Tate came to record with me over a full 3 day period, with the intention of fully recording all instrumentation for a 6 track EP consisting of 3 songs and 3 interludes with recordings from his world travels.
Tracking
We tracked all guitars, vocals, percussion, bass and various other instrumentation in my then makeshift home studio. Tate is a great songwriter but at the time was struggling to play to a click. We thought about (and tried) recording him playing freely, but ultimately decided that as we wanted to add so many extra instrumental elements afterwards that it was better to have recordings with a consistent tempo. Lots of people struggle with clicks as they’re very unmusical, so what I did was having Tate play along to a basic drum loop that was at the desired tempo!
Mixing
All mixing was done ITB in Logic Pro 9. A variety of plugins were used, but what was equally important to both myself & Tate was to record sounds that we were happy with at the source. This meant that all electric guitar parts used a variety of FX pedals to produce a sound that we were happy with in the first instance. This is a great way to approach recording as you achieve some of the prep work in the first instance, and you also save on CPU usage as it means using less effects in the mixing stage.
Mastering
All tracks were mastered ITB, mostly using the Slate FG-X limiter to bring up the volume in the final stage and add a few dB’s of compression. Because Tate wanted all of the tracks to lead into each other, I imported all songs into one project session in order to make sure they lined up and I could select the exact regions I wanted to bounce for the final masters.
All production including tracking, mixing & mastering was handled by me in my home studio.
Artist: Tate Matthews
Format: EP
Date: July 2014
