This is a personal reflection on recording philosophy - highly subjective.

My foundational worldview of recording was/is digital. When I started to record “seriously,” I had Garageband. I began with digital multitracking, completely forgoing the process and limitations (and frustrations) of analog recording. If I didn’t like a take, I could delete it instantly. If I had an idea for a part, I could record it immediately. Stop recording and begin playback in a fraction of a second. Click around in the waveform to whichever song section I wanted to hear or work on. I could record into infinity with no ostensible limitations beyond my computer’s available storage space. I could, in theory, “fix” anything I didn’t like about a take with enough nudging and crossfading and tuning and patience.

But that’s an exhausting way to work and to engage with art, especially when you consider that every mix is the culmination of hundreds if not thousands of tiny decisions that begin before anything is even recorded. I’m obsessive and I’m a perfectionist. That’s part of why I’m good at what I do, but there’s a fine line between quality control and self-sabotage.

When it comes to my own art, I am a self-saboteur extraordinaire. I re-record, I edit, I mix myself in circles trying to make my songs perfect. That’s a huge factor in why I’ve yet to release the album I’ve been working on since, like, 2018. I wonder how many thousands of decisions I’ve made in making it so far, and I wonder how many are left to make.

I’ve chased perfection for as long as I can remember - in school, in extracurriculars, in my work. I’m just hardwired to be that way, to give 1000%. It becomes detrimental. By insisting that my art must be perfect, perfect, perfect, I create such an intense expectation for myself that avoiding the song sessions altogether is less painful than engaging with them and failing to reach an impossible standard. The weight of perfection - because a digital workflow promises the possibility of perfection - is unshakeable. If it’s possible, I can do it. Right?

But what even is perfection? High budget, big studio sound? That’s how it’s always seemed to me.

Now I think that an imperfect thing is allowed to be perfect in its imperfection.

Over the past few years, I’ve been more and more drawn to analog workflows. There is a ceding of control when you record to tape, and that’s been liberating for me as a hypercritical self-engineering artist. I can make a recording and let it be what it is - not only accepting imperfection, but embracing it.

(It’s important to make the distinction here that the ceding of control is to the act and physical mechanism of recording. There are other ways to cede control as a self-engineering artist - most obvious being to hire someone else to make engineering and mixing decisions for you.)

I recently lucked into acquiring an old Tascam desk, and I wanted to use it to track a song live to cassette. I wanted to make something that sounds human, sounds like human expression, warts and all. Not ready to let go of one of my own songs quite yet, “Poison Oak” by Bright Eyes felt like a fitting option for this treatment; it’s one that I’ve been covering forever, and I’d been meaning to actually record it.

I set up the board and the mics and the effects. Tried some things that didn’t work out, tried some things that did. Monitored as I practiced, adjusted faders and EQs and gainstaging until everything felt right. I recorded a few takes LR out of the board to an old tape. I picked my favorite take and mastered it. That’s it. No vocal tuning, no timing adjustments, no cutting together of different pieces of different takes. Mix committed live, mastered, done.

It’s an act of vulnerability to release music that sounds “flawed.” My voice is untuned. My tempo fluctuates. I play notes that I didn’t mean to play. And I’m really proud of this recording.

And look, I am in no way against vocal tuning, comping, and editing. I’m actively for all of those things (perfectionist, remember?). Polishing a recording does not inherently remove its humanity. I’m just pointing out that grid-aligned and squeaky clean isn’t the only way to work, even if it’s the only way you’ve ever known. I made a production decision with this project to forgo the conventions that we have come to accept as the benchmark for a release.

I will continue to agonize over LP1, and I will continue to hold high standards for my art, but LP2 won’t take a hundred years to make. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be good. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth sharing. It doesn’t have to be perfect to make an impact.

If you’re a self-engineering artist, give yourself permission to be human in your recordings. I think it’s more important now than it ever has been to lean into that. And then hire me to mix - don’t worry, if it’s not my own project, I’ll actually get it done. :)