First we listen

Send me what you have: a voice memo, a guitar and a vocal, an arrangement already under way. It does not need to be good. It needs to exist.

The first hour goes into deciding what kind of piece this is. Almost every production that fails skipped that step and started from the instruments.

The genres

I do not work in a single genre, and that is not the pose of someone who takes everything: it is years of lessons, of listening, and of other people’s tracks that went wrong for the wrong reason. What changes between one genre and another is the conventions — where the bass sits, how much a vocal breathes, what the drums do when nothing is happening — and conventions can be studied.

If a genre is not one I can do, I say so first, and I say who can. A producer who accepts everything is selling their time, not their trade.

Then we remove

My job is to work out what the piece is already trying to do and remove whatever is in its way. Adding is rarely the answer. When it is, we add one thing and you hear it immediately.

Under my name or not

Ghostproducing is the same production with a different agreement about what gets written afterwards: the track comes out under your name, and there is no trace of me anywhere unless you want one. It is not a second-class service, and it is a large part of the real work — it simply does not show, which is the point.

Credits, confidentiality and ownership of the sessions are put in writing before we start, not after. That is the only way the word “ghost” does not become a problem the day the track works.

How the work runs

In numbered versions, each with a note on what changed and why. You can step back three passes at any point and hear what we had. No version is ever deleted.

The good version is almost always the one with less in it.