The Story

Ben got in touch with me to help him record his first solo album of original songs, all arranged by himself, with string parts, upright/electric bass, drums, and guitars. We recorded it at Airship Laboratories, and Ben played all guitar, drums and keyboard parts. It was an ambitious project, to be all tracked in a few studio days with lots of layers of overdubs and written out arrangements he had crafted for it.

The initial plan was for Ben to take all the material we recorded at the studio and continue the production on his own. It was mostly a tracking project with some production involvement for me, but I wasn’t involved in the pre-production, nor was it the plan for me to mix it at first.

After a few months, I heard back from Ben and he wanted me to mix the whole record. I was really glad to be able to do so. He has some really beautiful songs and the album came out quite nicely, I think. We added a few layers of background vocals as the mixing developed and we worked closely to capture the nuances he was intending for each part of the song.

We had to create little automated delays, long crescendos where the intensity has to grow across a whole section, and also the illusion of a whole section of strings playing together, which were actually recorded as individual overdubs.