Ari Hest:
From DIY to Major Label
These Sound Good
After recording a couple of songs with GarageBand Hest liked what he heard. And when he played them for musician friends who knew more about recording than he did, they concurred — though many were surprised. “They said, ‘You did that on GarageBand, without any knowledge of how to record?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I guess I did.’”
The singer-songwriter spent about a month working on ten songs; half made it onto his demo. He often recorded late at night. “For some reason my neighbors didn’t care about the noise,” he says. His home “studio” was as casual as the musical salt shaker suggests, featuring what he calls “a very common, cheap mic you find at a lot of clubs.” In fact, adds Hest, “I might have taken it from some club by accident. And it turned out that it sounded nice on my voice.”
With that mic he recorded his voice and every instrument — acoustic and electric guitar, keyboard and percussion — that went through a Fast Track interface and into his MacBook Pro. Excepting GarageBand drum loops, Hest played all instruments himself. “Making this demo,” he confesses, “I learned more about which ones I’m good at, and which ones I’m not.”
Raw and Rough
Hest evinces a certain disbelief as he describes the physical set-up. The biggest challenge was simply lack of space. “Try to picture this,” he says. “I recorded everything in one room. I sat at the piano bench with my MacBook Pro on the table and the mic to the left of it. I would hit the space bar to start recording, then twist the other way to play the instrument. If I hit a sour note, I’d have to press record, then immediately shift over to the mic and hope I got there in time to punch in and correct it in the middle of the track.”
Being both performer and engineer may have stretched him, but the result was even better than he’d hoped. “It was just the effect I wanted,” says Hest, “totally clear but not too pristine — kind of raw and rough. I don’t know the ‘right way’ to do it, but things came out sounding good to me.”
They sounded good to Columbia, too — so much so, the label turned his demo into a regular release. Hest calls it “a pretty big endorsement” that a neophyte could produce a demo of high enough quality to get picked up by a major label. “I spent all of a couple hundred bucks to make ‘The Green Room Sessions,’” says Hest disbelievingly, “whereas a label will spend thousands and thousands to make an album.”
More amazing yet, two of Hest’s tracks — the guitar and keyboard parts from the song “So Slow” — were lifted straight from GarageBand into the final studio mix.
Tricks of the Trade
In his first at-bat Hest hit it out of the park; not only did he score the Columbia release for his demo, but he gained first-hand recording skills that mean he won’t have to look over shoulders or turn to brother Danny for every techie solution. What did he learn? “GarageBand has all these built-in effects,” he says, “like reverb and delay and distortion. There are lots of ways to mess around with your recordings, to spice them up.”
Hest especially liked GarageBand’s vintage guitar amp simulations, which let musicians try many classic tones. “You can throw them on top of the audio you recorded, and all of a sudden your guitar sounds good,” he says. While he didn’t use effects on his vocals, he did apply reverb and delay to his instrumentals, testing various combinations to figure out what was right for each song.
His Own Way
Hest now considers GarageBand part of his repertoire. “At first,” he suggests, “doing ‘The Green Room Sessions’ was kind of a stopgap. But now that it’s out, I’m very proud of it. I’ve been using GarageBand for all my demos since then, and because I’ve learned how to do it my own way, I intend to record a lot more with GarageBand.”
Hest says fans who’ve heard his earlier recordings may find “The Green Room Sessions” more scaled-down. “It’s rougher, simpler, more raw,” he says. “And that sound was not an accident. Something I realized while recording it is that my music is better when it’s presented in a simpler way. The sound becomes more about my voice and the small arrangements around it.” It’s that kind of foolin’-around-in-the-garage discovery that keeps this young musician fresh, green and evolving.
