Toronto-born, songwriter and producer Matt Genovese shares how his desire to build the skills necessary to better express himself as an artist eventually led him into the worlds of music production and mixing, and building his analog-only studio.
The path to a successful music career isn’t always a straight ‘A to B’ journey. In Matt’s case, he saw building up his skills as a necessity to making progress.
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TRANSCRIPT
“You can’t learn 10 or 20 years of recording experience overnight, but you can learn a lot about gear and engineering in six months or a year.
I originally started as an artist and I really started learning this side of it because I wanted to better express my ideas to producers. So I thought I should learn how to use logic or Pro Tools or Ableton.
I would over produce almost because the song just didn’t sound like I wanted to, the kick drum did wouldn’t hit hard enough, so I would add another kick drum and what was really happening was the mix wasn’t good. And I didn’t know how to mix.
So then I realised that and I was like ”I need to get better at mixing just so that I can make my own stuff sound better’. By the time I figured that out, I had gone down such a rabbit hole with my analog stuff, that for me to send somebody stems to mix my song that I did, it just never comes back the same way and I have such a fixed way of doing things that I just started mixing everything that I do.
Eventually, it just got to a point where I just didn’t need the producer or the mixing engineer, I could just do it myself. In my early 20s I moved away from being an artist and just became full time producer, mixer and songwriter.“
