One of the hardest things about recording your own songs at home is knowing when you can no longer hear them properly. I don’t mean technically. I mean emotionally, creatively and practically. By the time I have written a song, worked out the arrangement, recorded the instruments, sung the vocals, tried harmonies, changed parts, removed […]

There is a strange moment that comes after you finish a song. You have written it, recorded it, built the arrangement, listened to it far too many times, questioned every decision, sent the stems away, had it mixed, produced and mastered, checked the final version, uploaded it, added the artwork, written the description, chosen the […]

There is a dangerous phrase in home recording. “I’ll just make one small change.” No one ever makes one small change. One small change becomes a slightly different vocal level. That becomes a new harmony. The new harmony needs rebalancing. The guitar now feels too loud. The keyboard part has started looking at you suspiciously. […]

There is a point in every home-recording musician’s life when you realise you are no longer just trying to write a song. You are trying to operate a piece of software that appears to have been designed by people who believe a relaxing evening involves routing buses, assigning inputs, checking buffer sizes and debating whether […]

This is one of the questions that sits quietly in the corner of every home studio. You may not ask it out loud at first. You may try to ignore it. You may convince yourself that the vocal is probably fine, the bass is probably doing something useful, and the drums sound much better than […]

There was a time when getting your music “out there” meant something very physical. You had to make a CD. Or a tape, if we are going back far enough and trying not to think about how old that makes us feel. You needed something that could be held, copied, posted, handed to someone at […]

There is a strange kind of faith involved in continuing to make music when very little evidence suggests that you should. Not religious faith, necessarily. Not even confidence. Confidence would suggest that you know where it is all going, that you can see some kind of reward waiting in the distance. Most independent musicians do […]

Last Saturday night I had the immense pleasure of hosting the 5th Songwriter Evening in my local village hall. Songwriter Evening was set up to be a place devoted to listening to songwriters in a lovely building in front of an audience that came to listen, not to chat, order drinks or spend half the […]

There was a time when the phrase “home studio” sounded far grander than the reality. In my case, it meant a room in the house, a computer, Cubase, a microphone, a keyboard, a pair of headphones, some speakers and enough cables to make the back of the desk look like an unsolved crime scene. Oh, […]

No, I’m not leaving home, this is all the equipment I take to run a Songwriter Evening at the village hall 400 yards from where I live. I never realised when I decided to start Songwriter Evening that I would have to turn into removal man. All this will get loaded into my car and […]