Why (and How) You Should Start Your Recordings with the End in Mind

One useful approach to recording is to take a cue from the principles of product design and start asking different questions: What values do you want the final product to embody? How do you want the end user to feel?

Instead of just “seeing where things go”, you can close off some options by reverse engineering your process—by beginning with the end in mind.

Too often, our primary goal in recording (especially if you listen to the gear manufacturers) is sonic “perfection”: Clarity, fidelity, warmth, and low noise. For at least half of my 20 year recording career I took this to heart and would approach recording with something of a “universal template”.

The author at his studio, Church Road Recording Company, in Brighton, UK.

I would track drums and bass, then overdub guitars and other parts, then vocals, then mix, knowing that this template would work time and again and produce usable results.

Breaking that template, however, is liberating. Today, I decide how I want the end result to sound before I hit record, and this informs everything.

Working with the artist, we’ll consider what kind of emotional effect we want to have on the listener, for instance, whether a given song should sound angry, sleepy or creepy. We think about whether the drums for a given song should sound big and crunchy, smooth and punchy, or tight and clean.

You can fit these intentions into to mic selections, positions, instrument choices and so on. Platonic “perfection” is no longer our goal. End results are. And every move we make is skewed toward that sonic goal.

Take an approximate term like ”creepy’’, for instance. This might imply a really creaky, boxy-sounding acoustic guitar. It could come through a mic that is awful in terms of clarity. It could come from a super-dead acoustic guitar in the recording room. It’s all about asking ”how do I feel when I hear this type of sound?”

This kind of thinking can inform not just the way we record and process sounds, but the way the artist performs as well. This means that chasing a “creepy” sound could even lead to recording in a very cold or unusual space that influences how the performer feels and performs.

Similarly, when you want to inject more ”soul” and emotion into a performance, it’s important to pay attention to the key and tempo of the song, and how the instruments and vocalist respond in that key. If you are working in a producers’ capacity, try transposing up and down to see how this impacts the timbre of the vocal parts, and the kind of feeling the performer gets across.

I love it when a chorus’ high note is just on the edge of the vocalist’s range, so that you get that dramatic ”reaching” for the note. It shouldn’t sound too comfortable. Neither do you necessarily want the artist to sound like he or she is struggling through a performance. But just how much is too much in either direction? You can only know this by producing with the end in mind.

Similarly, when deciding the tempo, be sure to experiment up and down in small increments to see if and how the emotional feel changes. A performance is a bit like a conversation in this way. Listening to an overly fast and garbled speaker sounds jolting and incomprehensible to the listener, and anxiety is the net effect, while speech that is too slow can sound wooden and boring.

Where, along these lines, should your track sit? You might try to get the musicians to play right on the edge of comfort, so that their playing starts to slip in and out of the groove. Too much of this can sound bad, while pushing performances just short of the edge can make the performance really snap, and create a compelling degree of tension.

So, where are the limits of comfort for the musicians you are working with? Which edge of this spectrum should you err toward? Once again, you can only know by starting with the end in mind.

If you want a more raucous rock n’ roll vibe, then it’s key to record several of the performances in the same room and at the same time. The natural spill between mics will knit together the tone and the musicians will respond well to eye contact and the close proximity to one another in the live room.

If you want “smooth”, then tightly control the playing, by choosing a key and tempo that are effortlessly easy to play in for the musicians, and by choosing mics that faithfully reproduce the full tone. Each layer of sound should be carefully overdubbed one by one.

If you are looking to depart from the artist’s usual sound, consider encouraging the musician to play an instrument that is not their own. A different type of guitar thrust into a player’s unsuspecting hands can conjure a much more adventurous performance. Allow a vocalist to sing into a hand held mic. When the goal is creating a specific texture or type of performance, concerns over picking the “right” gear disappear.

Recording with the end in mind is about flipping around cause and effect. When we start by thinking about what kind of effect we want to have on the listener, it becomes much more apparent how we can tailor our recordings to cause it.

Julian Tardo is a producer/engineer and music lecturer working at Church Road Studios in Brighton, U.K.

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