When It’s About You Not Great Music

Posted bythestevebellprojectsPosted incomposer, jazz music, Music, new artist, new song, personal growth, Pop music, Song writing, soul musicTags:, , , , , , , , , ,

These days people doing recordings often make the mistake of trying to be the whole creative team themselves. It’s a bad mistake and may even be why really competent performers end up using Ai generated voices and instruments on their recordings (which sells them short as a musician). Or simply why quality performers end up with poor recordings.

Two years ago I walked into Empire Music Studio’s in Melbourne deeply frustrated with having reached a dead end in the quality of my musical outputs. Quite frankly, my recordings just didn’t make the grade. I was writing, arranging, playing keys and using samples to to compensate for not using real musicians in instruments critical to achieving the jazz pop sound. Bass guitar was a good example. Sheepishly I asked gun resident producer, engineer Trev Carter to listen to a couple of the songs I had been recording . Surprisingly he seemed impressed by the quality of what I was writing, but was very clear that the overall sound wasn’t reaching the professional levels required for the genre I was writing. To him I suspect they sounded like demos.

The feedback given to me by Carter was a changing moment in my musical journey. After a few months getting songs together I commissioned Trev and his network of amazing musicians to help build my next EP.

There is so much to talk about the process I went through. But ultimately, for this article, I want fellow song writers and performers to realise that you need to work with people who are better at stuff than you at specific disciplines. People who play certain instruments more effectively, people who mix better, people who sing harmonies better than you or wherever you can extract improvement.

People who want great results need to realise that the greats such as McCartney, Gibb, Wonder, Jackson etc. had people who were better than them in specific disciplines contributing big time to their success. When it comes to the best albums, it’s about the best teams.

If you want it to be all about you, then you are thinking about yourself, not the music.

Steve Bell talks about not being everything to everyone.

Published by thestevebellprojects

‘My thrill is to take relatively unknown, very unique and talented singers and compose and arrange retro songs that they record.’ Born in Melbourne, Australia, Steve Bell was brought up on seventies and eighties pop, soul and funk. He was obsessed with Earth Wind and Fire, Bee Gees, Al Jarreau, Gino Vannelli, TOTO, George Benson and, the great, David Foster. He liked class music with rich melodies - a big feature of his own writing today. While at college he played drums in numerous bands, but in his own words ‘wasn’t much chop at that’. But he did have a knack for playing piano by ear and writing ‘kind of cool’ ballads and soul songs. In his twenties he had a part-time role (on top of his day job) as a pop music critic for a local arts magazine, where he interviewed acclaimed artists from across the world. His interviews were always deep and focused on learning more and more about great songwriting and performing. Then he took a break - for over 25 years, running his company and being a family ‘guy’. However, he yearned for creative endeavours and once locked down during the COVID crisis, he started writing songs again. His first song ‘Lonely View’ was written looking out across the local bay from his composing studio and recorded using the amazing vocals of Jennifer Davids. Thus he started the journey of identifying a talented singer every few months and penning them a song with rich 70s and 80s melodies and jazz pop inspired chord structures.

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