having the same conversation as though it was the first time. I don’t expect people to remember every little detail of our interactions, but at a certain point you start to wonder if they’re even remotely paying attention and that’s where my mind was already headed. If this kept up, it was going be a very trying couple of months.

I pulled out my acoustic and jumped into the first song – the one I was most interested in working on at the time with this particular producer. It’s a very straight forward pop-rock/folk-pop song, has room where you can add measures if you wanted without taking away from the core structure of the song itself. The lyrics were finished, but could be finessed a little for clarity or if a better word choice made more sense within the melody. It could also be altered in a few ways to take it out of that folk-pop sphere if that would make a meaningful difference. Finished in that it felt like a complete song, but I was very open to changing it if it came to that. 

That song is called Something in the Way and I’ve already shown it to you in the state I first wrote it. 

You can hear it here:

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After I played it, the producer said he really liked it. “Great song.”

‘Cool. I’m glad you like it!’ And I was. He genuinely seemed to like it and as I said earlier, that’s important to me when I choose to work with someone. ‘We can work on that one then, but I have a couple others. Maybe we should run through quickly in case you think they’d be better.’ 

“Sure, let’s hear them.”

These are all new songs so, while reading the lyrics and vague chords off my laptop, I fumbled through the next two a little bit, but well enough that you got the idea of them. Those songs were Crisis, which I’ve shown you, and one called Timeshare, which I may have teased already on the Neither Could Dylan Instagram page. 

“Nah, I like that first one a lot. Let’s go back to that one.” 

Cool, no problem. That’s the one I want to do anyway. 

The engineer still wasn’t here. At this point, the producer reaches out to him again and cites traffic as the reason for the delay. 

Toronto traffic is abhorrent, so I get it, but I managed to be on time. It’s okay, it happens, and we haven’t really done anything yet anyway. 

At this point the producer defers to me on how we should get started on the song. We decide the best way to get going is by laying down a quick demo of the acoustic guitar and vocal which is basically exactly how I do things myself to determine tempo before I even think about doing anything else. 

So he gets me set-up in the little vocal isolation booth which is not exactly professionally acoustically treated but definitely has some treatment done to it, some foam patches you’ve probably seen before on different points of the wall to deaden the sound. 

It’s not the most comfortable booth to sit and record acoustic guitar and vocal, but you don’t need anything really special for this part of the recording process, just well enough to hear everything clearly. I tried to shift my body in a way that wasn’t horrible awkward while also being mindful of not hitting the headstock on the little desk wall inside (this would also be a decent little room for some quiet editing work, I thought). 

I placed my laptop on the music stand (which took up more room than it should have in this small space) and my phone as well. Since I wasn’t sure if we’d be changing the chords or anything on this song during this process, I hadn’t fully learned all my changes and would read them off my two screens for this demo take. A little more awkward than I like to do things, but it is what it is. I had asked after performing it if we liked the chords and the producer seemed fine with them, so I was, too. I should have trusted my gut on that one, there is nothing wrong with the chord structure of this song, I just know I fall into similar habits for this type of tune and I kinda went into this thinking they might be more inclined to offer suggestions for ways to change it, but I was wrong about that, too. 

I whip through the song once or twice and then I’m invited to come back out and we determine the tempo of my performance. Still no engineer at this point, but he finally arrives sometime after we’ve established tempo and are kind of twiddling our thumbs about the direction of the song. 

When I wrote this one, it naturally came out as a sort of mid-tempo folk-rock song because of the basic chord rhythm I stuck to it as I figured out the melody of the lyrics. I was fine with going ahead with this direction because I knew the other songs I’d written had also nestled themselves into a folk-rock direction, although this was the one that I felt was the most Pop and the one with the most room for change. 

I really did go into this whole thing thinking that this song might end up sounding a lot different than my first demo, but the producer never pushed back (or pushed forward) any ideas outside of where it sort of naturally sat. That was really a big hope of mine with working with an outside producer so it was a little bit of a letdown, but as we kept on through the process I sort of told myself “if he really felt it could go in another direction, he’d say so.” I put a lot of trust in him right from the get-go, but that might’ve been my biggest mistake. 

When the engineer got in he arrived in a huff and explained there was a lot of traffic. I didn’t ask many questions about it, anyone from the Toronto area knows how rough it can be out there and it doesn’t really matter what time of day you’re trying to get anywhere.

The producer brought him up to speed and played him the rough demo we had just thrown together. We decided the next best thing to tackle was a rhythm guitar track to the tempo we set. 

Cool, easy. This shit is my bread and butter especially because this was such a simple track of my own creation. 

Not for anything, but I’ve been recording myself long enough now to know that I am pretty nose on the click most of the time. There are sometimes areas where I fall ahead or behind the click depending on what I’m doing, but if I just re-track it once or twice I can usually nail it pretty quick and not have to fuss much with editing. 

