Day In The Life: Michael Ross, Producer/Musician
Blog by Michelle Lloyd under Recording & Production
At present I’m currently the guitarist and keyboard player in Frankie & The Heartstrings, Minotaurs, Soundtracks for a B-Movie, and a freelance producer for various bands around the country, notably Ajimal, The Neat, The Lake Poets, Tessera Skies and The Prison Library, amongst some other lovely people.
I also dabble in accounts (that’s right, accounts!) as music doesn’t always cover the bills or my obsession with guitars, outboard and pretty much anything that’s musical and geeky!
For the past 14 years I’ve spent most of my time trying to develop the skills of the above - working with different bands with different qualities, expanding on my knowledge of various production techniques, touring the world (bizarre), coming across such a diversification of people and places…. signed, dropped, hired, signed again, session, engineer, producer etc. It’s a big blur, so we’ll stick with the here and now!
8.30am: On this particular day I find myself waking up in a Premier Inn on the outskirts of Castleford. It usually takes a few minutes to get your bearings, but the Premier Inn purple (as opposed to grey/blue Travelodge) usually means I got lucky with whatever I’m working on that day, and most likely it’s a production job or the tour manager struck gold!
Today is the second of a 2 day session at the Chairworks Studio for The Lake Poets. First things first though…get sorted and breakfast!
After the perilous trip across the barren wastelands of some bizarre industrial/entertainment park to forage for some eggs and the like, we stock up and head to the studio.
10.00am(ish): This is kinda the starting time for everything in the music world. No one really likes to or wants to get started on anything remotely creative too early. I might be wrong but those of you who do, are MAD. We’re starting by listening to the tracking from the previous day and analysing between the 4 of us what’s left to do, aside from the string quartet that’s due in 2 hours, which I’m fairly sure we forgot to do something for!
11.00am: We layer up some backing vocals singing into the piano whilst one of the work experience lads gets stuck with the job of holding the sustain pedal down for half an hour…sorry!
11.30am: We’re getting prepped for the strings, that’s what we’d forgotten… no-one’s written a score for them yet! Barry jumps on the piano whilst I furiously scrawl down a score for the quartet, copying the top line, adding some fifths etc. By the end it looks like 10 spiders have jumped in an ink pot and run across the page as opposed to a legible score but it’ll be fine….maybe!
12.15pm: The strings are slightly late, thankfully! Everyone introduces themselves and we get them all set up and comfortable for a take. We have a laugh at the score but one run through and they’ve nailed it so it must’ve been legible enough!
We spend the next hour tracking the players together and layering up some extra parts and also getting some ad-lib playing over the end section to lift it. Within a couple of hours and the track has completely transformed. Beautiful players. Always a sigh of relief as whenever you’re bringing in hired players it’s a massive gamble as you just don’t know what you’re going to get. There’s always a certain level of musicianship but that’s not everything, these guys were great and it puts everyone in a great mood for the day!
2.00pm: After seeing the string players out and a million thank you’s, we all take half an hour and absorb some nicotine, tea and biscuits; lunch is always a rarity in the world of recording! It’s also a good time for me to go through my emails relating to other commitments, reply to any band/label related stuff, we’re (Frankie & The Heartstrings) halfway through recording our second record so there’s daily emails, discussing songs, touring, recording sessions - a sometimes hourly barrage of information to absorb and respond to. There’s also any other production emails and any accounts queries to deal with. I have 4 email accounts in total…at which point my phone dies anyway and it’s back up to the control room!
2.30pm(ish): We start mixing. I work very well with the in house engineer/producer. I’ve done a few projects with him and he’s a great pair of ears to bounce off.
Thankfully there’s no drums and bass to factor in so mixing 2 tracks today should be relatively achievable. We start on the ‘single’ track as essentially, it’s the most important. It’s also a fairly simple affair, acoustic guitar, piano, lead vox, strings and some BVs.
Mixing is a dark art… either I’m good at it or just very lucky, I’m inclined to blame it on the latter. So rather than bore you with the details, we spend the next 3 hours putting this track together, shaping it with various EQs and compressors, reverb etc. And a few cigarettes, tea breaks and 100 listens later it’s all done. We bounce the stereo mix and some stems of guitars, piano, strings and vox just in case the mix needs a tweak!
5.30pm: PUB! At some point in every studio day, especially when mixing, you need to give the ears a rest. Perfect excuse really to go for a beer, get some food and wind down for half an hour. Well, more than likely an hour. It’s a good time to talk about anything else but music, but for this particular bar they’ve always got the worst music channel in the world on and we always sit in the same place to deconstruct everything that’s wrong with every song and video that appears. Sad, but it breaks the day up
6.30pm: We get back to the studio, check the mix, all agree and move onto the next song, one in the bag!! The next one is a slightly more complicated affair having gone a bit more nuts with the instrumentation the night before; mellotron, Rhodes, electric guitars, lots of acoustic tracks, multi-layering of various backing vocals. A bit more of a puzzle and fun one to work on the mix! But we’re short on time so it’ll have to be fairly intuitive.
Again, I’ll not bore you with the details. The main points were trying out different effects and making sure the track constantly built so we spent a good hour deleting parts so that it’s crescendo was in the right place. I loved working on this one as there were so many great parts and atmospherics….plus it was just a great song!
8.30pm: We’re halfway through the mix. I stay on in the studio with James the engineer, Barry and Martin head back up north and somehow end up on a crazy Hogwarts Express steam train to get back to Sunderland. Some of the photos they were texting were just plain mental! One of the great parts of doing production work is you get to work with so many different people, varying personalities, idiosyncrasies. It just never gets boring, especially when the music’s so great.
10.00pm: The mix is finished and we’re bouncing the stem tracks and alt. mixes. Everyone’s ears are a bit shot by now so for safety we take plenty of options. We reset the desk, get everything tidied up, backup the sessions and clear out of the studio. I’m giving James a lift to Harrogate and make the decision to get a hotel there as a) I have to be in Hull tomorrow and b) I NEED a beer and c) I need some sleep!
11.00pm: We arrive in Harrogate and against the odds it’s an amazing hotel. Somehow a friend has blagged a cheap rate for me through staff discount and I’ll be getting a nice lie in here…but before that I head off into the city centre with James to find somewhere to wind down from the session and the drive. We sit and discuss the mixes and talk about upcoming projects I’m bringing to the studio, which goes on a few hours and a few too many drinks and some awful food. Standard night out I guess!!
2.30am: Stumble back in and get my stuff sorted for a pre-production session the following day in Hull. I’m with a great band called The Neat doing some arrangement work before we head into the studio the following month.
And that’s the thing about this ‘job’ - my week this week will have consisted of 1 day doing accounts in Newcastle, 2 days producing in a studio in Castleford, a day doing pre-production in Hull, then the following day I’m rehearsing and writing with Frankie & The Heartstrings. They’re long days and most of the time, away from home, but there’s so much variation, not just in the music or the math, but the people, the facilities, the challenges and it never gets boring.
Work and social interaction, fun or otherwise just blur into one. A bizarre way to go about a lack of routine! Who knows what’ll be happening next week or next month…. and I have to admit, I love it!
Tags
frankie & the heartstrings, minotaurs, freelance producer, record producer, music producer, recording studio
