Word: matthew
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...Okay...well. Everyone should relax. It's sounding tense. Not very good a-tall," our producer and engineer Matthew Ellard informed us in his British accent. This was an understatement. He pointed to the Christmas lights that hung up on the wall. Some had been wound into the shape of a heart and blinked rhythmically on and off, much like my motor-skill coordination seemed to. We dimmed the lights some. Okay, relax...
...started the ditty again, and Matthew, waiting for us to warm up, went back to reading Rolling Stone. A Morphine album he had engineered was resting at the top of the college charts, and it brought about a quick smile. For our band the Humming, Matthew was both engineering and producing: simply put, an engineer captures sounds onto a recorded medium, whereas a producer is responsible for getting the best performance out of the band. The latter job includes instrument choice, style and tempo suggestion, specific note review, song selection and an overarching vision for the project. This relinquishing...
Unlike a proven act, however, we had no recorded "sound" to live up to or break away from. We were in the process of inventing that sound, and we had handed that job, in part, over to Matthew. However, if giving up some creative control meant adding experience to our debut, it was a trade I was eager to make. And at the risk of sounding unpatriotic, I'll add that I was more willing to trust to a man of British roots. Think George Martin with the Beatles. (Well, okay, the Beatles themselves were British.) Think London, underground...
...recorded bass, drums and guitar all at once to capture the proper vibe, but focused on the drums, the idea being to build the song up from the bottom. The 16 microphones and stands placed around the drum kit looked like something out of Star Wars. In the console Matthew flipped from mike to mike, listening to the sound each captured. They were all remarkably different. My favorite was the "crotch mike." Named after its unusual placement near the drummer, it picks up a dark, distorted sound appropriate for the slower grooves...
...Matthew Cooper...