The best sound engineers deploy their years of experience with microphones, mixers, and high-fidelity audio equipment to lovingly capture musical notes and steward them to your sound system. And quite often, when they’re at their best, their work is invisible, removing the barrier between the listener and what they’re hearing. But accomplishing such transparency isn’t easy. To accurately represent sound requires a keen attention to detail, a collaborative approach to working with musicians, and a deep love of all things musical – qualities James Clemens-Seely has in spades.
James is an Assistant Professor in Sound Recording at the Schulich School of Music. He has recorded all sorts of music through his career, from rock bands to full orchestras. We asked him about his work, why he loves recording, and what advice he has for students interested in recording.
Here’s James Clemens-Seely in conversation.
You’ve spent a chunk of time away from Montreal, including living in Banff. Tell us about some of the projects you’ve been working on.
I moved to Banff in April 2017 to take a position as Senior Recording Engineer at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. The role was pretty much a dream job combination of working with artists and performers, producing and recording projects, and mentoring apprentice engineers. Essentially, it was a combination of all the various things I had been doing as a freelancer and part-time instructor in Montreal, but with radically simpler tax accounting and in a beautiful mountain town in the Canadian Rockies.
Based in the Rockies, I worked on numerous projects, including live streams for the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and the Honens International Piano Competition, three Canadian Screen Award-winning documentaries, Juno Award nominated albums for Jens Lindemann (BMus’88) and ES:MO, and a Juno-winning album for Elinor Frey (DMus'12), Rosa Barocca, and Claude Lapalme. Recent/upcoming releases include an album of new trumpet music for Adam Zinatelli (principal trumpet for the Calgary Phil), an album of Rachmaninoff with pianist Nicolas Namoradze, and an album of new Indigenous classical compositions for multidisciplinary artist, Jessica McMann.
Outside of recording, since moving to the Rockies I've gotten very into mountain adventures, spending a good chunk of time snowboarding or skiing, but mostly looking to climb as many things as possible, rock faces and mountains in summer, frozen waterfalls in winter. It's been amazing and transformative to focus on athletic goals that also require focus and clarity of mind, and it's a great excuse to get to amazing places!
How did you first end up in the world of mixing and recording?
In high-school, I was consumed with the desire to learn different instruments and experiment in new genres. At the same time, I was discovering a love for integrating technology into my musical activities. Eventually, I concluded that my quest for maximum diversity and breadth in my musical life would be at odds with pursuing excellence in any one area, but I found it would be super handy for a life of collaborating with different musicians. Working with technology, to be a bridge between performers and their audiences, ended up being the rewarding career I was looking for.
My first recording and mixing projects were bedroom recordings of my own musical experiments, gradually growing into basement studio recordings of various rock bands and other projects I was a part of. Building miniature microphones with one of my best friends in college that we then sold to amateur recordists was a great way to learn about physics and electronics while also generating the income to buy better microphones to use for music recording and gradually build up a small studio’s worth of equipment to work with. At the same time, I was hired to record classical recitals in the chapel using fancier college-owned recording gear, which set me on the dual life of classical and non-classical work that I still love.
How would you describe the art of recording and mixing to someone who has never done it before?
Often, I make the comparison to being someone who designs and constructs chairs: there are infinite ways to do it, some so extravagant they can be found in a museum, some so simple they can be mass-produced at a tiny cost. Just about anyone can tell you when a chair is ugly, uncomfortable, or unstable, but often the best chairs are the ones we don’t even think about, forgetting everything about the chair itself and focusing only on our comfort or whatever it is we are enjoying while the chair holds us up.
Music, or any sound experience, is most often a complex and multifaceted experience, with most humans simultaneously being affected by their company, their environment, their other senses, their memories, their feelings, and so much more than just whatever signals their ears send to their brains. A sound recording on its own is much less impactful than all the combined sensations listed above, and all the technology in the world remains an imperfect simulation of our biological hearing systems, so managing and manipulating that technology becomes a crucial part of getting music to a listener.
Additionally, the nature of performing in an empty room for a collection of microphones is an unnatural experience for most performers and - in the grand timeline of human music-making - still something very novel. Being a compassionate guide through that process is a responsibility I take very seriously.
As you alluded to, recording and mixing are relatively new additions to the world of music-making (i.e. within the past 100-200 years). How do you see the impact of recording technology on music, and where do you see it going?
The impact is tremendous. Listeners no longer need to be in the same space at the same time as performers to enjoy music. We are almost in a situation where anyone in the world can hear anything that’s been recorded and released. In many ways, it's the best time to be alive for someone who loves listening to music. Barring some sort of techno-pocalypse, people will continue expecting more and more technology integrated into their daily lives and ever-increasing access to entertainment and art delivered to them on demand. Creators are increasingly able to realize what they’ve imagined and make it available to listeners, and I think the demand for access and variety will continue to grow.
What opportunities for creativity exist within the world of sound engineering?
There are limitless opportunities for creativity in sound engineering. Depending on the genre and desired presentation, subtlety and sensitivity are required, but the extent of the creative possibilities remains infinite.
What do you think is the most important contribution a recording engineer can make to the music they are capturing?
To handle music with love and care, and to approach collaboration with a kind and nurturing spirit.
We know that rest helps performers stay at their best for a concert. How do you keep yourself at your best for sound engineering?
Rest is equally important on the other side of the microphones, as is tending to all the physiological human necessities. A tired person's hearing changes in measurable ways that will decrease our ability to make choices. And, like with any other kind of work, stress, fatigue, hunger, etc. affect our abilities to maintain perspective, prioritize sensibly, and multitask efficiently – all of which are the name of the game in recording and mixing.
What advice do you have for a student who is just beginning their journey in music and sound engineering? What about for those who are graduating soon?
Embrace variety, learn as much as you can about as many things as possible, get exposed to as many professional working environments as possible (even if purely as an observer at first), pay attention to the sounds and the people making them, and the most important aspect of your career will be the artists and fellow engineers you work with, so be as good and reliable of a fellow human as possible.
What do you consider “essential listening” for any lover of music? Also, what recordings would you recommend for someone interested in hearing great sound engineering?
From a sound engineering perspective, the current orchestral work of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (engineered by Nick Squire, MMus’08), the National Arts Centre Orchestra (recorded by Carl Talbot, MMus’93), the Milwaukee Symphony (recorded by Jeremy Tusz, MMus‘06), and Chicago Symphony (recorded by Charlie Post) are all as good as can be. Most of us learned from Carl Talbot and Tim Martyn who are both brilliant. Everything recorded by my colleague Richard King is brilliantly captured and mixed, we’re lucky to have him at Schulich.
For pop music, the mixes coming from Shawn Everett and Serbab Ghenea are always magnificent. Shawn specifically has a way of having things sound excellent and exciting, a great demonstration of the creative potential in recording and mixing.
