Self-Recording Artists: Who, Why & How

One of the inescapable realities of the music industry in the 21^st century is that more musicians are recording themselves today than ever before.

Some engineers and studio owners lament this trend, citing shrinking budgets, dwindling audio fidelity – even the decimation of genres that rely on the sound of seasoned musicians coming together in real-time.

But for each of these critiques, it’s not hard to find a counter-example – some recordists owe their whole careers to this same trend. Although average budgets may have decreased, the sheer volume of self-recording musicians who seek help with basic tracking, mixing and mastering has doubtlessly contributed to the recent rise in the number of working audio engineers.

This new abundance of self-recording projects doesn’t tell a story of full-scale retreat from the conventional studio world. Instead, many of the self-recorded albums that register on our radars are ones that – just a generation ago – might never have been made at all.

Why Self-Record?

Regardless of how you feel about home recording, the reasons why musicians choose to self-record may be different than you think.

Of everyone I interviewed while selecting bands for this story, none focused on the cost of recording. Although a handful of them did incredible things on rudimentary systems, a number of the musicians I asked spent far more in making their self-recorded albums than they would have for a week or two of tracking time at a mid-level studio. Even the ones for whom money was a limiting factor stressed the personal reasons behind their choices.

Likewise, not one of them told me that self-recording was simpler, easier, or faster. “I’m not sure if it’s actually possible to record quickly when you record at home,” one confided. “The process honestly, was really, really drawn out and very inefficient,” said another with the kind of laugh you make when you’re remembering something that wasn’t quite as funny when it was happening.

But for all their playful commiserating, none of these artists regretted their choice – even if they’d do things differently the next time around. That’s why I wanted to hear the stories in their own words. Too often, we studio people focus on what self-recording musicians lose, rather than on what they gain.

Spanish Prisoners: Gold Fools

This past fall, Spanish Prisoners released Gold Fools, and with it, one of the best recent singles you’ve probably never heard: “Know No Violence.” This is a band that may alternately remind you of Prince, New Order and Sonic Youth, all translated through the swirly, undulating haze of a contemporary dreampop record.

Brooklyn's Spanish Prisoners self-recorded their debut album, Gold Fools

For Leo Maymind, guitarist, keyboardist and primary songwriter, self-recording was a predilection more than a choice. “It’s just what I’ve always done and what I’ve always enjoyed doing,” he says.

“I like the idea of being able to record whenever you want. I get very obsessed with songs, and there would be days where I would literally do nothing else but sit at home and work on these songs, drinking endless cups of coffee.”

In an approach that seems to be a standard for many beginning self-recordists, the finished album grew from the original demos. Maymind says, “There was really no distinction between demos and final tracks.”

“Everything we recorded, we treated as a final track. It was a very long process of adding and subtracting until we thought it was ready. There were even some sessions that dated back two years or so.”

For all that extended effort, and for the countless hours devoted to “carefully layering and sculpting sounds”, Gold Fools doesn’t sound stiff or labored-over. But that doesn’t mean Maymind wants to go through the same process again. Today, he and the band have essentially reversed their approach, and for their next recordings they’re “going to use the demos as demos, and then record everything together as a band.”

“We didn’t learn to play the songs on Gold Fools as a band until we were pretty much done writing and recording them, so in that case, we were chasing a sound that was already there. That worked sometimes, but sometimes it didn’t work at all, and it could be very frustrating.”

“I’m pretty burnt out on that approach now. Now I’m looking forward to just playing and letting someone else handle the engineering…A lot of this album was about finding myself as an engineer and producer, and I feel much more confident about it now that it’s over. I’m still doing a lot of demoing and writing on my own, but now we’re taking those songs into our practice space earlier on in the process to work them out as a band.”

Spanish Prisoners have already begun bringing some of their work into more conventional studios. Gold Fools was mixed by Dan Huron and mastered by Carl Saff, and they also completed a recent session with Jason Finkel at the Converse Rubber Tracks Studio.

But while Maymind says that working with all three of them was a great experience, it’s not always easy letting go: “We still usually engineer most of our own sessions,” he says. “All of us are kind of control freaks.”

Ghost Pal: Extended Family

Oliver Ignatius of Ghost Pal came to self-recording from a different angle. Raised by Americans stationed overseas as foreign correspondents, Ignatius grew up in Hong Kong, Belgium and Russia. When he finally came to live in the United States as a teen, his high school band “Rode a wave of hype in the early days of music blogs,” and even appeared on MTV’s “You Hear it First” and “TRL.”

Ghost Pal

“We weren’t really ready to ride that wave,” he remembers. “We made our record and had a good time, but the band broke up under the weight of all that.”

Ignatius would keep writing and performing in private, but put out nothing for years. He turned to self-recording, in part because he was never able to get comfortable in a studio environment otherwise.

“I always found that atmosphere kind of harsh in a way, and have always been frustrated with my experiences in professional recording studios. I’d never felt I had as good of a time as I wanted to, or was as satisfied with the execution as I could have been. Music is about being connected; finding your own center and getting deep into it. I could never really get relaxed enough in that environment.”

