I’ve recently been following with interest the efforts of friend and musical compatriot Nick Gill’s attempts to produce a new Fireworks Night album. Nick describes himself as an enthusiastic amateur, but he’s probably being a little bit modest; he’s produced a number of EPs by his imprint Lights and has a pretty active say in the production of The Monroe Transfer, as well as other of his projects. Since I get a few questions about production here, I thought you’d be interested in how someone deals with a larger, although still essentially a home grown, project.

But there were a few that I think apply to pretty much any music project you’re doing.

“There’s no such thing as a magic bullet The more I do…well, pretty much anything- printing, playing an instrument, engineering, mixing, the list goes on…the more I realise that there is never any one factor that determines whether something is ‘good’ or not.  It’s all the hundreds of tiny, tiny things that add up to give you a great result.  In the case of engineering, for example, having a great mic is no use at all if you’re not putting it in the right place.  Having a great mic in the right position is no use if your guitar is rattling and out of tune.  Having a great instrument is no use if your player doesn’t know the part.  A player who knows the part, but is just playing it mechanically, is going to make a mechanical record.  And so on.  Your recording chain is only going to be as strong as its weakest link.”

What this emphasizes is the dichotomy of modern recording; anyone can make a half-decent recording with the access to the hardware and software that is, by now, pretty cheap – but most people won’t make a really good one. I’m not sure Nick would share my attitude, but my feeling is that this comes down to sensible decision-making and hard work rather than to dumb talent.

Another facet of production is things you leave out, or rather, don’t bother to do. I rarely use EQ, for example – I don’t think that my recordings suffer because I generally use fairly sparse arrangements in which an instrument can cover a fairly big frequency range without stepping on the toes of everything else. I don’t think production decisions need to be taken in isolation -  sometimes the sonic space sounds cluttered not because of the mix but because of the arrangement (in my mind that means “what instrument plays what when”).

But this is far from a hard and fast rule -  I can certainly imagine wanting be more creative about sonic engineering is I absolutely have to have that stylophone AND that guitar feedback on the same track. However, people get hung up these sorts of things, I think mainly in an attempt to create commercial-sounding recordings. Well, I could write a whole blog post on how overproduction gives the listener none of the essential cracks with which to work their way into the music -  but I won’t. Not today.

“The goal is to make a great record… One of our goals at the beginning was to have an ‘authentic’ recording process, playing live as much as we could, and we stuck to that pretty well.  There’s no way that I’d let the goal of a great sounding record be compromised by ideals that we occasionally couldn’t live up to.”

When I first started recording myself, the process was among the most painful and disappointing I’d undergone. A few years on and it’s got easier and easier, but still getting what I want is very hard. When I started recording, I realised there is a fundamental paradigm shift between life performance and the recording. Live, it’s about you and about your performance. On the recording, the song is king. There are lots of things wrong with my first EP, Tissue of Lies -  but the things that are good about it stem from that attitude. It doesn’t matter if you can’t do the song through in one take, all the way through,  as good as it can be. All that matters is that the final product sounds good. You can sing a word at a time and sample it together if you like (that’ll sound nothing like the live performance, that’s for sure), as long as what you end up with sounds great. It’s not about ego – if you can’t nail that guitar part, cheat. Do 50 takes and choose the best. Drop-in for that tricky solo. Then figure out later how you’ll play it live.

I’m not detracting from musicians who can do it one take, and are as reliable in the studio as on stage. Gavin Osborn is someone I’ve recorded a few times, and to watch him work is just great – he really can do this stuff in one take. I’m just saying, you don’t need to wait to become a supercompetent/accomplished/flawless musician before you become a recording artist. People have no idea of the process, they just hear the finished product – in a way, the opposite of live performance. There, it does matter if you don’t have the energy all through the song, if you sing horribly flat you can’t retake, and if you forget the lyrics you’ll look like an idiot -  but the audience doesn’t judge you on whether you have a perfect take at the end!

Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that – and I would always encourage people to be as good as they can be. But for me, and I think for a lot of other people, the idea of perfection holds them back from making a flawed – but good -  recording.