This blog is part 6 in an ongoing series. If you missed it, jump back to part 5.

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The next session date was originally scheduled for July 20th, but as the day approached it had to be moved. The engineer wanted to go out of town, so we moved our session to the 25th instead.

In our e-mail back and fourth trying to re-schedule, I had mentioned that I already felt like we were quite behind the original schedule and had to push to secure the 25th as our new date. In a thread that started with the 3 of us all on it, the engineer failed to CC the producer as we worked through the dates. I wasn’t sure if there was a reason for it, but I had the funny feeling that if the engineer and I settled on a date ourselves, it would come out later that the producer couldn’t make that date and we’d be carrying on for a while, so I made a point to thread him back into the loop and stated I was doing so in case he just forgot to Reply All or something. This seems like an unnecessary aside for me to tell you, but it comes up again later.

On session day, I arrived before the engineer, but the producer seemed to be in a more jovial mood. While we were waiting, he’d mentioned we couldn’t get started because he didn’t have the file from the previous week – the engineer had it. 

Fortunately, I kept the mix file that I’d been sent in a cloud-based drive. This meant we could at least cue up the track in a new session, but we also needed to re-tap out the tempo because it wasn’t noted anywhere but the original session file. Better to do that again quickly than sit and do nothing, so we went ahead.

The producer had previously asked me to think about drum ideas, so I did but I was sort of still waiting to see if this guy was going to try to take the lead at all on this project. 

“What are you thinking for drums?” he asked.

Not wanting to guide it too strictly, I said something like, ‘Well, I don’t think it should be a big drum kit sound. Because of the song, it should be more laid back and more percussive than anything.” 

There is no huge arc in this song that requires a grand sound at any point, it sort of just moved along politely for the duration of the track. 

He started to tap around an idea to the track and I eventually chimed in, ‘Yeah, sort of like that. Like a train chugging along. A light shuffle.” In my head, I heard it with brushes on a snare drum. 

“Okay, yeah, I agree. Let me get this idea down real quick so I don’t lose it.” He cued up the Apollo and those same stereo pair mics and laid out a beat on a hand drum that felt a little too rustic or too acoustic of a sound, but here again based on the conversation we were having and the abruptness of it all, I thought we were just getting an idea down and would re-record something else later.  

It would do for a placeholder, anyway, to help build the rest of the track. 

While the producer was in the booth tracking himself, the engineer arrived again in a bit of a huff. 

This was boggling to me. In my experience, the engineer is never late for a session. Like, never. It might as well be a sin. It looks bad on the studio (not that this was one, but for the sake of the point, assume I mean company here), it looks bad to the client (that’s me today, hi, yes I see that you’re late again), and it sets a bad tone for the session of which you are now intruding upon mid-creative idea and have the session file we need to continue working, and it makes it seem like you don’t care about the project.

Big yikes, engineer man. 

So, I brought the engineer up to speed on what we were doing and he pulled out his laptop. In our short time together, he always seemed to want to have some completely unrelated conversation and I found that a little annoying. Maybe it was a nervous quirk or something, but if you’re going to be late to work, the best approach is usually to keep quiet and just get to your job once you’re there, not waste more time after you’ve arrived. 

The producer emerges from the booth and we take a few minutes to re-settle in with the engineer. The producers mood drops some and the session takes a more serious feel.

The engineer brings up the session on his laptop and we have to do a bit of file-transferring between the two laptops and see that we tapped out the tempo differently than we had on the original session file (a difference of 1 or 2bpm). 

So now we’re re-tapping out the tempo to make sure that’s correct, which is a bit of an odd thing to do at this stage. And then the producer voices his frustration that, well, my guitar is wavering off the click so he couldn’t lock in his hand drum thing. 

No matter, we have an engineer here who can quickly edit the guitar and drum track in time. 

He seems confident he can quantize it into place after grabbing a good loop, but first he needs to verify with me what chords loop and how many times and when there’s a change in the song. 

It’s like he wasn’t even there when he recorded me playing it. 