At this point of the session, the producer took off. Left the room to sit in that other room that I wasn’t sure what it was and left me and this engineer I’d just met to finish the job. 

It’s not necessarily out of pocket to leave your engineer with an artist and periodically leave the room depending on what you’re doing, but generally speaking in all my experiences as an engineer, the producer has almost always stayed in the room and kept half an ear on what was happening. 

This producer, I’d come to learn, doesn’t quite follow that general rule. 

Admittedly I was already a little annoyed that the engineer was so late, but the important thing is he was here now and we could proceed. We didn’t have much time to chat given our tight timeline (remember, we’re working in 2 hour blocks here) and I wanted to make sure I left the session feeling like we’d actually done something or at least laid a foundation. 

He set up his laptop and connected to the Apollo and once he got organized, we were ready to roll. 

I opted to sit to play the rhythm track which meant I’d awkwardly be trying to avoid the little wall table again and would have to keep my guitar as straight as possible based on the way he set up a stereo pair of mics. Not sure what mics they are, usually I’m pretty good at identifying them, but they had big wind screens over them so they were indecipherable. I didn’t ask because I don’t really care as long as they pick up the sound well enough without coloring my acoustic too much. I dig recording gear, but I’m hardly a gear-head.

The engineer popped his head in to adjust them to where I sat, saying things out loud like “I’ll point this to the 12th fret,” which always makes me laugh a little. It’s one of those things that’s often a sign of a newer engineer; I’m not sure if they say it because they think it makes them feel more confident about what they’re doing, but my head sometimes takes it the other way because I used to help audio students with this stuff. Are you going to start talking about polar patterns next?

He went back out to the Apollo desk and finessed some things before we were ready to get going. After some mic level adjustment (I’m pretty picky about how much sound comes through my headphones during tracking, you may have noticed in my videos I often opt for the 1 headphone technique), and then he started to record and the click came in.

Or, rather, the thud came in.  

Boom.

I’m sure there are certain applications where it makes total sense to use a deep heavy kick sound for a click, but recording acoustic guitar for a folk-rock track ain’t it. 

It caught me so off guard and I think I uttered something out like, “Uh, that’s the click?” and he confirmed. 

Hey, there’s a first time for everything. Let’s try it. 

I strummed. 

My God, guys, this was so disorienting to my ears and perhaps all of my senses. I gave it a solid go for a couple bars, but it just wasn’t going to work. 

I stopped. “Do we have another click sound, maybe one that’s not… that’s not that deep bass sound. Like a normal click?”

‘Oh yeah sure,’ he said it unphased as though he was expecting it. It was odd. 

While he shuffled through some sounds I tried to think of any instance I’d want to use this as a click sound and came up dry. 

‘How’s this one?’ he came back and let it play into my headphones. 

Guys, it was another deep bass sound but with a slightly sharper point to it. The other one, for lack of a better way of describing, was very round and almost lingered after each strike, this one was still a weird hip hop bass sound, but tighter. 

“Do you have like a normal click? Like a cowbell? Or like, a click? Like a classic click sound it’s usually referred to? It’s like a metronome?”

I felt like I’d gone insane to be asking such a thing. How many other ways can I ask for what I’m looking for without completely belittling this guy’s… expertise? Skill level? 

He eventually found one but it was still a weirder tone than I was used to, but by now I was already annoyed because what the fuck was that all about? 

I decided to roll with it. It was close enough. 

I ran through the song in full, but realized that both my screen settings on my chromebook and my phone had changed from their normal for some reason and we’re shutting off sooner than they’re supposed to. So I stuttered into the bridge section a little late but caught up the the click quickly. 

Before the next take, I took a second to fix my display settings so that didn’t keep happening and tried at the same time to make some decisions on how I should end the track. It wasn’t a decision I wanted to make with this engineer and the producer was still out of the room. 

It’s important to understand that in this instance, when I signed a contract for a single, I signed it with the expectation of working with the producer and while I was aware there might be other people involved in the production, they aren’t who I put confidence in this project with. 

I ran through the track twice more and thought they might’ve been fine for the purpose. Maybe wavered off and on the click a bit, but pretty easy to correct with some light editing if we deemed it important enough to, given the simplicity of the chord progression. 

I came out of the booth to listen back to the take and make sure it sounded alright as far as timing for vocals was concerned and no obvious errors. That’s important to determine before getting much further.

I thought we might go back in and do another take or two and I would’ve been happy to punch in any sections and suggested so, but the engineer was ready to move on to vocals. 

At this point, I figured we were just getting a slightly-better than the rough-demo I’d done earlier with the producer on tape (so to speak) to tempo so that we could decide where to take the song from there, so I wasn’t fussing about anything. Were we even going to keep acoustic guitar in this? I thought maybe we’d nix it.

