Recording - November 2013 - 16

Kristian Bush
But what’s cool about it now is that with the quality of my home recording
gear, I’ve had it happen—twice already this month, actually!—where I’ve
gone into the studio with friends to track the song, I play them the demo, and
they say, “We can’t beat that!” And I look around and say, “What do you
mean, ‘we can’t beat it’? Of course we can beat it—look at the players in
this room!” And they say, “Yeah, but why would you? It’s awesome!”
So I’m having this wonderful experience of chasing my demos—if we
spend the time being as creative on tape as we do with our instruments,
sitting in a room writing a song, the recording process becomes just as
valuable as the creative process!
I think it used to be the case that the sound quality was your barrier to
entry, your inability to turn a demo into a master. I don’t think that’s the
case any more! I think we’re in a whole new world now, where you can
sit in your house and finish the song and it could easily go on a record.

And it was a completely different environment, I played the
song completely different. I was more aggressive than I would
be otherwise because I was so close-miked. Ultimately, the
choices he made affected the truth of the song.
One of the things I’ve noticed, from your keynote and
from surfing around on songsofthearchitect.com, is
that you’re really big on community. There’s a real
sense that “the rising tide lifts all boats” as far as
you’re concerned; if you can help the community that
you’re in, everybody benefits.

And the future gets brighter for those new to recording...
Each generation of new songwriters is going to have their own
boundaries that they bump up against and that frustrate them, that also
contain and influence their music... But with programs like
GarageBand, they’re getting an education so quickly!
They can add effects... they don’t have to understand the effect chain,
they can just hit the button, you know? [laughs] But eventually, if they want
to know, they can figure out that if you put the compressor earlier in the
chain, you get a different sound than if you put it at the end. To learn that
at 6 or 7 or 10 years old... that gives me hope that those people, when
they become 25, they’re going to be concerned with brand-new things
that are going to bring innovation to the world around us, musically.

Collaborat And Communit
ion
y

One topic you mentioned in your AES Nashville keynote was having
an engineer available to help you in your creative process. I’d like
to talk a bit more about your relationship with Tom Tapley, and the
fact that he’s someone you have on staff and available not only so
he can bounce creative ideas off of you, but you can leave some of
the left-brain engineering stuff to him...
Tom and I are in our fourth year of working together and being around
each other almost every day, and it’s a real gift. I know that it’s something not everyone gets to do... it’s what I chose to do with my money
rather than buying a rock’n’roll sports car, you know? I invest in people.
Tom is an incredible engineer, and like most people who are extremely talented, if you can just support them, take the pressure off of them
monetarily, and give them the tools to work, they can not only become
people that help support you, but then they also grow in such huge
ways. What I think is great is that our collaboration then puts back into
the conversation chain and the creative chain, not just what I’m playing
and how I’m playing it, but what it sounds like.
Tom’s engineering is very emotional, driven by the room, driven by the
natural sounds of where you place the mics. Yesterday I went in to play
a tenor guitar on a song... I love the feel and the sound of it, because
you get these weird inversions that you can’t really physically play on a
regular guitar because of the way the strings are, and if you’re a guitar
geek it really confuses you... you hear it and you say, “Oh, that’s impossible.” [laughs] No, it’s a tenor guitar!
Tom comes in and puts on headphones in the room where I’m recording, listening to my headphone box... and he moves around the room
with the microphone until he gets it where he likes it. He puts a microphone as you would on such an instrument, on the 12th fret, facing the
right direction. But then, he takes off his headphones and walks around
the room to see what it sounds like to be me, because I’m not wearing
headphones... and he puts up another mic, almost over my shoulder.
And then, all of a sudden, we have not just the sound you’d expect from
the proper technique of the capture of the guitar, of the fret noise, of the
best resonance of the wood, but then we also have the straight-up “what
it sounds like if you’re a human being”, standing next to it.
16

RECORDING November 2013

I think that the recording arts are fostered by the community within each building, and also by the way the buildings
work with each other. Creating music is a culture, creating a
band is a culture, creating a music team or a recording studio is a culture, and it comes from attitude. Look, you can create a recording studio and be a jerk, and you can certainly
be just as rich as the other guy, just as successful, just as whatever. But there’s something that happens for me when a
bunch of people realize that they individually are not as
important as the thing that they’re making. The song that
we’re making is cool! It’s not necessarily about me or you...
it might have pieces of us because we’re putting our blood,
sweat, and tears into it. But it doesn’t belong to me.
If you take that attitude and you keep going out with it,
you achieve exactly what I am trying to do. I have an
intern, he’s here right now, and he’s not getting paid anything... but you know what? He’s engineering my tracks
today, right after this interview, because Tom needed a day
off to be with his family. He’s in there right now, patching
things, putting things together, thinking to himself, “What

http://www.songsofthearchitect.com

Recording - November 2013

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