When you’re starting out in the studio business (and pretty much any business to be honest) you don’t get much say over what you get to work on, and if you’re lucky enough to be employed by a studio, then you will get none at all. Twenty-five years ago this left me - a brand new studio assistant about to begin a long session with a black metal band - a little concerned to say the least. I wasn’t a big fan of metal, and not a fan of black metal at all, so was I going to hate this looming session? Was several weeks of listening to music for twelve hours a day that I couldn’t stand going to be an ordeal, and possibly even put me off this new career I’d finally managed to get a foot-hold in.
Now you could be forgiven for asking me to check my privilege here. I get it – I was lucky enough to have a job in a recording studio and was worried that I might not absolutely love the music? Get a grip. In my defence, I was young and very new to the whole thing, and I have actually seen many people leave in the industry since for exactly that reason. A few years of working on the poppiest of pop music has seen off many an indie kid / rock-fan etc, thinking they’ll never get to work on the music that they actually joined the industry to do.
Fortunately for me, there were a lot of very good people working at this studio and when I mentioned this to one of the regular producers, he gave me some advice that has stuck with me ever since. He said that I should seek out something that I like in the session and then concentrate on that. I guess a popular modern phrase that sums this up is ’Find Your Joy’. In a metal session he suggested that the drummer is likely to be technically amazing, and that would be very cool to experience. The guitarist might be really good too – which would also be great to be in the room with when he’s recording. And then he said that if all else fails, it could well just be a cool bunch of people to hang out with for a few weeks. Well, he was right on all three counts – amazing drummer, killer guitarist and a lovely group of guys.
From then on, this was my approach to all sessions. I was an assistant for a few years after that, and in a couple of different studios, so worked on an enormous variety of music - stylistically and in terms of quality - but I always remembered to focus on what I thought was great about the session. Quite a few times I’ll admit that the element I concentrated on was that the people were lovely!
Just to be clear though, this advice works best for assistant engineers or people in similar positions. Assistants don’t have any creative input during a session, so if you’re assisting a session it doesn’t matter if you’re into the music or not, just that you do your job really well (and ideally learn a bit on the side too!). Once you get into engineering and producing it becomes increasingly important that you work on music you like, as you’ll understand the genre and will be pushing the tracks in the right direction. This is definitely not advice for producers to take on any old work and try to push on through with music that is in a genre that they don’t understand at all!
Fortunately, I’ve been a freelance mixer and producer for more than a decade now, so it’s been a long time since I worked on music that I didn’t really like. But I do think that if I hadn’t followed that advice in those early days then I may not have made it far enough to get to the point where I get to choose my sessions.
More Recording Resources From Dom Morley
Dom is the founder of the Mix Consultancy, a zero risk (money back guarantee) way to get notes on your tracks to help improve the sound. Whether you're an artist who likes to mix all their own work, a composer putting together a pitch on a limited budget, or an engineer who wants a discreet second opinion before sending a mix off to a client - we're here to help.
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In addition to the one-to-one advice Dom has produced some excellent online courses;
Everything You Need To Know About Recording Vocals
Preproduction, DAW set-up, preparing the studio, psychology, equipment. Literally everything you need to know.This is a short, free, mini-course on the four things that you really need to know in order to get great mixes, and the four things that you really don't!