If you should not like our songs, then at least take a moment to see if you like the sonics and the production. If you do, the credit goes to both the superb facilities, and the talented people of Mimix Studio (mimixstudio.com). We consider it our home base.

The traditional, well equipped recording studio, with skilled and insightful engineers (and passing 1st call musicians), is an endangered species. It’s been said that all there is to recording music these days, is a laptop computer with a sound card. Throw in a midi keyboard and an el cheapo vocal mic, and that’s it. Then pick a template or preset from any given software program, sing stuff and autotune it to death, and voilà (okay, that went a bit too far… except you could also consider limiting it to death in mastering, to make it LOUD, right?).

It is absolutely true that what once required investments in the millions and formed one of the main hurdles – and also, therefore, quality controls – of making music professionally, has largely disappeared. Likewise true is that it is not always the cheapest venue to do things the traditional way. So if one wants to get there “quick and dirty”, the new way of skinning the cat may well be merited. Plus granted, there are different styles of music. We’re old – what would we have to say of today’s dance tunes or death metal?

But there are a few immutable elements that still hold true, and always will.

Firstly, what you hear (in our style of music, at least) is not only the instruments. It is very much the space in which they are recorded. And while you can mimic some of that after the fact, by modern mixing technology, good sounds captured fresh, are good. Think of cooking; you can add spices to mask less than optimal ingredients, but if you have really fresh and good stuff to begin with, you would not want to waste it by throwing in a ton of tabasco (unless, of course, you love the taste of tabasco).

The acoustic instruments you hear on the BTW record – drums, strings, horns, ac guitars, grand piano – are not samples. They are played and recorded live, in a space that sounds wonderful, with equipment selected to bring out the best of them (see link) – and with solid knowledge of what equipment to pick from the assortment, and how they should be used and placed, etc.

Which brings us to the other essential element speaking for the traditional studio. While there is an abundance of affordable technology available to all men made equal, the main bottleneck tends to often sit between the computer and the headphones. You do not get to be a great cook by having a ton of ever cheaper knives at your kitchen. It takes experience to use the stuff such that it gets out of the way of the actual creative process – be it cooking, or making a record.

When you are standing behind a microphone, eager to spill your soul and emotions out, you do not want to be worrying of whether the take is captured, and then managed right. You want to trust the people behind the glass doing their job – and along with it, offer the services of a psychologist, coach, or critic, as required.

All this has been available to us, and we are so grateful for it. We are something of studio nerds, admittedly, and so we also get creative kicks from all the great analogue gear around us (yeah, some of us suffer from serious “GAS”). But that is also a point: Whatever helps to achieving good creative results (within law…) is good.

In our case, music of BTW is very much rooted in our home base. We would hope that what we do, would speak well for our home base – as it has spoken so well to us.