Thanks To Coronavirus, We’re All Bedroom Producers Now
Brian Donohoe
January and February are usually slow for working musicians, but this year they seemed unusually busy. March was already booked well in advance, and my band, Progger, was slated for an exciting two-week tour in April, with guarantees at some of the best jazz clubs in the country. The year was off to a very promising start.
And then, for the first time in its history, South By Southwest was canceled.
Then the gigs in late March were canceled. Then the April tour was canceled. Then all of our local Austin venues were suddenly shuttered under shelter-in-place orders, preventing us from live-streaming concerts from the same stage.
It was clear that I’d have to rethink my approach to being a full-time musician. If I wanted to participate in any kind of collaborative music-making at all, I’d need to tap all of my skills, with music and with communication technology. I’d have to address any deficiencies in either department right away, and the same would be true for my entire community. So we started coming together in the only way we could: we all became bedroom producers.
My own fascination with digital audio workstations (DAW) started relatively late. In high school and college I was obsessed with becoming the best performing, composing, and improvising musician I could be. I went to a competitive music school and worked hard to keep my head up among bafflingly gifted peers. Somewhere along the way, I heard a copy of Give Up by The Postal Service, fell in love with the record and the story behind it, and became determined to learn how to produce one-stop-shop tracks of my own. In 2008, I sold some stuff to buy a MacBook and a second-hand copy of Logic Pro 7 from a friend.
I had always wanted to be a busy session musician like so many of my heroes, but by the time I left graduate school the record industry had been decimated by file sharing, and studio work was a fraction of what it had been. “Remote sessions” were only just starting to be a thing, but since I had taught myself how to write and record tracks at home, I was able to pick up some work as new remote possibilities expanded. Learning the fundamentals of producing with a solid musical foundation already in place worked in my favor. With time, I was able to produce entire tracks on my own, earning some placements on TV networks while recording and digitally transferring saxophone or keyboard parts to other engineers for their productions. In the years that followed, most of my peers began learning these skills, too.
Music software has become ubiquitous now, but nobody in my community expected it to be our only means of making music together. The tech skills we taught ourselves in order to survive in the wake of the recording industry collapse have become central to our lives as we navigate social distancing and stay-at-home orders during this worldwide coronavirus pandemic.
Some of my favorite performers are now taking the initiative to organize and produce ambitious multi-city recording sessions. Adam Ahuja, a New York City keyboardist, has organized a group called “The People Of 2020” to collectively write and record jazz-funk tracks with musicians all over the country. Isamu McGregor — a frequent collaborator with my band and a busy Los Angeles pianist — went even further, organizing over forty musicians around the world into groups of four to create a new track every week under the umbrella “Stuck At Home Records.” The tag #stuckathomerecords now has well over a hundred tracks associated with it on Instagram. Countless musicians outside of my scene are doing similar things to stay creative in quarantine.
The entire music world has no choice but to become bedroom producers for the time being, but the expectations for digital production have been rising steadily in this direction for years now. This year’s Grammy-sweep by Billie Eilish and her brother, the young producer Finneas O’Connell, demonstrated that small production teams can dominate mainstream success. The coronavirus has made being tech-savvy and DAW-fluent that much more important in the wider modern music world, too: jazz, rock, and funk musicians are depending on these skills just as much as pop and EDM producers are, at least for the moment.
Teaching in the music production department at Austin Community College has also opened my eyes to how a new generation of digital natives learn music. Gen-Z musicians are often learning digital recording and production concurrently with the fundamentals of music itself. Some of my students who struggle with performing, note-reading, and ear training are fantastic at sequencing beats, splicing samples together, and using side-chain compression. My generation, a group comedian Iliza Shlesinger calls “Elder Millennials,” tended to learn the fundamentals of music first. We focused on playing our instruments with facility, improvising, composing, and ensemble performance. Many of my students, by contrast, learned sophisticated recording and mixing techniques before they understood what rhythm and harmony really are. The DAW was their first instrument, and their digital fluency has already made it relatively easy for them to navigate the social restrictions caused by the pandemic. Our lessons have moved from the campus to Skype, but they’ve adjusted quickly and seamlessly. Our bedroom producer skills have enabled us to continue being students and professors.
