WIZARD TONE FREQUENTLY UNASKED QUESTIONS

Where do I park and how do I get in?

What does a producer do and why is it important?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of everyone recording together?

Should we record to a click track?

Recording, mixing, mastering, pre-production, editing… what. And what am I getting when I book a session at Wizard Tone?

What's the deal with tea/coffee/snacks/etc?

What are some common mistakes people tend to make in the studio?

There’s ample parking here (the south-east bit of Whitworth Lane) and our entrance is in the corner under the Sunjive sign. Find your way there and give your engineer a call to come and open up for you.

This is probably the most important/most often unconsidered factor in making a record. The role of the producer has changed substantially since music started being recorded and released about 100 years ago, but here we are talking about one person (or a few people) who has an idea of the finished product in mind, making practical and artistic decisions to bring that vision to fruition. The producer can be someone in the band, or even the entire band if everyone is up for it, but it’s important that this role is actively filled. 

It can be difficult to maintain perspective when you’re recording, particularly when you’re putting down multiple takes of parts and getting absorbed in the minute details of your performance, so it’s invaluable having someone listening to what’s being recorded and makings calls such as

• “The vibe on the first take was perfect, let’s move on

• “The snare sound doesn’t fit, let’s swap it out with a more vintage, more open sounding one

• “This note is out of tune on every chorus, let’s isolate it and see if we can get it sounding great

• “This guitar part is clashing with the main hook of the song, let’s simplify it 

• “This section of the song feels empty, let’s look at adding something more from the bass and maybe some percussion 

• “We’re overthinking this section, let’s strip it back to the basic elements and rethink our approach 

• “We need a different vibe for this song, how about we turn off all the lights and record the vocals sitting on the couch with a handheld microphone 

• “We’ve done too many takes and it’s sounding tired, let’s take a break and come back to this later”

Etc etc etc etc

Our engineers can help you with these sorts of decisions as we work with you to capture your music and make it sound as good as it possibly can, especially if we can think of simple adjustments to help you get where you’re going. (Sometimes musicians will engage the studio engineers to act as producer or co-producer on a project, but this is definitely an arrangement to be discussed before your session.)

But ultimately, all these sorts of points listed above are all artistic decisions with no right or wrong answer or approaches. Having a producer with a concept of what we want the finished record to be like who is in charge of calling these shots and making sure everything is pulling in the same direction will make your time in the studio more focussed and efficient, and will leave you with a stronger finished product.

Wizard Tone’s large, acoustically controlled tracking room is uniquely suited for ensembles and bands who want to record together in the same room, not physically or sonically isolated from each other, but with a good amount of separation between the instruments. Sometimes even without headphones! This is a great option for a band where the energy and interaction between members is a crucial part of the music, especially genres which tend to involve some level of group improvisation (jazz, folk, post-rock etc). 

Good things about this approach:

• It generally means a longer setup time, but once you are up and running your workflow can be a lot more flexible and efficient. This is especially good if you’re in the studio for multiple days, recording a whole album.

• You can really capture the sound of your band performing in an organic way.

• The vibe of everyone working in the same room is a great time.

There are some trade-offs however:

• Yes, the longer setup time. Often, micing up an entire band and getting headphone mixes happening for everyone takes longer than setting up a few microphones + one pair of headphones and recording everyone consecutively. This really depends on the type of music being recorded. Music with fairly set parts and not much interaction between players doesn’t benefit much from tracking everyone at once, whereas it’s crucial for most jazz recordings. 

• More people playing at once means less focus on each individual part, which is especially an issue if there’s no non-band member acting as producer behind the glass. A lot of artists will use their time in the studio to experiment with forms/arrangements/sound textures and so on, and committing to recording full-band takes is not always conducive to this.

• Spill. With careful instrument placement, microphone choice and baffling, spill between instruments can be kept fairly low, but there is usually still a bit that remains. It’s not inherently a bad thing - sometimes it can sound really great - but it limits what you can do later when editing. Things like tuning vocals, fixing wrong notes, muting parts and editing the arrangements become a lot more difficult the more spill there is. The less balanced the instruments in the room are, the more problems the spill will cause for you (e.g. a trumpet section tends to play roughly at the same volume and can be miced closely and are very directional and so aren’t a problem, whereas loud drums next to a relatively quiet double bass is generally a bad time, resulting in a room-y, less defined drum sound (or a bass sound compromised by using the pickup)).

