How to Ride on the Back of Other People’s Skill Sets

In today’s entry, I explain how I’ve been successfully relying on other people’s abilities since I was about sixteen — and how that finally paid off when it came time to record the album properly.

With the album written, the next step was dealing with the reality of recording the audio. I still had a vague hope of keeping the whole project under a thousand pounds, but by this point that was looking increasingly optimistic. The obvious solution was session musicians — people who could actually play their instruments and do what I asked.

And that definitely wasn’t going to be me.

First up was finding a guitarist. While I know plenty of musicians, I didn’t want to dump a huge workload on friends, so I went looking elsewhere. Naturally, that meant Fiverr. I found a guy who could play guitar, bass, drums, sing, and also record, mix, and master.

I sent him a demo of There’s a Body in the Tank and offered to tab it out. He learned it by ear before I even finished the message. We agreed he’d record guitars, bass, drums, and handle the mix and master for £120 — which felt like an absolute bargain.

A week later, he sent everything back. It sounded good. More importantly, it sounded listenable.

Lesson learned: there are some incredibly talented people out there — and apparently my music isn’t that hard to work out.

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