Welcome to Ben Ross Music

The making of The Bullets and the Stars

A bunch of people have been asking me about how I made The Bullets and the Stars. It seems artists don’t generally disclose their secrets, but we’re musicians, not magicians…so why not?

I actually recorded the album entirely in my little apartment on a noisy street in State College. I recorded the album on a few year old Mac laptop using Logic and around probably $1000 worth of recording equipment: a Mackie Onyx mixer, with a bunch of relatively inexpensive mics (primarily a Shure Beta 87A and Studio Projects C1). (By the way, I very highly recommend that Beta 87A.)

I played all the instruments, except for the strings, horns, and some of the piano. I laid down the tracks one by one…typically starting with a guitar or the drums, and then adding the rest of the instruments and vocals. Yes, this takes a really long time, even if you have a pretty good idea of what you want to add…if a song is 4 minutes long and has 10 different tracks (a few guitars, drums, bass, vocals, backup vocals, etc.) then there is really 40 min of music there. So even if you do everything in one take (which very rarely happens) it takes hours to record a song.

The album came together over about a period of two months. I did some preliminary mixing, and then had everything professionally mixed and mastered by Bob Klotz (www.klotzaudio.com), who really did a great job at opening up and breathing life into the tracks.

And there you have it! The Bullets and the Stars was born!