I’m not one of these people who says it used to be great in the old days. There was crap stuff going on then just as there is crap stuff going on now, but there are various aspects of what used to go on in the music industry that, frankly, we shouldn’t have thrown away in pursuit of progress.

The thing I found utterly frustrating about the way the music industry went is that it was completely brand-led. The way I’ve quite often described it, is that major record companies would conceive a marketing program and then reverse the artist into it, rather than looking at what an artist is doing and devising a marketing program that works around them and enhances what they do.

One of the dilemmas that producers have been facing is that, along with managers and publishers, we have been the only people in the music industry that have been developing artists. What you really need to do with artists is develop them from their small beginnings, into a commercial entity, rather than trying to make their third album, first time around. That development process is a costly one in some respects – certainly in terms of time and it can be costly in terms of money. The record companies have shied away from doing this, and rather, looked for instant success, instant gratification and instant returns on their investment. So it’s fallen to managers, publishers and producers to take up the mantle of artist development.

One of the problems is that during the development process, it’s very unlikely that there is an infrastructure around the artist that enables the process to be monetised in any way. People shout about how wonderful the internet is and how great it is now artists can sell their music directly to the public and so on.

And that’s absolutely true, the distribution has been simplified and, in some respects, the promotion of the artist has been simplified and made very accessible. However, everybody seems to forget that you’ve got to make the music in the first place, which requires a certain amount of investment in order to buy the facilities and the talent necessary to do that.

It isn’t really good enough to be doing this in bedrooms because I believe that the creative quality – and I’m not necessarily talking about audio quality – of the music is enhanced greatly by being in a studio environment or a creatively encouraging environment with other creative people. Music for me is very much a social activity. For a large majority of artists, the interaction with other people in an environment that is conducive to making music, quite often produces much better performances from them.
I remember the first time I recorded in Abbey Road studio two. You can feel something there – ghosts in the walls or whatever. There’s an atmosphere those places soak up that comes out and it inspires people.

When I choose a studio, I don’t always use the same one. I choose a studio that is very specific to each project for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons are to do with the technology, the space, the mics, the type of console, the recoding medium, and some of those decisions are based upon choosing an environment that is good for that artist.
Recently there have been two key Sellaband artists that I have worked with – Daniel Ward-Murphy and a girl named Ellie. Ellie is a singer-songwriter and it was her first time in the studio. I was very keen to make sure that the environment that I chose for her was exactly right, so I decided on a studio called Angelic Union near Aylesbury in the Buckinghamshire countryside, which is owned by Toby Smith, formerly the keyboard player in Jamiroquai. Ellie comes from Plymouth in Devon and I didn’t think that it was going to be a good idea to just throw her straight into the middle of London. So I took her to this studio instead and she said it was one of the most wonderful experiences; it took away all the tension she had about going into the studio for the first time and made her really comfortable. She performed absolutely fantastically because she was relaxed. I think that’s a very good example of how the studio environment really contributes in a big way to creativity if you choose that environment correctly.

We recorded Daniel Ward-Murphy’s album at Westpoint studios in Acton. Daniel’s particular sound is very organic and earthy. He plays the acoustic guitar and I wanted him to be able to play and sing at the same time, while we also recorded the cello and the drums – he doesn’t have a bass player, he has a cellist – so it was a kind of a trio rhythm section. I didn’t really want to effect the sound much, I wanted good microphones, I wanted good mic preamps, and if I had to use eq, I wanted it to be something special. Westpoint has got all this incredible vintage Neve gear that is wonderfully maintained. They’ve got fabulous microphones and a nice acoustic recording space that’s quite intimate.

In technical terms there were one or two things I needed to cover in order to do this recording of an acoustic guitarist who’s singing at the same time and get a reasonable amount of acoustic separation. I got onto Mitch at SE microphones and he sent me down one of the reflection filters and a GU10 microphone, which clamps onto the acoustic guitar. We positioned the reflection filter like a cup under Daniel’s chin, strapped the GU10 to the acoustic and used Neumann M49 on his vocal. The separation between the vocal and the guitar was fantastic and quite frankly I was amazed at the sound from the GU10. It was a remarkable experience that contributed greatly to way the session ran.

The Sellaband model means that I can go to studios and I don’t have to try to get a stupid
deal out of them. I can pay them at least something close to what they are worth; I can earn a little bit of money too, so that I’m not doing it as a charitable institution and I can pay musicians as well. In the circumstances, nobody gets paid full rate, but everybody gets paid a decent amount that is reasonable and they feel like they’re contributing to something worthwhile, which I think is important. If I’ve got a budget that will allow a decent rate, that’s what I’ll pay. I won’t just negotiate the lowest rate for the sake of it. That said, I do think there are some studios out there at the moment that are trying to play a bit of an Asda game. They will undercut everyone else and that can put people out of business. I don’t think that’s a good policy.

It’s very sad for any studio of any size to have to close down, because the more alternatives we have, the better. Some of the studios that have closed down over the last five years didn’t close down because of the economic climate, but because they weren’t particularly well run. My colleague Haydn Bendall and I were waxing lyrical to each other just before Christmas because he’d done a session at Air studios with a full live setup and I’d done the same at Livingston studios. Both of us had been able to go into these facilities, get set up and hit record within about an hour and a half of arriving.

Although that used to be normal, for the last 15 to 20 years, it’s sometimes taken three, four, five hours to get just a simple session set up because microphones haven’t worked, cables couldn’t be found, stands kept falling over, channels didn’t work, patch cords didn’t work, patch bays didn’t work and so on. If a studio has got this kind of thing happening all the time, you’re not going to go back there. There is a responsibility from the studio’s point of  view in terms of their survival as well.

Something that contributed greatly to this was that we went through an entire period during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s where people recorded one instrument at a time with one microphone and one channel. Of course, in this situation, there’s no real reason for a studio to have 64 channels all working at the same time. In fact, you probably wouldn’t know whether the 64 channels worked or not, because you wouldn’t get to use them.
We’re now coming back into an era where people are realising how wonderful it is to put four musicians into a studio and have them all play at the same time. And all of a sudden there’s a different technical requirement there. Now that economic stringencies have come in, virtually no studios employ engineers or assistants – they’re all freelance. There are very few studios that have constant maintenance on hand either. So you’ve got a situation that has started to develop.

I’ve got to say that this tends to be the case more in this country than in America. There’s an underlying passion that the Americans have always had, whereas the British have got this belt and braces approach: “Don’t worry, we’ll lash it together and lash ourselves to the mast and we’ll get through.” The Americans are very much more: “Let’s not actually put the boat out until it’s absolutely pristine.” But it seems to me that, in a time of economic stringency, what you need is for things to work properly the first time as much as possible. So we might be better off coming round into a situation where we get a bit geeky about things and get a little bit more passionate about making sure that things work properly.

SELLABAND

IN MANY respects, Sellaband.com is similar to social networking sites, such as Myspace – users are able to upload music and develop a fanbase. Where the site differs dramatically, however, is in the ability of fans to invest financially in a featured artist. The target investment figure is $50,000USD and to achieve this, the artist must sell 5,000 shares, or ‘parts’ at ten dollars each. The money goes into an ESCROW account until it hits 50K, at which point, around $35,000 of that is handed over for the artist to make a record. The remainder goes toward mechanical copyright, CD manufacturing, artwork and delivery of the CD to investors. Until a budget reaches 50K, any investor in any artist can withdraw their money and invest it in another artist on Sellaband. The company has its own A&R department which guides successful artists through the recording process, such as helping them to find an appropriate producer.
www.sellaband.com