Heck, I was still unsure if this was really the space we’d be recording this song in. 

The stage we were at was basically the same stage I’d start new bands with, where I’d bring my little mobile rig (laptop, interface and a mic or two) to their homes and record rough demos to tempo before taking them to a professional studio to really do the project. 

During listen-back, I recognized I had accidentally extended the outro by an extra phrase or two. It was fine if I did, but something about it sat funny to me and I was pretty sure we’d have to remove part of it so that I wasn’t repeating a line too many times that was reasonable. 

I mentioned it, but said I’d try a run through as is to see how I felt about it in context. 

Had the producer been in the room during any of this, I would have flagged it for his feedback. “What do you think about this? It would either be this way *with extra phrase* or this way *without extra phrase*. Does that sound like it drags too long? Is it necessary? Does it add anything? Maybe if we add a second local line like a backing vocal there, it’d work better. I don’t know if it needs it though.” These were all things that were floating through my own mind about it that I was left to determine myself and it was another one of those moments of early realization that perhaps I’d made a mistake hiring this producer to work with me because here I was, being the chief decision maker just as I would have been at home and at this point, taking this song the same direction I would’ve without paying some guy to poorly assist. 

I hopped back in the booth and expected a microphone change from the stereo-whatever pair to a stand-alone single mic and… nope. The engineer arrived and loosed the boom to raise it, maintaining the stereo pairs original configuration and, “Ok, that looks good?”

‘Yeah, I guess it does.’ 

Whatever, this is still a demo take, right?

We finessed levels again for a few moments and I pulled an ear off my headphones. 

Just before this, the engineer had mentioned how he prefers to track vocals, like by line or section by section, and I mentioned I’d prefer to run through the whole thing and if necessary punch areas. 

He agreed to do it that way even though it wasn’t what he liked and so, we were off. 

That interaction rubbed me the wrong way too, but I am a professional, God damnit.

I think I ran through it 4 times in total and somewhere between 2 and 3 I determined the outro wasn’t going to work with the extra bar, so I came out to listen and tell him we’d have to fix that. 

The engineer sort of brushed it off as something we could tackle later and wanted to go through takes to make sure we had a solid performance we were happy with instead. “It’s good to repeat lines anyway,” or something to that effect, he said. ‘Not always,’ I replied. ‘Sometimes it works and sometimes it’s overkill.’

Whatever though, if we end up having to re-track that guitar at the outro for some reason, it’s really better to handle that first, but if you think we can fix it later, I’ll trust you on this one Mr. Engineer.

He started to play through and comp takes, inviting me to sit beside him. “You can sit here and watch,” he said, gesturing to the chair beside him. 

I don’t know why that made me feel uneasy, but it did. And with the conversation that sort of followed as he comped, I sort of felt like he was trying to teach me something or show-off what he was doing, and that felt weird given my own experience. 

He whipped up autotune as he comped and started a conversation about it which I was quick to explain that I don’t use it personally. I wasn’t telling him he couldn’t, but that I didn’t care for it as a tool for myself – I’m more than okay with vocal imperfections is all. 

He back-tracked a little, “I’ll only use it to a point where you can’t really hear I’m using it,”. ‘That’s fine. That’s the best way to use it if you’re going to, I think.’

I really didn’t want to discourage either the engineer or producer not to do things as they’d normally do them. I didn’t want to overtake anything and I was more than willing to learn from their techniques. Where was that producer anyway?

We comped the takes and then he started talking about doing some harmonies, a stage that at this point I was a little surprised to be getting into without any other elements in the track yet, and still without our producer in the room. 

Instead, he ended up suggesting we try to record something else like shaker to see how it’d sound. 

I wasn’t sure where the producer was and I didn’t really want to move much further than we had without him knowing where we were at, but I’m always down for a little shaker, so I hopped in and quickly threw some on. It was the better alternative to jumping into harmonies at that stage, anyway.

Once I finished and he quickly grabbed a loop of the shaker, the producer resurfaced and we were at our 2 hour mark. 

“Okay, how’d it go?”

It was fine I guess, but I wanted to know what he thought about it so we gave it a quick listen. 

All in, he was happy. No notes. The engineer showed him a bit of the shaker and he quickly shut that down before telling me they’d send me todays demo (yes they used that word), along with a new scheduling link to book the next session when we’d start to approach percussion and drums. My homework was to start thinking about drum rhythms. Sure, I can do that. 

I received the link shortly after from the engineer with a positive and affirming “Great work today!” and left the studio feeling a little baffled about the experience, a little worried that I’d made a mistake hiring these two, but ultimately chose to brush those feelings away and look at it as a positive step in the right direction. 

We had laid a foundation.

The song could only get better from here. 

Right?

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Next up in the series, read Part 6: The Second Session.