It’s a flattering thing when a fellow artist comes to me and asks me to produce something for them. Usually it’s because they’ve heard something I’ve done and they say – I really dig that sound you got on that, can we do that? My answer is: you bet.
Do I claim to be a be all end all of getting great sounds? Nah. But I do like to spend my time getting the right sound for a situation. One thing I find interesting is that I went to hear a retrospective on an engineer’s life a few months back. There were a bunch of famous artists there all talking about how they hired this guy to come to their personal studios to learn his tricks to getting a great sound. Each time the answer wasn’t in an EQ setting or a compression setting but rather it was how he set up the mic to capture the performance.
That type of thing requires very careful consideration and preparation. Pure and simple. You have to have patience to setup mics, listen and then make adjustments until the sound is doing what you want without any additional need for things. That’s the technical side. The musician’s also play a big part of it. How a person plays will very much effect the way a sound gets captured.
It’s said you’re cutting corners to achieve a goal, you’re goal probably isn’t worth the effort.
Such is the case for today’s choice. It’s a song where when I hear it, I feel the effort dripping from the recording. It says, look at me, love me. Why? Because there is a vibe that was captured and it works for what the song is presenting as an emotion and effect. Did they do tons of compression and EQ on the mix? I wouldn’t really know as I wasn’t there for the recording. I want to believe it was a matter of correctly setting up the mics and hitting record on the DAW.
Either way, it doesn’t sound like State and Madison cut corners in creating this tune.
Why wouldn’t you want to buy that? Love it? Go buy it now!
That really sounds like you…are you sure you weren’t there?
No, it’s not me. Great song though.