What I Learned From A Week Recording An Album

As you may know, I spent 50 hours in a recording studio this week, working on Permanence, the new Deathmøle album I recently had a successful Kickstarter for. It’s the first time I’ve been in a proper studio in 12 years, and the first time I’ve ever been in a studio working on one of my own projects. I was pretty nervous coming into it, but the entire process was an absolute blast and I’m tremendously pleased with the results. Here are a few things I learned in the meantime:

Abandon your preconceptions. I’ve been working on and living with these songs for a year, and had a pretty strong idea of what I wanted them to sound like. But since the whole purpose of this project was to bring in a skilled professional to improve on my work, I went in with an open mind. If Justin (my recording engineer and an absolutely stellar guy, both personally and professionally) had an idea, we’d talk about it and try it out. And 9 times out of 10 it worked, improved the song, and never would have occurred to me on my own. This leads in to the next lesson:

Trust your engineer. If you’re at a good studio and working with someone who knows what they’re doing (which is ideally the case), you have to be able to take their word for it sometimes. When recording the guitars, they sounded way too midrangey to my ears, but I had faith that Justin knew what he was doing and it would sit well in the mix. Guess what, he was right. If I had spent who knows how long trying to get that starting tone to match what I THOUGHT it should sound like, it wouldn’t have worked at all in the final mix. Knowing when to take your hands off the wheel and let your engineer steer not only saves time and stress, it results in a better final product. That being said, you can’t disengage entirely- these are YOUR songs, after all. And that brings us to the next tip:

Trust your ears. My hearing is actually quite seriously damaged due to a lifetime of loud music, health problems, and congenital hearing loss. So I was concerned that I wouldn’t be qualified to make tough judgement calls about the sound of the record. On the other hand, I’ve been playing guitar for two thirds of my life and have been recording instrumental metal songs for 8 years now. As it turned out, not only was my judgement far more sound than I had expected it to be, it proved to be essential. I caught things Justin didn’t hear, he caught things I didn’t hear, and it balanced perfectly in the end. Because of that, I have a record that I’m happy with and am confident Justin is happy with, and that’s the best possible result.

Anyway yeah, recording was super fun but MAN I am glad it’s done, 50 hours in one week is a pretty brutal schedule. I’m looking forward to mixing, and hope you guys will enjoy this record as much as I do when it’s done.