Ari Hest:
From DIY to Major Label
New York singer-songwriter Ari Hest is used to doing most things himself. When he needed the softly percussive rattle of an egg shaker and couldn’t see quitting a recording session to trek to the music store and buy one, he simply grabbed the salt shaker from his kitchen table.
He’s that kind of guy: practical, inventive and, until now, decidedly low-tech. Hest began touring colleges and clubs across the country while still an undergrad at NYU, keeping it all very DIY and in-the-family (his older brother Danny is his manager) as he gathered fans organically along the way.
Today at just 27, Hest has built a pretty impressive track record: he released three CDs independently and was recently invited to sign with Columbia Records. For his third title on that label, “The Break-In” (due out May 1), he worked with leading producer Mitchell Froom, whose credits include Crowded House, Elvis Costello and Bonnie Raitt.
Hit the Road, Get Lucky
Still, Hest remains modest. “I got lucky,” he says without guile. “After college I hit the road and it was just me and my guitar. I played a lot of shows and audiences seemed to dig what I was doing. Plus,” he says with a laugh, “I had a motivated agent.” Before he knew it, Hest had a fan base.
Although he is charmingly self-deprecating, Hest is a hard worker, too. After Columbia settled on a May release to allow time to promote the full-length “The Break-In” album — which he’d completed the previous August — the musician decided he couldn’t keep his fans waiting that long for new material.
So he put together a five-song EP called “The Green Room Sessions,” performed solo and recorded by Hest on his MacBook Pro using GarageBand. He intended to release it himself. “It was meant to be something to satisfy my fans, and me, in the interim before the new album came out on Columbia,” says Hest. But that little amuse-bouche turned out so tasty, the label snapped it up, too.
Seriously Low-Tech
But the best part of the story is that before recording “The Green Room Sessions” Hest was, by his own admission, seriously un-handy in all things tech. “For a long time,” he says with a sigh, “I was a recording artist who didn’t know how to record. Danny has always been the more technically gifted one between us — I was jealous! I’d ask him how to fix things and he’d come to my rescue.”
Hest decided it was time to learn the electronic underpinnings of his musical muse. “Before,” he recounts, “I would look over the engineer’s shoulder during sessions, but I always felt, ‘Let someone else do this stuff. I’m never going to be able to, so I’d rather stick to singing and playing.’ But then I started wanting to figure things out for myself. So I decided to try GarageBand.”
The collection that ended up being “The Green Room Sessions” offered the perfect opportunity. “At the time, those songs were demos,” Hest says. “I just wanted to see how they would turn out. So I thought, ‘I might as well try to use GarageBand and record them myself.’”
Right At Home
Watching over many shoulders had given Hest some familiarity with the workings of ProTools — but no confidence he could manage that kind of recording program himself. He soon discovered that GarageBand was different. “Visually, it was so much easier than ProTools — I immediately understood how to start learning to record.”
From the start, this innately DIY musician was right at home. (Literally. He recorded the entire “Green Room Sessions,” salt shaker and all, in his Brooklyn apartment.)
“From the day I opened GarageBand I felt comfortable with it,” he says. “And from me that takes a lot, since I’m usually the guy who needs lots of help with those things. But with GarageBand, it was just intuitive. I went through a bunch of trial and error — like, ‘Let’s push that button and see what happens!’ — and I was like a little kid playing with a toy.”
