Words: Joe Bennett and John Pierce O’Reilly
This week Gordon and I went lo-fi and visited some home studios! Home recording has existed as a practice for over 70 years – nearly as long as the history of pop music itself – and can be loosely defined as the recording of sound in any space that isn’t a professional recording studio. Home studios have become more commonplace, as they offer a much cheaper alternative to professional recording studios and, in the right hands, can often yield similar results. As well as being more affordable, home setups can also offer an intimacy that is hard to recreate in a professional setting. While some artists have built professional-grade studios in their houses (think Prince’s Paisley Park), on tonight’s show Gordon and I focused on the more home-spun end of the spectrum. Some of tonight’s songs became very successful indeed – so I hope that the show can be inspiration every singer-songwriter on a tight budget.
Les Paul and Mary Ford recorded How High the Moon (1953) in Paul’s home studio in Jackson Heights (Queens, New York). The setup featured an Ampex 300, a small home-made mixer, a Bell & Howe amplifier, a Lansing Manufacturing Iconic speaker, and a single RCA 44BX ribbon mic. Paul described the recording process: “We had to fold the Murphy bed into the wall in order to put the machinery in there […] we’d record at night, and that kept the people upstairs awake. Mary would put a blanket over herself to isolate the sound — the guitar wasn’t a problem since it went straight into the earphones — but in this case those folks complained because they could hear her singing the fourth part, which had a lot of high and strange stuff. Still, in the end we got it done.”
Bon Iver‘s For Emma, Forever Ago (2007) exemplifies the kind of mythology that home recording can bestow upon an album. Founder and primary songwriter Justin Vernon retired to a log cabin in rural Wisconsin, hunted his own food, and wrote and recorded For Emma. The entire album was made with just two guitars, a Macbook with Pro Tools, an Mbox audio interface, and a single Shure SM57 mic. Skinny Love is representative of the album’s intimate and homemade character.
When the demo becomes the record
Bruce Springsteen recorded the entirety of his album Nebraska on a Teac four-track cassette tape deck in a single evening on 3rd January 1982. The initial cassette recording was intended to serve as a demo for the E-Street band, with songs recorded in a professional studio for official release. After a few weeks of carrying the tape around, however, and after various attempts at rerecording, Springsteen decided that nothing could replicate the immediacy of his cassette demo. Springsteen describes the process: “I could sing and play the guitar, and then I had two tracks to do somethin’ else, like overdub a guitar or add a harmony. It was just gonna be a demo. Then I had a little Echoplex that I mixed through, and that was it. And that was the tape that became the record. It’s amazing that it got there, ’cause I was carryin’ that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of weeks, just draggin’ it around.”
Steve Lacy‘s 2012 iPhone was included in an exhibit at the Smithsonian museum; he used the phone to produce songs not only for his own projects but also for Mac Miller, YG, and Kendrick Lamar. Lacy created most of his first EP Steve Lacy’s Demo (2017) – on which Dark Red appears – using only the Garageband app and an iRig guitar adapter, with vocals straight into the phone’s mic.
when the party’s over, from Billie Eilish’s debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019), was written and produced by her brother Finneas O’Connell from his small bedroom studio in Highland Park, Los Angeles. Eilish and O’Connell used only Logic Pro X, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface, a pair of Yamaha HS5 studio monitors with an H8S subwoofer, and a single microphone to record and produce the entire album. [JB note – coincidentally, that’s exactly the interface and speaker setup in my own studio – we preview all the show’s songs with the same kit. I guess there’s no excuse now for not writing some mega-hits…]
Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls…
Paul McCartney‘s song Waterfalls, from his second solo album McCartney II was written and produced entirely at his home studio in Peasmarsh, Sussex, using a Yamaha CS-80, an ARP 2600, and a Studer 16-track tape recorder. Interestingly, the ‘McCartney’ album series – McCartney (1970), McCartney II (1980), and McCartney III (2020 – his lockdown album) – were all mostly recorded in home studios.
Jacob Collier‘s In My Room was recorded entirely – as the name suggests – in his room. Collier made his name by uploading harmonically-dense vocal covers of popular songs, before releasing his debut album in 2016. In line with the covers that made his name, his cover of the Beach Boys‘ In My Room – the song from which the album takes its name – is a vocal-led, harmonically rich, and home-spun.
Salad Days is a single from Canadian musician Mac DeMarco‘s eponymous second album. The album, like most of DeMarco’s oeuvre, was recorded at home in his Brooklyn apartment, using a Fostex A8 tape machine, a Focusrite ISA One Analog Preamp, and a vintage Roland Juno-60.
Remembering Quincy Jones
Tonight we also paid respects to legendary producer, composer, and arranger Quincy Jones, whose career spanned seven decades and transformed the landscapes of pop, jazz, and film music. Born in Chicago, he began his journey as a jazz trumpeter and worked as an arranger for iconic big bands like Count Basie’s. An alumnus of Berklee College of Music, class of 1951, Jones later received an honorary doctorate from the institution in 1983. Throughout his life, he earned 80 Grammy nominations and 28 wins. His collaborations with Michael Jackson on Off the Wall and Thriller (the best-selling album in history) revolutionised pop music, while his scores for In the Heat of the Night and The Color Purple showcased his cinematic brilliance.
Soundslike – chocolate?
Our soundslike this week features a song by The Doves and a very famous 1985 advert for Cadbury’s Flake chocolate bar. The Flake jingle was composed by the remarkable Ronnie Bond, who was also responsible for the jingles associated with: Coco Pops, Murray Mints, Fairy Liquid, Bran Flakes, Kwik Fit, and Smarties.
For our quiz this week you had to identify six songs recorded in a ‘home’ studio (loosely defined – in some cases the pop stars in question hired a stately home).
As always, find the show and blog at joebennett.net/5live, with occasional Instagram extras at @joebennettmusicology. And you can find our Spotify mega-playlist, which contains all songs ever featured on the show, here:
- Words: Joe Bennett, John Pierce O’Reilly
- Audio production: Joe Bennett, Rafi Waters
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