Red Hot Empty released two singles in February, which in addition to being what we believe our best work to date also signaled a new path to our music production process.
We’ve always recorded everything at GTown Studio, the basement studio of yours truly, One Drummer Drumming. GTown Studio was primarily setup as a drum tracking studio, but over the past few years of recording and getting to know the space I created, it’s become so much more. There have been numerous recording equipment additions with the ability for 16-track recording through a large variety of mics. The available drum, percussion and instruments continue to grow as well for a large selection of sound options.
I’ve figured out how to record guitar amps, vocals, bass, horns and a wide range of percussion, and get the sound needed from each. But other than some basic mixing, I’ve then relied on others for final mixing and mastering. That all changed for these latest Red Hot Empty tracks.
As we finished tracking Peckish and Crankshaft Sensor, Ben Barron started spending more time with me fine tuning the mix. We’ve both been involved with a wide variety of bands that have recorded at studios or in home setups over the years. So we already had a solid base of experience to jump off from. Throw in countless hours of experimenting with mics, plug-ins and settings along with a bit of YouTube, we were able to get to a mix we both felt was as good or better than anything we’ve been involved in previously.
The final process of mastering these two singles was then a group effort of the whole band as we brought the levels up, listened and evened everything out between the two songs. These two songs will also eventually end up on the next album we’re still finishing up.
Uploading and releasing through Distrokid was a piece of cake after that. The last piece was hearing the final versions once streaming, reinforcing we can do this ourselves. DIY Baby!
Of course there is a time and place for having others record, mix and master your music, and we’ll still do that for certain releases in the future. But knowing we can do it all ourselves definitely is a sense of accomplishment and provides us a streamlined approach for getting our music out there to the masses.
Check the two songs recorded, mixed, mastered and released ourselves right here:
Stream Crankshaft Sensor at this link
