In a country town filled with upscale studios and musicians, Nashville’s pop and rock scene is flourishing again, in part because of producers Jason Bullock and Brian Carter, who are carving out a niche by offering quality demos and records on the cheap to bands who can scarcely afford a B-room session.
Throw a dart at the local rock music listings for any given weekend, and you’ll probably find your way back to Bullock or Carter in a game of six degrees of separation. Together, they’ve recorded a sizable chunk of some of the more prominent rock acts in Nashville and Murfreesboro over the past few years: The Features, Feable Weiner, The Privates, Slack, jetpack, The Hotpipes, Character and Glossary, to name just a few.
As any struggling local musician can attest, it takes more than plugging in at The End once a month to make noise in a town saturated with bands competing for a solid draw. In music industry talk, a band are only as good as their demos, so it’s essential that they document their aspirations, and a quality recording can be the difference between making a decent living and drowning in a sea of amateurs.
Producers play a crucial role in the process, often lending bands—or clusters of them—a signature sound. Some, such as Bullock and Carter, are also forging connections among the bands they record. Most of the acts who find their way to the producers’ studios have arrived by word-of-mouth, and it’s not uncommon for the bands to start booking shows together, bridging the gap between some of the fragmented cells scattered across Nashville’s variegated musical landscape.
A native of Birmingham, Ala., Bullock has been recording in some fashion for more than six years. Now 27, he’s established a reputation for achieving excellent results with quick turnaround, sometimes completing as many as six songs in a day at Lake Fever Productions, his studio on Third Avenue South.
The work is paying off. One of Bullock’s first engineering projects, the Feable Weiner album Dear Hot Chick, is being distributed nationally through DogHouse Records. Local rockers The Privates had less than a year of live shows under their belt, but with Bullock’s sharp recording of their self-titled debut, they recently found themselves with the eighth-best selling record at Grimey’s. Bullock’s crisp production on the Slack demos not only secured them a management deal with Union Entertainment, it also caught the attention of L.A. producer Sean Demott, who just recorded their new album. Bullock’s brisk, utilitarian approach might not be radical, but it has drawn a host of local bands to his studio—all of them appreciative of his flexible payment plans. “I work a lot on the 'I can pay you later’ system,” he laughs.
“Bullock has become incredibly good at what he does,” says Jonathan Rogers, singer for The Hotpipes. “He promotes local acts by making affordable demos and full-lengths for bands that can’t afford to record at larger, more prominent studios. In that sense, he is one of the most important people on the local scene today.”
Producers often tell bands how and when to change their sound, but Bullock has distinguished himself for his hands-off style of recording—and by not overproducing bands’ music. He’s particularly good at distilling a group’s sound, infusing it with punch and a sheen that never feels too polished. His approach to recording also highlights a band’s strengths without hiding their flaws—something that can be heard, for example, in how the crack of the drums is offset by seemingly unprocessed guitars and vocals on The Bubblegum Complex’s Looking Down at Cloud Nine, which just came out on Heatstroke Records.
Unlike most Music Row producers, Bullock doesn’t engage in traditional preproduction, which means he doesn’t go over songs before recording to make suggestions. Rather, he just listens to what bands want do to, often over a meal at Fiesta Mexicana up the street, and delivers a big, dynamic sound with Cubase, a digital program comparable to Pro Tools. “What I like about working with Cubase is having as many tracks as I need,” Bullock says. “You never know what may work, but with digital editing, it may not work here but it may work there. So I can literally push, pull and stretch things to fit where I want them to.”
Thirty-six miles down the road, Carter, a mainstay of the local Murfreesboro music scene since 1990, is at work at Paradox Productions, the ’50s- and ’60s-style studio he’s outfitted with analog gear and imbued with vintage charm. Later this year, The Features EP he produced, The Beginning, will be rereleased in the UK on Fierce Panda records. (The band recently signed with Universal.) The album that Carter recorded for the alt-country duo Porter Hall, TN helped them secure a deal with the Slewfoot label.
Carter’s facility with different recording techniques and his willingness to push bands to get their best performances have won him their loyalty. Joey Kneiser, the singer and lead guitarist for Glossary, says that his band recorded all three of their albums with Carter; during the recording process, Kneiser says, they “think of him as another member of the band.”
Carter’s recordings are marked by a warm, organic quality, often textured by a dose of natural or plate reverb. His real talent, though, is for fusing the old and the new, for applying vintage recording techniques to his modern subjects while maintaining the energy and spirit of their performances. Carter captures this energy through the use of his “live room,” a spacious rectangular area where band members record without being isolated from each another.
“I recorded some stuff with Matt Mahaffey [of the band Self] at MTSU once, and we were all hanging out playing in these isolation booths,” Carter says. “When you see pictures of people recording from the ’50s and ’60s, they’re just hanging out smoking and spilling beer on their guitar and playing in an open room. It sounded great. Why do we have to have a freakin’ hyperbaric chamber to play in? I don’t get it. It should be like when you’re playing live—everybody looks at each other from across the room, everybody plays off each other. They can hear what the other person is doing.”
If Bullock and Carter were to sit down to discuss local bands and how they might produce them, they likely would engage in a friendly debate about their different recording techniques and the merits of using digital (Bullock) vs. analog (Carter) gear. They’d find common ground, though, in their support of local music in Middle Tennessee—and their belief in its staying power.
Some have argued either that there isn’t much of a “scene” here or that if there is, there isn’t enough of a central, defining element to get excited about. Bullock disagrees. “I think Nashville has a true scene, because I’ve been in a city where there isn’t one, and I know the difference,” he says, referring to his hometown of Birmingham.
“The difference is in the bands,” he continues. “I don’t know how to define it. What makes it is the level that so many of the bands are at here in Nashville. They aren’t just doing it for fun. They are serious about being a band and going on tour, playing shows, getting a record deal.”
Carter agrees. “There is so much collaboration between musicians here,” he says. “Older bands play out and get shows for newer bands all the time and help usher them in. That is what really makes it.”