It’s a pretty simple song. If you didn’t watch the video in the previous blog, there is a 3-chord sequence for the bulk of the track. After a couple iterations, there is a quick pre-chorus that introduces 1 new chord before it falls back into the same original sequence. Then it drops into the chorus, which is the same as the intro and verses. Finally, there’s a bridge where things get real wild; I keep the same rhythm but introduce another new chord and change the sequence slightly for about 2 measures.  

Intro/Verse: G, D, C
Pre-Chorus: Am, C, then G, D, C
Chorus: G, D, C
Bridge: Bm, C, G, D then Am, C, G, C, D

We go back and forth about this for a bit before I say let’s just grab the first three chords first and build it from there. 

What happens next in an excruciatingly painful half hour of me listening to this guy attempting to grab loops of chords and quantize them to the tempo. He makes a change and suddenly everything is very very fast. He makes another change and I’m not sure at all how he managed to turn what I did into THAT rhythm. He goes back and fourth, back and fourth, having quite a hard time and I, honestly, am baffled. 

Admittedly I’m a little annoyed when I finally chime in, “you know, I have an easier time not using any sort of quantizing tool and instead you can just really quickly manually adjust the performance by splicing it and moving them to the grid where it’s off a bit.” I don’t let my frustration show, but I’m a little direct about it. I’m still mostly in a good mood, I just thought it might’ve been helpful to change the approach of the editing because whatever this guy was doing seemed to make things a whole lot worse. 

Both he and the producer seemed to think I was hitting on a weird down beat or something, and I cannot stress enough that I was not. 

This carries on for a while before I’m a bit more obviously annoyed and say, “I would have had this done so fast.” And that’s true. This would’ve been done if I was doing it at this point and we still were working on just a 3 chord loop. My faith in the team was dwindling by the minute. 

“It’s really, really important we get this to the grid,” this producer adds. 

That’s sometimes true, but not a hard rule, to be clear. In any case in this situation it should have been pretty simple. 

And then, as the engineer continues to fumble, the producer asks me, “If I bring someone in who’s a really good guitar player are you okay if they track this?”

I was a little taken aback. I’m like, a pretty good guitar player. This wasn’t even one of my more challenging pieces.  

“I mean yeah, I guess I am…” I started. At this point, anything to move along from whatever the hell I was witnessing. And have we even decided if we’re keeping this rhythm track? Will this song even have acoustic guitar? We’re still demo-ing, right? 

The engineer, suddenly the most awake and excited I’d seen him pipes in, “Oh I can definitely record this!” and he turns to the producer who says, “Yeah, you can?”

And I press my feet into the ground. 

Absolutely not. 

I jump in and continue, speaking to the producer “But if it’s just a question of getting the performance tighter, we only did like two takes of this and I can just re-record it better if you think it’s too far off (it wasn’t, but I’m a team player). Again, this should be a pretty easy edit but sometimes it’s easier to just retrack.”

The engineer became my enemy at this moment. 

You’re going to show up late to my sessions, not even know a lick about my song that you’re recording, do a poor job actually engineering the guitar, rushing the recording of it – your ONLY job as far as I’m concerned – and then try to jump in on playing on it? Absolutely not. 

The producer re-iterated it was really important we get this down to the click, which felt belittling in the moment. At this point, I was sure he had not spent any time listening to the albums I gave him of my work. This also could have all been avoided if he’d been in the room during the tracking session and we focused on just the guitar and not all the vocals and arbitrary shaker, but what do I know about anything.  

“Yeah, I can just take this home and do it there, I record my stuff there all the time,” And I use the same if not better gear than these guys, from my bedroom.

I was disappointed in having to offer this. The one thing I don’t like about recording from my home is I have a really bad in-room sound because obviously, my bedroom is in no way acoustically treated. And out of all the elements of the instruments I record, this is felt strongest on acoustic guitar tracks and vocal tracks which pick up the in-room noise. It’s a major reason I wanted to work with someone else in a different studio space for this song, just to get away from that and ensure a cleaner sound was captured, but at this point having a solid performance was more important than that and I perform most comfortably at home. 

