Pre-Production, Schmee-Production

When I was significantly younger than I am today, I used to wonder what the fuss was all about when it came to pre-production.  I thought, “Hey, we’re a band and we play this music all the time. Why do we need to rehearse specifically for the studio?”

Today, I saw the benefits of pre-production for a band like ours and didn’t question it for one second.

For the uninitiated, pre-production is basically the act of preparing your music for the studio. This usually entails going over the songs, working on how they feel, coming up with references (other songs by other artists) and making simple demos if necessary.

Tonight, we worked on a song called “Georgie,” that we’ve been playing for over a year.  The feel for the song was just never right.  On Monday, we played through it acoustically and decided we needed to change the groove. I played the guys a song by Paul Thorn called “Lucky 7 Ranch” and it was right on the money for what we wanted in terms of the overall feel for the song.

We went through the song this evening and put together a drum sample groove we could use to make a very simple demo.  We can then use that as a reference when rehearsing the song with live drums.

Our goal is to have a groove or “feel” reference for every song we intend to record as well as a sonic reference.  In essence, one reference that gives us an idea of how to play the song and one reference for how we want it to sound.

Now, the sonic references will be much more limited. Feel references could be anything. It doesn’t have to sound right or even be recent. Every song could have a different artist for a reference.  On the other hand, the sonic references need to be limited to just a few artists and recently released albums so that our record has both consistency and a modern sonic palette.

This is the most organized I’ve ever felt before starting the actual recording process and I can really see the value of pre-production of this kind.  I have no doubt it will make a big difference when we start actually cutting tracks.