I can find the process of recording and interacting with engineers to be peculiar and/or perplexing sometimes when there hasn’t been much dialogue upfront. You want to respect someone’s boundaries, and you want to respect what their capacity is with your work. These are things you can expect of me while working together.

Email Chain and Phone Call - I like to get to know people if the project is going to be longer than one day. We can decipher a lot of what needs to be accomplished, and how, on a quick phone call after some brief email exchanges

Pre-Production - Do you want me to attend a practice? Do you want to send me voice recorder demos made on your phone and have me jot down my thoughts? We can discuss where you feel your songs are succeeding, and where you feel they’re falling short of what you hear in your head.

Audio Recording - Whether at No Fun Club or D.C.Riekman Recording, I’m able to meet the needs of nearly any sized project. You want to record two drum sets at once with total isolation? We can do this at No Fun. You want to record intimate vocals in a comfortable space where you’re not worried about your bandmates listening to your cracking voice takes? We can do that as well. Whatever I can do to facilitate the best recording experience for you, we can ascertain that and make it happen.

Mixing - For me, you should be as close to the finished product you hear when you hit the record button. I’m not someone who “fixes it in the mix” generally, unless we’re trying for something experimental that will require that path that we can’t achieve in the analogue domain. That being said, there are things that need to happen to make the song exactly how you hear it. Mixing can take our recordings from a great arrangement and performance, and introduce cohesion and presentation for a multitude of listening devices. It’s also an opportunity to be creative and push and pull pieces of your song dynamically, harmonically, and through modulation and time based FX. When going back and forth with notes, never be afraid to phrase things in a way that isn’t “technically correct”. We will always figure out what each other means. The amount of malleability is limitless, I’ve known people to be afraid to ask for small changes, but please feel free to ask me to turn down the word “fuck” at the end of verse 3 in the hopes it’s obfuscated from your parents, it’s doable.

Mastering - I do not master, I highly recommend people budget out a chunk for mastering. It’s the phase that can take a B grade recording and make it an A, and take an A recording and make it A+. If mastering is something that feels esoteric to you, let’s chat about it, I know many great mastering engineers who I’d be happy to connect you with.