We run a remote business.  We don’t have a permanent location right now and both of us have full-time day jobs.  We’d love to each be able to go full-time with Constant Q in the future, but for now, it’s just not feasable.  So how do we communicate, work, and create remotely?

One of the ways we’ve discovered is to leverage the great resource that is Spotify.  In prepping for new acts in the studio, discovering our favorite sounds, and comparing tracks, nothing beats the availability of almost every song ever recorded!  We especially like the ability to build collaborative playlists, so even if we’re not working together, we can research and share artists and tracks and listen at our own leisure.

This is just one of the ways that we’ve found to be productive during the day or at home when we can’t be at the studio.

You know that Bitrate Studios loves to experiment. Well, while recording “Hello” for Quenton Clark earlier in the week, he wanted a very raw, overdriven keyboard sound. I played him a track called “All the Poor and Powerless” by All Sons and Daughters in which the keyboard (Wurlitzer?) is captured by micing the speaker on the keyboard itself. Using a vintage microphone that Kevin and I acquired through a friend, we mic’d the keyboard’s onboard speaker and, Voila! What a great tone! Quenton liked it so much that he kept it for the final mix. I just read an article from Joe Gilder (www.homestudiocorner.com)yesterday that said the words “Should I…” should never be in an engineer’s vocabulary. How true! In this day and age with audio recording so cheaply accomplished? Try it! Try it again! If it doesn’t quite work, then try something else, but never stop experimenting.

-D