Other artists might need time to bed in and find what works. You might all want to play in the same room, together, looking each other in the eye; you might rather do it all separately in booths. Either is fine. You want the band to be comfortable, Tim says, because that’s when the best music starts to happen. “They’re just coming here to do what they do, and all we’re doing is helping them get it down,” he adds.
Most of the work is done before the ‘Record’ button is even looked at. The guitarist, bassist and vocalist get acquainted with where they are and what they’re doing. They’re able to hear themselves comfortably, they can hear everything else going on around them comfortably, and they’re confident.
Spinal Tap-style shouting-matches aside, that means they might use their own personal vocal microphones, their own cables, insist on setting up the vocal booths a certain way, have no brown M&Ms in the chill-out area… For example, one regular – and stratospherically famous – artist likes Studio 2. “He likes his own Audio-Technica AT194 and M150X microphones. As long as he’s in that room, and he’s got his engineer in the room with him, he’s happy.”
It all has to work. The last thing you want to worry about as an artist is for you, your producer and your engineer to be worrying about what’s happening in the signal chain – you need to know that exactly what you hear is exactly what’s being recorded.
“You’ve got two specific workspaces,” says Tim. “Recording and mixing; they’re different environments. Recording is about hearing what’s going on on the floor with your artist – whether it’s an orchestra, a band or a soloist. You need to hear what they’re doing, and you’re optimising your recording for that.
“Then you get mixing. What you’re doing there is listening to each strand, each track, each thread. You’re bringing things together… and not necessarily the way the artist wants.”