Recording - November 2013 - 18

Kristian Bush
did Tom do when he was last in here?” I’m watching him experience
the anxiety and the joy of doing it.
But before him, I had graduated one of my interns, sent him out into the
world, and said, “Go forth and write songs, and we’ll support you—if you
ever need the studio, call us.” And yesterday I had a meeting, and I was
sitting next to a lady who was a super-heavy-duty innovator in Logic Audio,
and she turned to me and said, “Hey, your old intern just came through and
worked on something for me last week, and boy, he was the nicest guy.”
And I was like, “Yes!” I’ve had a guy out in the community spreading the
goodwill of what he’d learned. And I think that’s how you build it.
I would imagine that some of our readers might be saying, “Well, that’s
all well and good for him, he has lots of disposable income to hire people!” But I get the impression that a community could pool resources
and make this work even without a lot of money to draw from?
I’m sure you and your readers may be familiar with what I’m about
to say, but: While we may not all have the ability to put a person on
salary in our life, we certainly have overspent on gear, and we can
use that flaw to our advantage! [laughs] It is very common that artists
park their instruments and gear in my studio in exchange for free time.
I could imagine very quickly that if I was to try and set this sort of thing
up and didn’t have the sort of resources that I have, I would go and
find somebody to pool my gear with. Of course it gets complicated
because you have to figure out what you do if it goes sideways... but
you’ve got to trust the world somehow. You can’t create, or co-create,
unless you put your fear back into your pocket for a minute.
You can certainly barter... and all of us own things we don’t use, or
don’t use all the time. I was fortunate in my first run with Billy Pilgrim to
have a few more guitars than I needed, and so I just started loaning them
out to people who needed them. And inevitably, all those people ended
up in my world as people who were able to loan me things I needed later.
So community happens with just that! You can start there. You can say,
“Look, I don’t use this old compressor any more—do I know an engineer
who needs it?” Or, “Hey, I know this guy because I stand in line behind
him when we buy our hard drives... why don’t we throw all our mics
together and try them out to see what they’re like one night?”
We just restructured one of our rooms... it now feels like it could be
a pretty cool drum room. We need a new drum set! And somewhere
in this town, I am sure someone who’s a friend of mine has a kit that
they would love to park over here in exchange for, maybe, coming in
and tracking a couple of songs! That’s the way you do it!

shake the genre up, just by the sound of the backbeat. You
create the beat then thumb through all the possible sounds
that can carry it, much like you’d do in Logic. You can
change entire kits, genre and attitude, until you find something that is inspirational, or at least gets out of your way
enough... or for that matter, gets in your way enough! But
it will change how you talk about the Big Black Car.
So the idea here is that songwriters should have tools
set up that allow them to create with a minimum of
thinking... tools that let them create without slowing
them down too much?
Right! The more you’re thinking about the rhyme for
“Big Black Car” and the less you’re thinking about the
kick drum sound, the more successful you’re going to be.

Tools To St , Tools To Finish
art

I’d like to look at the toolbox that you use when you’re just getting
ideas started. In Nashville, you gave us a taste of a new track called
“Giving It Up,” where you hauled out an iPhone, launched
Propellerhead Figure, and created the track for us right then and there!
One of the things I use as a songwriter is the relationship between lyric and
rhythm... the way the lyric of the melody bounces against the beat. That seems
to generate the most “radio reactivity” in my style of writing. So if I turn on a
beat and I start making stuff up, I might come up with something like, “Big
black car.” Those are hard words, hard consonants, nothing soft about them,
they communicate power and confidence. And there’s a rhythm there already,
the three words have equal emphasis and land on the beats of a measure—
“I’ve got a Big Black Car, what’m I gonna do...” It’s almost like a rap.
Now, to build a song from that, I need the lowest barrier of entry to a
backbeat! I could clap, or play my guitar... I tend to do that rhythmically... but I want something to play a beat as I create, so instead of firing
up something powerful but complicated like Arturia Spark, I use Figure.
Now, the sound of the backbeat tends to define the genre that you’re
choosing. And that’s really tricky—I don’t want it to suddenly sound like
a Postal Service song, because I’m trying to write for a country artist... it’s
going to flip them out if suddenly they hear techno! The creative process
happens so fast, and a tool like Figure helps me define the genre, maybe
18

RECORDING November 2013

Let’s talk now about the other end of the process... this
is something that our readers don’t know a lot about
and often are a little frightened of. I don’t know
whether you’d like to be very concrete or very philosophical here, but let’s say you’ve got a song you believe
in, you’ve tracked it, you’ve got a good mix, you’ve
played it for some people whose ears you trust, and
they say you’ve got something there. You’ve got something that’s ready for the world to hear. How do you get
stuff out there? What’s a good strategy for someone
who’s got something but isn’t sure how to get started?
That’s a good question. I’ll speak in concrete terms.
The first thing you need to understand is that fans are
agnostic about technology. They don’t give a crap how
they get to the music, as long as they get to it. There are
not more fans on one platform than another.
If you’re trying to distribute your music into the world, the
Internet’s a great resource, obviously, because you can connect to people you don’t know and they can get to you

Recording - November 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - November 2013