Home recording has become an invaluable tool for young songwriters and musicians, with new technology creating the possibility to build your own studio with minimal expense and budget, says Barney Chunn. He talks to home recording advocate Daniel McBride - aka Sheep, Dog & Wolf.

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The process of recording music was once a clumsy and cumbersome task. Gear was large, and though it could be of a high quality, it was difficult and expensive to use, monopolized by and overseen exclusively by record companies. With today’s technology however, the recording process has become accessible to the point that it is possible for anyone and everyone with the desire and a little spare cash to dive in and explore for themselves like never before. The result of this newfound ability is a recording process that’s far more creative and involved, initiating a new wave of holistically creative records which push the boundaries of what the young and talented can do.

An example of someone who’s done just that is Daniel McBride. McBride’s first foray into the limelight was as a member of the garage-noise-pop outfit Bandicoot, who took student radio by storm in 2009. Since their disbandment he went on to start Sheep, Dog & Wolf, with which he’s toured Europe, won the 2013 Tui Critic’s Choice award, and was nominated for the 2014 Taite Music Prize. Clearly, there’s something impressive about the incredibly nuanced and textured sound that McBride has created, a unique style that came into its own with his latest offering, Egospect.

What makes McBride’s success with Sheep, Dog & Wolf all the more impressive is that everything has been recorded entirely in his bedroom. An advocate of home recordings, McBride has, since the tender age of 16, been recording in his bedroom, experimenting and growing together with his records in a way no other generation of artists has been able to do.

I met with McBride a few days after the Taite Awards to ask how he came to be one of the countries strongest champions for the cause…

"I was 16 when I first started home recording. I really just wanted to do some of my own stuff. I got an audio interface, a terrible mixer, and a set of seven drum mics. It turns out they were awful, and seven awful mics isn’t really worth any mics at all… I didn’t know anything really before I bought the equipment, I kind of worked it out as I went along."

The equipment cost McBride a few hundred dollars off TradeMe, and he spent ‘months and months’ building his understanding of the process, becoming familiar with the gear and how to capture sounds in the way he wanted to.

"Basically I just sat down in my room for nine months. The great thing about that is that I was at high school at the time. So there was no time constraint. I didn’t need to organize anything with anyone. So if it’s 3am and I feel like recording a song, I can. It’s the freedom and the flexibility of it that’s so appealing."

It’s a learning process that has only been possibly, certainly for those without huge budgets, in the last decade, and it encompasses much more than just the recording process itself. One of the most powerful, and perhaps unforeseen, aspects of the home recording phenomenon is the effect it’s had on the creative process.

Egospect is an album that is not just a bedroom record but a bedroom composition. The ethos of bedroom recording infuses the record, permeating from the layering to the mixing to the lyrics. Egospect is a very inwardly facing album, something McBride says is influenced by the setting in which it was made.

"It’s where you sleep, it’s where you live. I find, especially when you’re writing in that space, you can try things, and maybe you’ll fail at that and you’ll have to try again, but you can go to a lot more of a personal place with the music and the writing, and I think that leads to some beautiful results."

As a nominee for the prestigious Taite Prize, an award judged on the artistic merit of the album alone, it’s clear that there is a growing acceptance of bedroom recordings of a releasable standard. Though the technology is ever improving, there is still a clear difference in the sound of bedroom records, something McBride embraces as a shift from the ‘studio’ sound.

"I find I really love the sound of bedroom recordings, I think there’s a lot of character in the aesthetic. I think sometimes studio sounds, especially drum sounds, can be quite sterile, because it’s so engineered. [With bedroom recording] there’s all those little things, like it’s mixed by someone who doesn’t necessarily know how, so a lot of their character comes out in that."

McBride is clearly as comfortable at the helm as he is uncomfortable with someone else there, at least with Sheep, Dog & Wolf.

"One of the reasons I do my own mixing is because I feel like it is part of the composition. Especially with songs as layered as mine are, it actually becomes quite an artistic decision. I actually think its great to have control over those kind of things, because in a studio you don’t, there’s a professional engineer that will do it for you, but I think it loses a lot of the artistic input into the piece that you’re making."

Home recording allows young artists to grow and develop their personal sound in a way they never have been able to before. The ability to hear yourself back is a constant feedback pattern to yourself, which helps young songwriters grow and shape their sound with a much more reflective and considered approach, and with time and continued technological advancements, hopefully we continue to see a growth in the kind of creative approach to recording as we’ve seen with McBride.

Look out for the next blog, which will feature the other side of the story, and why studio's are still the best way to record...

About Barney:
Barney Chunn is a graduate of Victoria University with BA in Philosophy and a post-grad Diploma in English. He manages the Jam Bus programme at Play it Strange, is a freelance music journalist, and plays with the band The Dictaphone Blues.