Dehlia Low "Tellico"

Dehlia Low “Telico” Track Listing

1. Take Me Back
2. Bide My Time
3. Climbing Devil’s Pass
4. Santa Ana Winds
5. Wilkins County Wood
6. Lord Won’t You Help Me
7. Spoon
8. More Than I Can Take
9. Buffalo To Washington
10. Wandering Boy
11. River Is Rising
12. Anatori
13. Plains of Tellico

Recording: Who, What, When, Why, How

Hi, we are Dehlia Low. We’re a young bluegrass band from Asheville, N.C. that includes myself, Anya Hinkle (vocals, fiddle), and Stacy Claude (vocals, guitar), Aaron Balance (dobro), Bryan Clendenin (mandolin, vocals) and Greg Stiglets (bass, vocals).

We’ve been together now about a year and a half. We’re in a place that many “up-and-coming” bands find themselves…we need a CD. A full-length, professionally recorded, mixed and mastered disk for sale, promotion, and general ascent into the stratosphere of success that every musician hopes to find him or herself inhabiting.

(As the old saying goes, there are literally tens of dollars to be made playing bluegrass music and we want to make sure we have every opportunity to secure these financial opportunities).

This is not our first recording—our eight-song demo/EP was recorded in a basement studio with no real isolation (so at least we didn’t lose that “very live sound”). At the moment we have a whole lineup of original songs that we’ve already been performing and are arranged and ready for recording. What is a band to do?

1. Record label or no record label.

There appear to be numerous small record labels that are willing to record your disk for free. As more people heard our EP/demo, we began to be approached by several of these businesses.

One very useful thing they offer is to pay for recording the disk! But the general catch is that basically you must give up ownership of the material at some level, which means that IF your music gets noticed (which of course you hope it will) that you could potentially never reap the full benefits of your hard work.

On the other hand, if you release the disk yourself, you don’t get the benefits of the experience and connections that the label might have, so you have less of a chance that your work will be noticed in the first place.

A label’s contributions will generally come down to music production, manufacturing and distribution of the disk, and can also in some cases include advertising, marketing, booking and management so that you are an artist of that record label.

Deciding how to proceed with this crossroads type of question brought us to the typical places: Blog space on the internet and friends in the industry, where we discovered just how many ways there really are to structure a contract, and perhaps someday we’ll need to implement all that we learned in that department. In the end you just don’t know what’s going to happen, so you have to trust your gut.

2. Dehlia 0 ,World 1?

We decided we would take the risk in going on our own, paying for the recording, mixing, mastering, pressing, and packaging ourselves. We then plan to have our management company (the Macro-Management Group) distribute, publicize and promote the disk when it is finished. We applied for our own publishing company.

You can set up your publishing company in several ways, but since we had become an LLC earlier in the year, we established the company Caught By A Train Publishing through BMI. We chose BMI because we were already registered with them as songwriters.

Music published through our company means the band owns publishing rights in case Alison Krauss wants to record any of our songs or something.

3. Anybody got any money?

Now we’re facing adding to our current debt another ridiculous amount that is way more than our modestly-paying gigs will ever pay off in the near future.

We’ve looked into taking out a small loan (great time to borrow in this economy), getting ANOTHER 0%APR credit card and finding a benefactor. So far no benefactors are appearing, and if we can get the studio to set up a PayPal account and accept a credit card we’ll probably go that route.

There are also grants out there that we are looking into–arts programs through the state government sometimes offer small sums to traditional artists, so we’ll try to get some assistance there.

4. Anybody ever recorded a dobro?

It is tricky finding the right studio. Most of the time I just wish someone would tell us what to do. The most important factors include: money, money, equipment, and schedule.

You get what you pay for, but you need to consider how much you need to get. The financial commitment quickly brings into focus all the things that could go wrong after the recording is finished and it is just plain scary to be that vulnerable. So, keeping costs down if possible is certainly a priority.

But at the same time, does the studio have the right equipment to make the kind of recording that will be useful in terms of sales, marketing and promotion, and do they have the right attitude, sensitivity, appreciation for your sound to capture the “magic” you like to think you create?

And last but not least, can they accommodate the schedule of a group of aspiring professional musicians (i.e. people that work 40 hour weeks)?

We’re going to go with a local studio because logistically it’s the only way we can record with family and work demands. I also think this might work well with our band psychologically as well because it is just hard to focus for long days in the studio, and breaking it up makes some sense.

We decided to work with an affordable and flexible studio, relatively new in town, without much experience with bluegrass or even acoustic music. This is balanced by the fact that it seems to be elegantly built for functionality and flexibility…they placed enough separation with baffles they designed to record three trumpets in the same room! Also they have a fantastic mic collection that they keep in a gun safe. We brought a live recording of our tunes to the engineer, so he can give us some feedback on how we should approach recording them.

We decided to break the project into chunks for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is a much smaller financial commitment than a full album. Secondly, our manager can take those tracks and see if a record label might be interested in bringing us on as recording artists. And finally, it’s just easier mentally to wrap your brain around three songs than an entire album’s worth of material. We hope that we can finish within a two-month recording span but this is difficult to predict.

5. What does a producer actually do?

Obviously a real Nashville producer isn’t even part of the equation at this point. So, we’re considering various friends/colleagues with more experience than we have and asking them to give more general advice than actual production advice. (Is that the same thing? We’re still figuring this out).

Next time…a new bass, setting up the studio, sessions, and planning ahead…

Part 2 of this series can be found here.