Tom Waits once said, “Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble. Everyone who’s connected with it, the studio’s gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that’s left is this recording which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago”

We wanted to bring the audience into this “bubble” and share the magic of the recording process, to give the music lover a taste of what it’s like for the artist to put their music on record, store it in a time capsule, to be found later and reconnected with years from now.

All we needed was a studio and some brave musicians to share their story. The obvious choice were our old partners Sun Studios in Temple Bar, Dublin, where for example Rihanna, Kanye West, and Sinead O’Connor have recorded. In fact, their team was part of the first ever Mini Music Festival which we hosted in a whiskey museum for Dublin Tech Summit After Hours 2017. They’re not only masters of sound but we also love their desire to do things differently!

Usually the recording process is a private affair, quite personal and intimate. Sharing that experience with an audience would be both challenging and rewarding for the artists involved. We had a feeling it would add to their performance, driving them on to play better and equally giving the audience a new found appreciation for how music is made.

Mistakes and perfectionism were encouraged as they would reveal the nuances of setting something in stone. These errors and retakes would show the audience that music isn’t just a solid piece of sound that miraculously comes to be as though always existing as a whole, but rather separate pieces that have to be thought up, created and amalgamated to make up an entire song.

It would also be a performance so the artists would be between two worlds that normally don’t mix. As an artist it is essential that they deliver a great performance. It is what they are born to do! Their mission is to entertain, to bring the audience on a journey of emotions – a successful gig comes down to whether the artist took the listener with them on their musical voyage.

This event would merge the live performance and the recording worlds, requiring the artist to muster up a different mindset that would simultaneously focus their attention on their performance but also on the fact that they were being recorded.

We wanted to give insight into the creative process of recording that the artists go through and bring the audience on an experience of what it’s really like to record. The audience would experience the nuances of a recording session: When putting on the headsets the raw sounds of the artists’ performance transformed into a professionally mixed track with EQ, panning, compression, just like a finished album.

With every event that hasn’t been done before come technical challenges. The 72 hours before Culture Night were filled with nerves and excitement, setting everything up to guarantee a smooth run. We wanted the artists to roll up, feel at home and be ready to rock! After all it would be a very different environment for them.

See what you missed out on below,

featuring Paddy Hanna, Pine The Pilcrow, 5 Dollar Shakes, Curtis Walsh and Dowry (Ena Brennan) and you, the audience. Big thanks to the guys at Sun Studios, Shaun Cadogan, Steve Caffrey, Colm Drennan and Karl Healy. Also, shout out to the music loving beer company O’Hara’s Irish Craft Beers for their support and very tasty ‘Opsession (yum!) plus the Irish Rock ‘n’ Roll Museum Experience for helping out on the night!

If you’d like to get along to unique music experiences like this register here as a Fan. To get to play such events create your Artist account here or sign up as a Host here and bring live music into your life.

See you on the beat!