He seems to have gotten past that block through self-recording, and to hear Ghost Pal today is to hear a group of musicians that sound comfortable with being as weird as they want to be. Filled with calliope-like arpeggios and vocals recorded in a reverberant stone hallway, Extended Family is an EP that’s entirely unafraid to be itself. From the audacious Beatles cover that opens it up, through the Syd Barrett-inspired originals, to the meltingly-unusual Supremes cover that closes it down, EF is a record that’s playful, imaginative, and at times, unhinged.

Ignatius recorded the EP in downtime between sessions for an ambitious full-length concept-album that the band has scrapped and rebooted from scratch on two occasions. Compared to this, the process for EF was quick, unpressured, and the band saw it as a good way to decompress. “We overdubbed multiple players at a time, and tried to let them bleed into each other a little bit,” Ignatius says. “We’re very influenced by the Phil Spector/Brian Wilson school of production where you try to meld sounds together to make new ones, using their interactions in the room itself to let them coalesce.”

The major irony is that for all of his talk of how stifling recording studios and engineers can be, Ignatius’ home studio slowly evolved into something bigger. He’s relocated the space with a friend and now works as an engineer-for-hire himself. His place, Mama Coco’s Funky Kitchen, is an unpretentious and casual-looking room across the street from Greenwood Cemetery.

Ignatius doesn’t flinch at this dissonance for a moment. “We really try to get to know the people we work with. Music is so much more interesting when it’s a clear expression of the individual – when you can really sense the person through it. I think that when someone else is mixing your music, it’s really their responsibility to be so on the level with you and so committed and connected to getting inside your brain to understand what you want to hear in it. That’s what we’re trying to do here.”

Soltero: You’re No Dream and 1943

Tim Howard of Soltero writes music that sounds instantly charming and earnestly naïve. Listening to songs like “Wondering” and “Alegria” can conjure up thoughts of Yo La Tengo as reinterpreted by Wes Anderson; a rickety and affable version of Pedro the Lion; or Andrew Green – had he grown into adulthood without straying from the style of The Moldy Peaches.

In person, Howard is as unassuming and disarming as his music, and to hear him tell it, he never thought he would end up recording himself. “It’s really amazing how little I knew when I started.” He pauses for a second and adds, “Actually, it’s amazing how little I know now.” He laughs, and I can hear him shaking his head through the phone.

On his first few albums, Howard relied mostly on the help of friends, some of who took recording fairly seriously. Those early albums earned him slots opening for Calvin Johnson, Fiery Furnaces and Mirah, but after a while he grew tired of “relying on the patience of friends” and decided to strike out on his own. “There’s only so much you can ask of people,” he says. So for his 5^th record, You’re No Dream, Howard borrowed his roommate’s 8-track reel-to-reel and started trying things out for himself.

Click to hear Soltero's 1943

“It was a definitely a difficult way to start because it was such a finicky machine. Of course, I could have also used help when it came to things like ‘how do you mix a bass?’” he laughs. “It may have taken an eternity, but I wasn’t trying to capture the songs as I had written them. I was trying to get them to a place where they each had their own kind of evil, vulnerable little mood.”

“In a sense, it was because I didn’t have any help that I was able to get all these sounds and feels that I had never ever been able to approach on any of the earlier records. There may have been a loss in fidelity, but there was definitely a gain in atmosphere.”

Ultimately, Howard’s reasons for self-recording his fifth album parallel those of Maymind and Ignatius. “When you have a feeling in your head and you can’t even articulate it; when it’s just a feeling or a mood, it’s hard to expect someone to trust you and keep on trusting you.”

“Maybe it’s a fault of my own that I don’t want to burden anyone with my aimless exploration,” Howard says near the end of our talk. “Of course, not every song needs to be this abstract impressionist masterpiece. There are songs that are just so straightforward, that you’ve already figured out, and those are the best times to be in the studio and tell the engineer to set up mics and just move on with it.”

For Soltero’s most recent album, 1943, Howard retired the tape-deck and began seeking out friends with recording spaces once again. He had just come back from an extended trip to Central America, where he says he had enough time “locked up inside his own head,” and on returning home, he relished playing music with friends again.

“Now, I want to start doing recordings quickly enough to keep that energy and spontaneity. I like to realize that there’s a lot of perfection in a lot of the sloppiness and looseness and all the mistakes. That’s the way that Woody Allen and Werner Herzog approach making movies: You get excited about something and just run at it; But you have to have it done by a certain point, and you don’t worry about whether it’s a masterpiece. You kind of just have to banish that word from your vocabulary. You have your successes and your failures and you move on.”

“It also reminds me of the way I always understood that Will Oldham has approached his music: He records a lot. Some of it is good.”

As far as 1943 goes, it may be some of the best Soltero has ever done.

Justin Colletti is a Brooklyn recording engineer and studio journalist. He is a regular contributor to SonicScoop and edits the music blog Trust Me, I’m A Scientist.

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