The Art and Science of Creating an Album | Chris Shreenan-Dyck

About Chris Shreenan-Dyck

Chris Shreenan-Dyck is a renowned Canadian music producer and recording engineer. He was nominated for Engineer Of The Year at the 2012 Juno Awards, and five of the albums he has worked on have won Junos (Canada’s version of the Grammy Award), as well as having received multiple nominations. Chris has recorded such artists as the legendary Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Cockburn, Garth Hudson (The Band), Blue Rodeo, and Ron Sexsmith among others over a career spanning 10 years.

When Chris started as a studio professional, he had the good fortune of apprenticing under such producer/engineers as Grammy award-winning Trina Shoemaker (Sheryl Crow, Iggy Pop, Emmylou Harris), John Whynot (Lucinda Williams, Big Wreck), and Matt DeMatteo (Danko Jones, Ashley MacIsaac). After a move to Toronto from his hometown of Ottawa, Chris was hired by multi-platinum selling artists Blue Rodeo as their in-house producer/engineer.

In 2010, Chris Shreenan-Dyck relocated to Los Angeles and started the premier online music production studio called Sundown Sessions Studio (https://sundownsessionsstudio.com) The virtual studio brings world-class production to songwriters anywhere for a fraction of the price of a typical studio.

Interview Transcript:

Chris Shreenan-Dyck
So essentially, you know, when artists will come to me with a song, and usually they’ll, you know, bring an instrument, so I’ll have a gist of what they’re drawn to. And I’ll hear the song. And immediately you can start to classify it, to what soup maybe jar, I’ll ask them what their favorite bands are, and so on because you, the artist, of course has to be along for the ride. So people ask me to produce, sometimes they co produce, and then I’ve engineered earlier on but so for producing solely, essentially what you’re doing is you’re taking the song, and you’re trying to enhance it, you’re trying to express it in a greater way than it is already. So some songs, you know, you play something from John Prine, you don’t have to do a lot with that kind of stuff, or Dylan, sit around a campfire with a guitar, you can pretty much nail that type of feeling. And then there’s other ones where, you know, you could take an extreme like Radiohead, they go to incredible lengths in their production. And so you need to define what that is with the person that with the arts that is creating that. So then you start to map out and you start to come up with some sort of image or concept of what that song should be. And then as you start to, to lay it out in your mind, you start substituting in instruments, what are the instruments, instrumentation that are gonna express those particular things. Instruments are on to themselves. I mean, they sound nice, but they have to work together with the song. So there’s also things that you have to pay attention to with frequencies. You know, for example, like a drum kit to use a nutshell is designed to hit all the different frequency, you’ve got a kick drum for the bass, and a snare drum, sort of for the upper mids. You’ve got times for the sort of lower mids, you’ve got symbols for the highs. So when somebody’s playing the kit, that the traps actually as they used to call it, that which was a short for contraption, when they invented this. So when you start playing this thing, it hits all the frequencies in the same thing in a mix, and you decide you’re gonna have strings in there, you’ve got to complement that with something else that’s not going to interfere with the strings. And essentially, that’s sort of how you build it. And you can rely on the catalog of course of music that exists out there that the vast catalog nowadays, you can refer to other things and build it accordingly.

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