Lilian's Experience

Hi! I am a producer and engineer working out of the Seattle area. I studied engineering at Shoreline Community College, interned at London Bridge Studios, and currently work and teach recording out of The Vera Project at Seattle Center. As a producer, I’m the old school love and support type, helping guide artists from preproduction and workshopping their songs (utilizing skills developed while obtaining a BA in creative writing from the University of Washington), coaching performances during recording, while using engineering techniques to inspire creativity, and finally putting the material we’ve created together in a way that presents the artist as the very best version of themselves. Philosophically, I don’t believe in utilizing a computer to “fix it in the mix”. I’ve never found the results to be satisfactory as they rob the music of what makes it human. Even something as simple as having the artists play to a click track can take away the fun and the energy of people playing in a room, if they start honing in that bleep and not on each other. The perfection I’m after is in the expression, not the technical/mathematical. It helps that I record a lot of punk, which works because of the imperfections. As long as the feel is there, as long as we capture the vibe we’re after, and as long as everyone, at every stage of the process, is putting their very best into the work we do, then the results are invariably something magical. (Not that I don’t edit, I just do it by ear using my own internal sense of pitch and timing ? ) While I enjoy working out of studios like London Bridge and Robert Lang, the majority of the work I do is out of The Vera Project. We’re a non-profit, youth focused community and arts center, with an excellent professional level studio. While our gear may not be top of the line, we have a wonderful variety of workhorse microphones, 32 inputs (so I can go as overboard with my micing as I’d do at a larger studio), and an excellent live room with lots of fun acoustic environments (like an aluminum ADA elevator shaft) to give the recordings a unique sound, with the same workflow and approach to recording one would take at one of the larger studios. This is important to me, as it was how I was taught to record, and is way more fun. For me, as the engineer, and for my artists, to see that yes, despite the low cost option, they are getting a real recording experience. While my experience and preference trends towards live tracking, I’ve also had the opportunity to work on more electronic based music, as both a mixing and mastering engineer. I feel there is a lot that we can learn from each other, reaching across genre and style lines, to create a unique and compelling listening experience for the fans, which, at the end of the day, is all that matters. So, if you’re looking for guidance through the recording process, from beginning to end; looking for a big studio recording experience at (somewhat) reasonable prices, and bigass drum sounds, drop me a line. We’ll get coffee ?