The making of Robber Bride - Album Production

•

Over December 2013, I recorded, produced and mixed an album, called Robber Bride, for recording artist and performer Julia Gray. We recorded over 3 days in a warehouse studio in North East London. Most of my work as a producer involves a lot of post production, editing and over-dubbing. This project was different in that it was all captured live without editing or correction after the fact.

I wanted to highlight Julia's raw ability as an artist and tap into the most basic essence of recording, a means to capture performance.

The recording space was more like a store room for musical gear, including the piano we used on the album, but for some inexplicable reason it had an incredible sound to it. I often call the space an unnamed artist on the record.

The drum setup included an SPD drum sampler used to trigger electronic sounds. We setup it up so these sounds were played through a guitar amp setup next to the acoustic drum kit. This way, sampled and acoustic drum sounds were recorded at the same time.

Julia created a number of illustrations, documenting the recording process in her unique way.

Robber Bride, the title track from the album

Tuba player Andy gave a haunting performance for the track Long December. I set the mics up in the stairwell at the far end of the recording space to get a distant feel to the sound.

Part of my approach as a producer is to find new ways to merge digital and analogue sounds. I created a synth in Native Instruments' modular synthesis program Reaktor and then played it out into the recording space using an old guitar amp.