I touched on some of it in my How It Started post, but I wanted to take a slightly deeper dive into the process of how I recorded the EP and some of the more philosophical thoughts I have around recording.

I’ve only ever had a digital recording setup. As much as I’d love to have an analog signal chain going to tape, it just doesn’t seem all that practical for a home project studio. I do plan to eventually have some analog outboard gear, but I’m not really sure when that will happen. Without going through the details of the various digital recording interfaces I’ve had over the years, I’m just going to talk about what I used to record the songs that are on the EP.

The foundation of my setup is a Universal Audio Apollo 8p connected to an iMac running Logic X. I also have an Apollo x4 that gives me 4 extra channels for random mics I might want to setup. It also gives me remote control over the monitoring on the 8p.

I always try to leave room for experimenting (e.g. re-amping while mixing the song The Approach to get the ambient, delayed guitar in the background), but my overarching theme for my studio and music is that what you’ll hear at playback is exactly what was played during tracking. For the EP I played everything myself, which makes it impossible to get a “live band” feel or sound. That said, I kept that in mind as I recorded everything. I would typically record drums to a click track and then record everything else without a click. Having the drums become the backbone for the song’s timing, I feel like, kept me from ending up with tracks that ended up feeling too sterile. If the drums moved off the beat slightly at some point, it would be fine because I’d more-or-less follow that when doing the guitar(s) and bass. There are numerous “mistakes” on the EP recordings and ultimately it all turned out fine (in my opinion).

Trying to keep the tracks as “pure” as possible meant not deferring decisions on whether or not a take was good. If a take wasn’t good, I recorded it again until it was right instead of waiting to fix it at mix time. The only place I gave myself some room for “fixing” things during mix down were for very minor drum imperfections. I’m not the best drummer and if I were waiting for myself to become “good enough,” the EP would still not be done. Even then it wasn’t for fixing things like timing as it much as it was doing things like riding the bass drum fader slightly to account for my lack of skill in hitting the bass drum with the same intensity every time. If you listen closely to Prey, even with my minor corrections, you can hear in the chorus that some of the bass drum hits aren’t quite as present as others.

I’ll get into more details another post, but for the most part I did a bare minimum of processing to the tracks on the way in and I treated plugins like they were hardware units. Meaning, since I started early on using a UA 1176LN Legacy because it was the compressor plugin I had available, I kept using it without looking for alternatives - even if it wasn’t always the “right choice.” I carried that mindset to most everything else plugin related as well. It helped fend off decision fatigue. I did have to backtrack on that for vocals, though. I had a very hard time mixing vocals and using the 1176 plugin wasn’t helping me. I just couldn’t dial it in. It wasn’t until I got some advice from Matthew Barnhart, who mastered the EP, that I was able to sort things out. The advice was to start from scratch with mixing the vocals. Take out any processing I had on them, go with Logic’s stock compressor and use the mode with only three knobs. It seemed like such an obvious thing to do after it was said, but I had gone down the YouTube rabbit hole and got in way over my head with ways to process vocals to the point that I wasn’t thinking clearly about it all.

I know these thoughts around recording are not unique to me or unheard of. This is just the approach I took to recording my songs and the approach I plan to continue using. A lot of the “keep it simple” attitude is a result of me doing this as a hobby. I don’t have the time to dive into a dozen different plugins in order to find the “right” one for whatever I’m recording. It’s easier to just pretend like all I have is a couple of pieces of rack gear and use it for almost everything.

In my next post I’ll dive into some of the specifics of how I recorded guitars, drums, bass, etc. What mics I used. What processing I did on the way in and during mixing.

Cheers ✌️