Roger O’Donnell:
One Man, One Instrument
All on the Mac
After recording “The Truth in Me” at his countryside Pear Tree Studio (a neighbor’s dairy farm provides O’Donnell and his partner, Erin Lang, with a ready supply of clotted cream), the musician sought a fresh set of ears to mix it. A rummage through the credits on his favorite albums yielded German producer Mario Thaler. “It’s funny,” says O’Donnell. “I drove across Europe — from our middle-of-nowhere near Devon to his middle-of-nowhere near Munich — to work with him.”
At first the pair applied Thaler’s top-of-the-line vintage equipment, including Neve desk and flying faders, to create the mix. But the result was marred by a “nightmare of hiss” that O’Donnell blames on his own lack of engineering skills during recording. So, he continues, “Mario went back and remixed the entire album in Logic. And now it sounds exactly how I want it to sound. It became apparent to me that when you have Logic, you don’t need anything else.”
Admittedly “kind of old school,” O’Donnell initially resisted mastering on the Mac. “Even for someone like me who’s so into the Mac, I’d always mastered on DAT,” he says. “I still had this mindset — sure, you can record into the computer, but when it comes time to ‘make it real,’ you have to take it to the big deck in the big studio and mix it down to tape. Then I discovered that with Logic, you don’t have to do that. There was no sacrifice of quality — in fact, it sounded a hundred times better. And now, I’m comfortable leaving it all on the Mac.”
Show Projection and Music Video
O’Donnell collaborated with Tokyo-based artist Richard Cornelise to create video projection for his album-promoting tour, using Final Cut Pro to edit. And the musician used Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro to create the music video “Treasure,” which features stop-motion animation and is available as a bonus track on the album through the iTunes Store.
“Final Cut Pro is so easy,” he says. “To use the multi-track feature I just moved the camera to five different locations, imported the five video tracks, then cut between them. It was very linear and straightforward.”
Onstage, O’Donnell runs his entire show on a MacBook Pro, using Logic Pro and Ableton Live to record loops during the performance. Two Moog Voyagers, set at right angles, are his instruments, with his MacBook Pro and controller panel in the middle. “My right hand is on the Voyager, so my left hand is free to work the sequencer,” explains the keyboardist. “I’ll start with a rhythmic track, like a kick drum, then record each part to build up the song on stage.”
Paying It Forward
Keenly conscious of his debt to the musicians who’ve inspired him, O’Donnell is of a mind to pay it forward. To that end, he plans to give away several of his songs from “The Truth in Me” as GarageBand loops. “I’m really into letting people see how I work,” he says. “I see it as part of the whole new Internet culture. Before, there was this mysticism about how rock stars recorded, all holed up in some mansion. Now everyone wants to know how you did it. It’s just more open. And I think that trend should go as far as it can.”
O’Donnell muses, “Where does the music really come from? I mean, do you ever really own it? To me, it’s a collaboration. When it comes, it’s a summation of all you’ve heard before, and you’re just another part in the process. So it’s nice to pass it along to someone else. If you’re going to take things from other people, you should give back, too.”