The musicians creating the most satisfying work, to my ear, are still the ones with the strongest fundamentals in music itself, and there will never be an actual substitute for understanding melody, harmony, and rhythm. But this pandemic has also inspired old-school musicians to harness software for music creation and communication like never before, and to fill in any gaps in digital skill sets that younger musicians often had to learn first.
This is a very difficult time for our whole world, but I have no doubt that when it’s all over we’ll have a stronger scene of independently powerful, creative, tech-savvy, and cooperative music makers.
If you’re a performing musician interested in recording and producing from home, but you’re not sure how to start, here are some tips.
Focus On Musicianship First
Software has come a long way in the last couple decades, but the musician is still the most important element. Make sure to maintain your proficiency on your instrument or voice and keep developing your ears by listening to your favorite recordings and trying to make sense of everything that’s happening. There’s no substitute for good writing, good arranging, and good playing.
Understand And Articulate Your Goals As Specifically as Possible
A composer who wants to learn to produce her own fully-fleshed-out arrangement with virtual instruments will have different goals from a trumpet player who just wants to contribute single-tracked parts to a friend’s project. Knowing your goal will affect what gear you need and which skills need the most attention. The trumpet player will need to know microphone placement technique, gain-staging with his audio interface, and subtle use of equalization, saturation, and compression. The composer will need to understand elements of mixing and mastering. She’ll benefit from spending time experimenting with reverb, EQ, compression, and making sure her levels leave enough headroom that she isn’t clipping the stereo output. The trumpet player might need to research some good affordable options for dynamic or condenser microphones while the composer might focus instead on better-quality virtual instrument and effects plugins.
Research The Gear You Need
We live in a golden age of affordable music gear, but musicians often need to make the most of limited resources. Start with a computer, an audio interface, and a digital audio workstation. If you already own a Mac, Logic Pro is reasonably priced, very powerful, and comes with a huge bundle of high quality virtual instruments, so many composers use it.. There are plenty of good Windows-compatible alternatives too, including Ableton, Studio One, Reaper, and the industry standard, Pro Tools. Any of these will let you record and mix music on your computer.
If you play guitar or bass, you can usually run your instrument cable directly from your instrument or your pedal board into the TRS input on your audio interface. If you record an acoustic instrument or voice, you’ll need a decent microphone that you’ll plug into one of the preamps on your interface. Even if you plan to just run a MIDI keyboard directly to your computer via USB, an audio interface will almost always help to streamline the audio input and output for use with headphones, speakers, or professional studio monitors.
Know How To Control Your Audio Signals So They Don’t Blow Things Up
It’s tempting to want to hear and feel everything big and loud when you’re starting to produce and mix your music in a DAW, especially in the low-end. Too much low-end energy will ruin a mix or a track, though, and even the single-tracking trumpet player will benefit from some mixing fundamentals to understand how hot his signal should be when recording. Whether you’re running a microphone into your interface’s preamp or an instrument cable to a direct input, you’ll need to experiment with your entire signal path — instrument, pedals, interface, DAW — to make sure you aren’t coming in too hot. Keep your peaks between -5 decibels and -10 decibels per channel to make sure there’s plenty of headroom later down the line. For full productions, your final mix should peak somewhere between -3dB and -8dB, depending on who you ask, so the ultimate level can be brought up during mastering. It’s easy to make things louder later, especially with today’s technology!
Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment
Digital technology is much more forgiving than tape. You can record and re-record yourself over and over again as you experiment to find your sounds without fear of physical media degrading. There are also numerous educational resources online for recording and mixing — I’m a fan of “Music Tech Help Guy” on YouTube — and explanatory videos or articles by experienced producers tend to inspire productive experimentation. In the end, the only way to really learn how to produce music is to do it over and over again. If you develop an intuitive relationship with the process through trial and error, you’ll be able to make the most of the abundant resources out there to help you along the way.
Brian Donohoe is a composer, producer, saxophonist, and keyboardist based in Austin. He writes, arranges, and records music for Grammy-winning artists, television, podcasts, and his own critically-acclaimed jazz-funk group, Progger. Normally a busy performing and touring musician, Brian is currently collaborating on remote recording sessions and teaching lessons via Skype or Zoom until the COVID crisis calms down a bit.
