What We Do:
Pre-Production & Production:
You're an artist and because you're so close to your art, it's difficult to hear what you've written from the perspective of the casual listener.
At Sawmill Recordings, we have this conversation and work with you to not only make the songs you've written sound as good as they possibly can but also so that they can hold the attention of any listener from the first note to the final reverb tail. We select tones, attend rehearsals, fully flesh out the arrangement and orchestration, and set a heading for the project as a whole!
This streamlines the recording process so everyone knows what to play, and when to play it. Effectively eliminating nasty surprises on tracking day.
Recording:
Having an ear for music and a feel for the emotions you want to convey is really only half the battle when it comes to making a record. You also have to possess a great deal of technical knowledge and some killer sounding recording equipment. There are all manner of factors to consider when trying to get a great sound as efficiently as possible: phase correlation, room qualities, microphone placement, and signal flow to name a few.
Don't know what those are? Well, that's one of the reasons you come to us!
We have the capability to record real drums, real amps, and real singers individually or all at once depending on the needs of the project. Our live room sounds great and our gear is more than capable of delivering some crushing tones!
Editing:
Mixing:
Editing is by far the most grueling and granular process of making a record. It is not glamorous, nor is it creative, or entertaining but the reality is that it is sometimes a necessity for the product. We prefer not to have to do many of these as we are strong believers in keeping as much of the sound of musicians making music intact as possible. But, if it's not salvageable measures must be taken.
We have the capability to compile takes, reamplify guitars, bass, and keyboards, clean up and remove unwanted noise, time-align and sample replace drums, and tune vocals.
Mixing is where we zoom out and look at the song's elements as one big picture. It's the process of creating a balance within a stereo field and generally making things sound balanced and in some circumstances, larger than life.
This generally takes the form of Panning, EQing, Compressing, adding Reverbs and Delays, volume automation, sidechaining, saturation
and much more!
Though it appears otherwise, mixing is more of an art than a science and is very subjective so we encourage you to listen for yourselves and to be communicative with us in the process of refining your product.
Education:
This is the part where we can offer you the keys to our bank account! If you're a musician who's looking get better or wants to learn about recording, production, mixing, or mastering then this is the place for you! All of our team, even our Chief Engineer are Berklee College of Music alumni and are accomplished musicians and experienced teachers.
We provide a robust, hands-on interactive, learning environment in person or over video conferencing software where you can expand your horizons and learn some new skills as quickly as possible.
Now is the time to get better! Be the bandmember who knows how to record and mix, you'll be glad you did!
Mastering:
Mastering is a bit of a dark art but it's something that is very much a necessity if we want our songs to do well out there in the real world. This is where we take the 2 track stereo file from the mix engineer and alter it further to optimize it for the consumer. To put it another way, the mastering process is the last say the average consumer has in the music production process.
It is for that reason therefore that our policy is that if we mixed your song we won't master it unless it would be a disservice not to do so. However, we're more than happy to master the mix you got done at another studio! Mixing is still very close to the song whereas mastering is supposed to be a lot more objective.