Plus, after having more like 3 seconds to think about it I realized I was in no way okay with bringing in any sort of session musicians for guitar work on this song. Piano/keys, sure, bring someone in, same for drums, I’m still green on those instruments. Bass I could handle. Vocals had to be me, too, obviously. Anything else was kind of up for grabs, but guitars? Not a chance, pal.  

The producer seemed fine with letting me have the opportunity to record myself, all I’d need is the tempo we settled on and for that they had to time the drum part the producer recorded to the grid.  

So I sat for a bit while they finessed that into time. And then the engineer offered that he could send me a loop to perform to as well. 

I thought he meant the drum part, but instead he started climbing through his library of drum loop sounds and playing these very strange and overly involved loops for me to see if those would be good to track to. I was nothing if not confused by this. 

He played through a few of them before I had to cut him off again and say, “Yeah, no, that won’t work. I don’t normally record to anything other than click or at best a simple kick and snare set to click”. 

By that I mean literally a kick and snare. 

Beat 1 – Kick. Beat 2 – Snare. Beat 3 – Kick. Beat 4 – Snare. To desired tempo. 

It just sometimes help cut through the headphones a little better than a standard click and depending on the song, helps you play more naturally to drums than to metronome which can be way too robotic. I don’t know, it’s just something I’ve found works for me as a solo artist when I’m producing myself and building a track. 

He went through his library again and found some kick and snare heavy loops full of rolls and fills and all sorts of weird shit. 

“No, that won’t work. Just send me the loop of what the producer did and I’ll put it in a session. Send me the already recorded acoustic guitar, too.” I wanted to see how far off I’d performed it. Spoiler: not that far. 

This session felt like a huge waste of time and I was super annoyed at this point. 

While they worked on uploading that for me, the engineer also thought this was a good opportunity to show me some other loops of productions in his DAW which was weird. Then he said if I heard anything I liked and wanted to buy something, I could. 

What the fuck?

I can’t stress enough how unprofessional this guy is. To suggest this at this moment was so, so bizarre. Now I just felt like I was in a cheap sales pitch.

“Why would I buy a loop when I can just produce it myself?” I said. The engineer kind of nodded in a way that I felt he didn’t agree with me, but the producer did agree and that conversation sort of abruptly ended.

I understand there are artists out there that do require a service like this. They’re not producers or maybe not even musically inclined enough to know what they want to create, so they need to purchase beats or work with others to do that side of things. There’s nothing wrong with it if you are that person, but I am not that person. More than that, it’s just weird to pitch in the middle of someone elses original music session. As an engineer, you really have to know when the right time to speak up is or you’re bound to piss off a lot of people. That conversation is one that’s better saved for after the project is complete and really only if you had a good rapport with the artist and they’d mentioned that they were looking for something like that.

As he finally sent the files over, the engineer turned to the producer with a little quip: “Do you want me to also CC you on this?”

It wasn’t the first time that day that the two had an exchange that felt like they were being purposefully snide at my expense and I immediately felt like something was off, a feeling that had been slowly building since my audition. These two seemed to be working against me, annoyed with me even – certainly the engineer was, and it was hard to view many of our interactions until this point as genuine.

I was advised to reach out to the producer and send him my files after I re-recorded them and we’d aim to meet again the following week. 

I explained he should expect them early next week since I was heading out of town for the weekend for a gig and then I got out of there as fast as I could.

This experience felt like a bad joke and I had zero faith in the engineer who I appeared to be stuck with. I was still weary of whether or not this producer understood how a normal professional recording session should go. I wondered if this was how all his sessions went when he convinces artists to work on a single with him and hoped for their sake it wasn’t.   

We didn’t make it to the 2 hour mark on this day, finishing just after an hour or so with take-home homework for me. A total wash. It was now the end of July and we were back at square 1. By the original timeline, we should be done this thing by mid/late August and that seemed imposible at this pace.

But I couldn’t dwell too much on all of that right now, I had to pack for my weekend trip to Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie where I was playing on Saturday.   

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Next up, a gridlocked guitar track and more scheduling woes.