You can use the best bits of both approaches if you’re clever about it. For example, you might want to record drums/bass/guitars rhythm tracks together, but you know that it’s likely that the guitarist will want to do a few takes to get the guitar solo right. So to make sure there’s no unwanted remnants of discarded guitar soloing in the drum mics, you might get the guitarist to omit the guitar solo, or make sure that the guitar amp used for the solo is completely isolated from the drums. Or, say you want a string quartet on one of your epic jazz tracks: the spill that having those four extra microphones in the room would introduce isn’t acceptable but you still want the players to get a sense of what the string part is going to add to the track, you might bring in just a section leader to record their part with the rhythm section as a placeholder and then bring in the rest of the quartet in the last couple of hours of the day to fill out their parts.

Maybe! Recording to a metronome has some distinct advantages:

• A consistent tempo is maintained throughout the song (obviously), so if that’s what you want then a click track is the way to go.

• Different takes of the same song will be the same tempo, making edits much simpler (e.g. keeping the intro and verse from take 1 and cutting to the chorus of take 2). This is possible without a click track too, but the results might be jarring if the tempos have shifted too much.

• It will be possible to drop in extra loops which line up with the tempo or use time based effects such as delays or tremolos which lock in with the tempo.

It’s not all good news though. Here are the downsides:

• Your song might sound better pushing and pulling the tempo a bit! If you find that a song feels great live but lacks energy when you try to record it, it might be that the extra energy of the band pushing up the tempo when the chorus hits is part of the song’s appeal.

• At least one person in the band has to have the click track clicking away in their headphones, which is a bit of a drag honestly. 

• If the performers aren’t used to playing with a metronome then performances can be negatively affected. The sound of a band rushing forward and then having to pull way back to let the click ‘catch up’ is generally worse than just having the band rushing together, in this author’s humble opinion.

• Even if the tempo ideally doesn’t change for the whole piece, many musicians prefer to not be restricted by the click track in their ears.

• It also means that anyone recording an acoustic instrument with the click track in their ears won’t be able to use open-back headphones (which are lovely for letting through the sound of your own instrument in front of you, but equally good at leaking the click track bleed into the microphones).

The philosophy on how to make a record is a huge and fascinating topic, worthy of its own FUQ sheet. Here are some hyper-simplified general steps and what you can expect out of a Wizard Tone session:

• Pre-production

This is your preparation for the recording. Some artists will bring a cheap recording setup into the rehearsal room and record all the parts to hear how everything fits together, some people will make backing tracks to use as templates to record over in the studio, some people write out lyrics and song forms on big bits of paper. All this is to help keep things flowing smoothly in the studio and identify any problems before they trip you up on recording day, but it’s important to know that it’s all optional! It’s totally fine to hit the studio with only rough sketches of what you want to achieve and see what happens. You might be inspired by our space and some of the weird instruments around the place to create something you’d never have thought of otherwise.

WT is generally not involved with the pre-production, but we can be on request. In any case, keep us in the loop! Send us your rehearsal demos if you’ve got them, write down what parts you’re planning to record if you know them... If we have a clear picture of the project we can be more helpful and efficient in making it happen.

• Recording

(AKA tracking) This is WT’s main purpose, and it’s pretty self explanatory. Picking microphones and putting them in front of instruments, maybe trying different instruments, putting other mics around the room, shaping the sound with pre-amps… it’s all great fun.

• Editing

Editing involves things like comping takes (e.g. if you have four lead vocal takes, going through and picking the best option for each line to make one excellent vocal track), removing/repairing mistakes, nudging tracks around to be more in time, tuning vocals, refining the arrangement by muting unnecessary parts or adding extra layers... it’s tricky to pin down because some records are designed to be raw and require very little editing while some need weeks of polishing. It’s a good idea to do at least some of this during your sessions at WT. 

