isoldaland

My dad—a hobbyist singer, songwriter and artist working under the nom de plume isoldaland—approached me with a desire to transform some of the songs he had recorded on the Voice Memos app on his iPhone into full-fledged studio productions. . .on a budget of $0. I was up for the challenge—I felt that “Photograph,” one of his original compositions, had a ton of potential and would be a strong entry on which to anchor his social presence as a musician.

While we didn’t have access to any professional acoustically-treated recording spaces, that wasn’t the type of sound he was going for. He noticed that his garage, which he had recently converted to a home gym, possessed a rich-sounding natural reverb. This would be our studio space. Limited to a maximum of two recording inputs at any one time and following the artist’s request to record “live” for the foundation tracks, I opted for a simple setup—one MXL V87 condenser mic for capturing vocals and one Blue Spark condenser mic for capturing acoustic guitar. The only form of acoustic treatment we used was a portable isolation shield to help prevent any of the more unpredictable reflections from muddying our vocal takes.

isoldaland, the consummate professional that he is, was able to nail the vocal and acoustic guitar parts in one take. However, he and I both envisioned a bigger sound for the track, so I quickly came up with parts for electric guitar, bass, drums, and glockenspiel and added those tracks to the recording. With those parts locked in and on tape, I began mixing. I aimed for a sound that was accessible-yet-subversive, a middle ground between the folkpunky amateur sound of early Violent Femmes and polished acoustic pop from groups like The Lumineers.

Once we settled on a final mix, I guided the artist through the process of registering his work with the U.S. Copyright Office. My job was far from over, though; with the end goal of establishing a social media presence, we needed a visual element, a music video that would go along with the song so we could distribute the song on Instagram and YouTube.

I didn’t like the idea of simply filming the artist lip-synching to the song, so I storyboarded a rough outline of a travelogue-type video with shots of the artist performing interspersed within. Filming was completed in one day, with the first half of the day dedicated to getting footage on location at Stone Mountain, GA and the second half dedicated to getting studio performance footage. All footage was captured using my personal iPhone 8 Plus. When all was said and done, we had about 13 GB worth of raw footage in 138 separate clips.

Although my previous experience with video editing was limited (I had only used iMovie for a few quick projects in college), I decided to learn the basics of Adobe Premiere Pro for this particular project because of the level of control it afforded me in the editing process. isoldaland played a significant role in helping me determine which shots to keep and which to discard, and we landed on the final cut of the video after about 10 hours in the editing bay. We accomplished what we had set out to do—record a song with a bit of studio polish, create an engaging music video, and do it all without spending a dime. The whole process was a labor of love; it required a ton of commitment from both of us, but how could I resist the opportunity to call myself a bona fide audio engineer/musician/director/producer? I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.

Stream “Photograph” and check out the finished music video below.