HOW TO CAPTURE MAGIC IN THE RECORDING PROCESS …and 3 reasons why it's worth the time
There’s definitely a sequence of steps to creating a great record, and I am excited to peel back those layers in time, but right now, in the space suspended between Christmas 2020 and the start of a hopeful New Year, I want to talk for a moment about where the magic happens.
Like any type of creative, it is easy to get deep in the work, to become bound with intent, and fixated on the macro and micro details of a project. When you have invested everything you have, and more, into getting your material ready for a recording studio, it can be hard to not hold fast to your expectations and how you want things to unfold. This pressure becomes worse when paying an expensive studio day rate while watching the clock run down on your available time. So logically, I am a big advocate of preparation. Maybe it has to do with getting the most out of the experience, or perhaps it is out of respect for the people who are choosing to invest their time in your project, either way, it’s worth having a plan to nail down the fundamentals for what you have prepared first.
What I have found though, over the years, is that it is super important to allocate a large chunk of time to experiment. Really! That undirected space is where the real magic happens, and here are the reasons why:
1) Each person you have trusted to be a collaborator in the process (including your engineer), arrives with a wealth of personality and experience that will broaden the scope of what you do.
You will work with people whose aesthetic taste does not align with yours, or whose abilities are different than what you expected. Regardless, the journey that has brought each contributor to this moment is built from a special series of personal preferences; growing up listening to certain genres of music, comfortability with suspended endings or dissonant chords, or nostalgia for easy listening major endings and a basic four on the floor. It is inevitable that we are each imprinted by sound in unique ways, so we each bring a unique voice to the work at the table.
Do you remember the telephone game, or those little flip drawing books where you just see the end of what the last person has drawn and you use it to create what comes next on the page?
When you hand over an outline to another creative they get to fill in the colours and detail from their unique perspective. Inevitably, it is different than what you would have done, but this process envelops a single person’s idea in more complex and intriguing layers, building an expansive universe that can be whittled down later into a final product.
2) By leaving open time and space for creative play, you move from cerebral planning/executing mode to experimental/listening mode.
It can be a challenge to watch your ideas splattered by sonic imitations of Jackson Pollock, but beyond the initial hump, allowing space for experimentation gives other players the opportunity to process and expand on their contribution. It gives the chance to align a musical idea with a new instrument and its characteristics, to explore tone and melodic variation. A session player can take time to apply their experience to deliver the best iteration of an idea, or create something completely different that you never would have envisioned.
The gift of this process is that you have to listen in a focused way with fresh ears. There is the opportunity for excitement, and to discard the intrinsic assumptions you have developed about your creation, through renewed experimentation . Here, you can evaluate if the interpretation of others aligns with your intended output, and see if what you initially tracked is landing how you hoped.
3) In the long term you give yourself the gift of being continuously surprised, even if you are the creative source for the work.
When you take a step back and give others the space to contribute creatively, there is the opportunity to view and learn about your work through new eyes. This is the space in which you move from “work” to creativity, and I truly believe that that translates into tangible energy that is imprinted in a good track.
Once upon a time this magic was created by a band recording live, breathing together, and the challenge of everyone executing a performance from top to bottom as a team. In a digital age, music can be made where each element is individually tracked until it is perfect, then a computer can further align tempo, pitch, and adjust everything else conceivable. This sterility can be combated when you leave time to tonequest using different gear, by recording ambient sounds from objects on hand, or by making time to improvise new parts on instruments you don't play. What we do have in our digital age is a newfound freedom to re-track, and capture the magic within moments of innovation. Giving creative leeway to session musicians, and engineers who have dedicated their lives to becoming experts in their craft, means each contributor can be excited about their creative imprint on a project. The aliveness of this open, collaborative process captures the almost imperceptible energy of the people in the room, the molecules in high vibration when everything about a take aligns.
When I listen back to the records I have made (well over a decade’s worth), I am nostalgic for the parts I expect and know best, but the real sugar comes in the form of treat surprises, the detail work of the people I shared those experiences with. It’s in the moves I wouldn’t have chosen, the tones that were, at that time, outside of my comfort zone. Many of these musical choices I questioned at the time, but now my collection of albums is laced with magic left by people who I love, by the moments where they speak to me in the quirky language of musical mannerism.
I take the same chance with this writing process. I put my microcosm of ideas out into our shared world in my way, and the excitement lies in knowing those thoughts will be absorbed into different realities by each reader. If I am lucky that bridge will reconnect back, and I will get to hear from you. Drop me a line, I would love to know what your experience has been as a creator. Follow me at @cleaanais on Instagram.
Until next time!
Clea