Gone are the days of the inferior bedroom producer. As production gear and software becomes ever-more affordable, spare rooms become more viable alternatives to Abbey Road. Whether your homemade productions are for sharing with bandmates, seducing industry professionals or official releases, the tech is more accessible than ever – but making your music stand out in a saturated market isn’t.
With so many variables to self-recording and mixing guitars, as well as a raft of conflicting information online, sat down with esteemed producers George Lever (Sleep Token, Loathe, Monuments) and Forrester Savell (Karnivool, Tesseract, Caligula’s Horse) to learn about what to do, and what not do, to make your productions pop. Like everything, preparation is key. Savell stresses the importance of players learning their parts before entering a recording environment; but Lever goes one step further by emphasizing the value of players “understanding their instrument to the best of the ability”.
He says: “There’s an assumption that recorded guitar should sound like MIDI, but that ignores the builds of different guitars – the way it's set up, the string tension relationship with the tuning that you’re playing in, and how the left-hand influences microtonal changes to the tuning. “Or whether the pickups can perform in the way you want them to. The best thing someone can do before hitting record is become the most intuitive musician that they can, based on what they want to ac.
