Swedish‑born producer Martin Terefe’s credits include Christina Aguilera, James Blunt, Coldplay, James Morrison, Westlife, Craig David, Cat Stevens, Backstreet Boys and many others. Asked to recall a favourite sound, he nominates the one‑room production approach on James Morrison’s album track ‘Under The Influence’.
“For the three decades that I’ve been producing records, one of my central philosophies has been bringing great musicians together in a room and arranging, playing and recording songs together in an open live setting. Sonically that has made me very aware of, and interested in, what the recording room itself contributes to the final record. I like to have as many of the musicians as possible in the same room as the artist when tracking, and sometimes that becomes problematic when you’re a lot of people, because of course you get a lot of leakage.”
All Together Now
“When I recorded James Morrison’s debut album Undiscovered I met a young artist who was not experienced in the studio but had so much soul and raw energy. The way he sang, his personality, everything was just really high excitement, and I wanted to capture that and really make it come through on the recordings.
We were working in my old Kensaltown Studio A in London, a studio with a 700‑square‑foot combined control/live room with high vaulted ceilings, set up in a kind of living‑room style. Me and my longtime friends and brilliant engineers Andreas Olsson and Kelly Pribble built and designed the studio together, literally pouring concrete, nailing down reclaimed floorboards and making our own sound‑controlling baffles and studio furniture.
Martin Terefe: For James’ album I wanted to get him, the whole band including a pro string quartet, and backing singers as well as the engineers all in the main room.
“For James’ album I wanted to get him, the whole band including a pro string quartet, and backing singers as well as the engineers all in the main room. We were between 10‑14 people in the room at all times during the tracking sessions. We had a good size separate drum and amp room in the studio too, and for ‘Under The Influence’, like on most songs, the drummer got his own room.
“In the main room I put the string quartet in the middle of the room, in a circle, and then the rest of us all set up around them, spread around the central mixing console, my 1973 Trident B‑Range. The room has a really warm, woody ambience and with the compression going on you could hear everything from pedal clicks, the tape machine rolling and the string players’ bows hitting the mic stands when the track really got going. There was so much grit in the room. I placed a Telefunken ELA M 251 in the corner for the vocal so James was singing towards the centre of the room. When he sang really loud, he kind of stepped back a bit from the mic, but he’d be so loud so that you’d hear his vocal in most all of the microphones in the room. I was struggling with that when we started making the rough mixes. So, I decided instead of hiding it, to try and exaggerate it and I really compressed everything a lot. I put out some drum leakage artificially by putting a speaker in the room.”
Crowd Control
“The last piece of the puzzle was one evening I got everyone gathered in the smallest room in the studio and asked them to come and make some noise on the track, to sing along or clap their hands or just talk to create some noise. James was there as well and he got this really rowdy energy going and everyone started cheering and the piano player started playing this very kind of honky piano, but it wasn’t miked; you could only hear it through the two room mics I put out, because I really only wanted the ambience.
“It’s kind of very diffuse, what’s happening when you hear the recording: one piano from the recording playing and what’s happening in the room on the piano too. James’ vocal is disappearing into the distance at times when he sings really loud, but for some reason there’s so much of it and so much energy in all the different mics that it just sounds exactly like I wanted it; like a super‑exciting record — so youthful and so high energy. It kind of was exactly what I had wanted to try to create.”