Recording - November 2013 - 14

If you’ve heard any of the fantastic hits from country music phenomenon Sugarland, you’ve heard the music of
Kristian Bush. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in nearby Sevierville, Kristian was immersed in music early
in life and turned a young passion for music recording into a career. He first gained fame as a member of the band
Billy Pilgrim, and in addition to his work with Sugarland, he runs the Atlanta-based songwriting collective Songs Of
The Architect with his brother Brandon Bush (of the rock band Train) and engineer and creative partner Tom Tapley.
When he’s not educating songwriters and recording musicians at events like the Audio Engineering Society’s Nashville
Recording Workshop last May (where he gave the keynote address), Kristian is constantly writing and pitching songs, with
six BMI awards to his credit. When he spoke with us by phone from his studio in Atlanta, his most recent achievement of
note was being added to the iOS game My Singing Monsters as the new monster Shugabush—complete with mandolin.

Interview by Mike Metlay

Orig
ins

May I be one of the first members of the print media to congratulate you on your recent promotion to “monster”?
Kristian Bush: Yep! Monstering is kinda fun [laughs]. You know, I’m constantly amazed and surprised at how cool people
are in the world, and how open they are—especially creative people—to doing crazy things. And sometimes I’m first in line.
How did you get started in recording your own music?
I happened to hit a sweet spot in culture. At that time, we were deep into cassettes in the commercial world as a
replacement for vinyl and for the 8-track, and they’d just come out with cassette 4-track recorders at the time I was
about 13 years old. That was how I started; I saved up my money and I got a Fostex, and I read the manual, and
that’s how I first got introduced to multitrack recording.
I was young, and I was putting in the amount of time and dedication with that recorder that you’d more likely see
now with someone playing a video game. Within a year or so, I was so obsessed with it that I wanted to figure out
how to get more tracks, because the bouncing process was getting trickier; you had to pre-mix all your tracks in your
head. I was learning constantly: what the bass and treble controls did, what I could do with my one recording microphone... what happened when I got closer to it or farther away, what happened if I took it into the bathroom.
At first I didn’t know why songs sounded they way they did. I took a song to the local music store guy and I said,
“Hey, why is it this way?” And he said, “Oh! That’s the bass part.” I said, “Bass part?” And he said, “Yeah, the bass
guitar.” I said, “Oh, can I trade my guitar for a bass guitar?” And he said, “Sure!” So I traded my guitar for a bass
right then and there, took it home, and laid down all the bass parts for all the songs I had on my recorder... and then
I went right back and traded the bass back for my guitar! [laughs]
Wonderfully, the next step came courtesy of my sweet mother, who gave me and my brother a birthday gift: one hour
at the local 24-track studio! That was a totally new environment, full of faders and 2-inch tape... but what we learned there
was something that I use to this very day. That was to track everything on a 4-track first... do a home recording first and
make all your mistakes ahead of time, so you’re not making them in a studio at however many dollars an hour. You can
create and rehearse the recording, and then when it’s time, you can actually go in and do the recording smoothly.
So that’s pre-production. You’ve an idea of what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it before
someone clicks the stopwatch.
That’s right! And that’s not just pre-production on the parts or the emotion or the lyric. It’s also pre-production on
the whole attitude of the recording. I do my demos to explore the sonic space of each song, the transfer of emotion
from the lyrics, and all that.
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RECORDING November 2013

Recording - November 2013

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