For example, say you’re recording with a medieval jazz group and take 3 of Hildegard von Bingen Boogie is regarded by everyone to be the best take but the psaltery player is very unhappy with their psaltery solo and likes the solo from take 2 much better. Also, the sackbut plays some controversial improvised notes right at the end of the piece in every take. Editing the desired psaltery solo into the middle of take 3 is easy and doesn't take long but you need to make sure that it fits together naturally: that the tempos hadn’t shifted too much and the tone/energy matches between the different takes. In this hypothetical, let’s say the takes match pretty well and the edit is seamless. Moving on, the band democratically decides that the song would be better without the noodling sackbut at the end, but when you go to mute it you find that they were loud enough to be heard in other microphones around the room, and so you need to send to players back down to re-record just the last few moments of the song - minus sackbut.

Editing like this should be done on the recording day in the studio before everyone packs up their chaneries and goes home, because it’s not always possible to know what’s going to work and what needs to be recorded again.

Some editing doesn’t need to be done in the studio though. Things like cleaning up vocals and aligning drums to the grid can take a long time and is very boring to watch, and it’s a bit of a waste of money booking out our big tracking space just for this. (We do have smaller studio 2 available for hire if you’d prefer to be there while all this happens.) 

• Mixing

This is where we take all the things we recorded and balance the levels, use eq and compression to make things sound better (sometimes that means more natural, sometimes shaping things to bring out interesting characteristics of an instrument or pulling out parts of the sound to make room for other elements in the mix, sometimes making things really unnatural just because it sounds cool), using panning and reverb to move things around in the stereo image, deploying other effects…

Your WT engineer will try to do a lot of this as we go, so at the end of your session you can take home the rough mixes and have them sound pretty good. And sometimes that’s pretty much enough! If your project doesn’t need much additional editing and mixing then we’re generally happy to do a bit of “in-kind” work to get it finished. But for most records, a lot more mixing is required. The cost tends to vary from project to project depending on the complexity and the time it takes, so please feel free to discuss how you want to approach mixing your project with your chosen engineer prior to the session.

• Mastering

Mastering is the final step before your music gets released to the world, where the tracks on an album are lined up and spaced out nicely, any sneaky mix problems are identified, loudness levels are brought up towards industry standards, broad, subtle compression and eq changes are used to get the music sounding as good as possible across different listening environments and so on. This isn’t part of your WT booking. We do however offer in-house mastering - see our ‘rates’ page for more details.

So we have an assortment of teas, instant coffee and usually some decent ground coffee and a French press, and a little fridge. There’s a takeaway coffee joint about 5 minutes walk away, open during business hours, a bunch of good eats in the neighbourhood and a snack machine down the corridor. There’s a kitchen area down the hall with a microwave and sink, and we ask that you keep all your eating there and clean up after yourselves.

‘Mistakes’ is maybe too strong a word but here are some tripping hazards which tend to come up often:

• Recording everything and deciding what to keep later 

Get off the fence! Trust yourself, make decisions and commit to them. It’s more rewarding, and also quicker.

• Having a plan but keeping it secret

If you have a clear goal for the end product (e.g. to make a full album/demos/promotional material/tracks for a live show/etc.), or if you have a schedule for how the recording sessions are going to run (e.g. we’re tracking a full album in one day/just trying to record good sounding drums + replacing everything else later on/setting up and just jamming for two days before we start recording/etc.), then make sure you communicate them clearly to your engineer prior to the date. Of course plans can change at any time, but it’s important that we’re all on the same page at the beginning. Likewise, if you have a timeline in mind for mixing/mastering or a set release date then it’s important that your engineer knows about this too.

• Recording with a click track without ever rehearsing with one 

If you decide to record to a click track for all the positive reasons listed above, make sure you give it a shot in the rehearsal room beforehand. Knowing the tempos can save a lot of time on recording day too. 

• Making nothing but safe decisions

Be bold! Figure out what is unique about your music and make bold decisions to bring those elements to the front. There is so much music out in the world and you’re not likely to capture people’s attention with safe, middle of the road productions.