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Accessible Recordings
for New Musicians

An Investigation Into Music Production For New Artists

This project was created by Cj Rhen with the help of faculty mentor Josh Swiger.

Musicians do not have equal access to the music industry. There are financial barriers that prevent artists from accessing tools for recording, marketing, and distribution that hold back artists' ability to grow and mature their craft. With the music industry's move towards the digital world, music industry tools that are necessary to make a song or album come into fruition have steadily become more accessible to a broad audience, but the standard recording process holds back new artists. Accessible Recordings for New Musicians is a project examining the entry barriers in music production and empowering new artists by investigating methods to make the recording process more accessible. The standard recording process leaves room for more efficient use of time and budgets that can allow new artists to focus more on the quality of their work and less on logistics. To achieve this, Accessible Recording for New Musicians is working primarily with two projects to produce original works starting with an unconventional demo that reduces the financial investment for preliminary work in the recording process. This demo is the basis for the entire recording process and allows for more flexibility to create a commercially viable recording suitable for release on streaming platforms. By breaking the traditional mold of the recording process, Accessible Recordings for New Musicians is standardizing efficient and cost effective methods to make professional levels of recording more obtainable for artists without the means for a large investment into entry costs in the music industry.

About Cj Rhen

Cj Rhen is a Composition and Jazz Studies - Commercial Music major with an emphasis on trumpet. Cj records for Sounds.com and Landr Samples and works in sound design and film scoring for Pittsburgh productions. With his interest in music production, WVU's Honors EXCEL program has enabled Cj Rhen to further explore his interest in music production and connect with other artists in West Virginia and discover the processes involved in the music industry.

Recording Process

The first step is simply auditioning the artist's music and making a short reference track. This basic track was recorded with only a portable recorder and could be done with a smartphone for accessibility. Portable recorders can be as little as $20.

After choosing the artist's song, a demo recording has to be put together. In a professional setting, this would entail hiring session musicians exceeding the typical budget of independent artists. The solution to this was creating a demo using the previous recording and virtual instruments played with a keyboard.

Overdubbing

The next step to the recording process is called overdubbing. This means adding additional layers on top of the original demo tracking. The typical order for overdubs would be bass and drums first if they were not already completed, and then additional instruments such as the horn section in this recording.

To experiement with accessibility for artist's budgets and production times, the horns were recorded first since they are the most flexible section in terms of editing. They can be easily spliced and altered but elements such as drums would need rerecorded if there was an error or specific direction added later on.

This next step was recording live drums to the fully arranged music and overdubs done in the previous step. This mixed up order of tracking enabled the drums to interact with other elements of the song and only required the use of a live drummer once reducing the strain on an independ musicians workflow.

The last overdubs required were Aristotle's vocals and guitar independently and with better quality equipment. Notice the difference in quality from the original track to the overdubbed track.

Mixing

The last step is mixing. Mixing is the action of taking the track and making all the pieces blend together and be an appropriate volume. This track represents all the progress and steps involved in this production.

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