INTRODUCING MIRIAM / an emerging singer-songwriter

One of the things I like best about my job is working with emerging artists. I am currently working with Mirjam, an emerging singer-songwriter from Zagreb, Croatia and this is a great opportunity to introduce her work here on the Steemit community.

(this is her first single released before she started working with me)

When Miriam first came in, things looked good. She contacted me via a mutual friend and the idea was to record one song and see where we stand. She sent me the video for ''King of the Road'' and I was interested, mainly because of the way she sings. Her singing has this british Jake Bugg kind of feel to it and it somehow doesn't sound artificial when she's doing it which came as a bit of a surprise from someone coming from Croatia. The song she first recorded was called ''Mr. Humble'' and it was this simple up-tempo folk song performed on an acoustic guitar, backed with a bit of bass and freight train drums. I was happy with how the basic guitar and vocal tracks sounded and I asked @dimitrij if I could use his studio for recording drums. I recorded the drums with 7 microphones (kick, snare, two overheads, floor tom, two ambient mics) and things started to look really good. The drums had this warm, organic, country sound to them and I was pleased at how Miriam's drummer delivered the freight train groove. When I got back to my studio I exported the drum tracks to Cubase and started mixing the track. And that's when problems started happening. The song lacked arrangement. The groove was goo and since we were using a metronome everything was falling well into place, but there just wasn't enough in it. It's one of those songs that start happening and sound good but then it just keeps on being the same for too long. The second problem was that it was just to reminiscent of ''Hit the Road Jack''. The vocal melody was different but the overall feeling, groove and the structure of the song was ''Hit the Road Jack'' no matter what I tried to do with it. Here's the export of unmixed guitar and vocal tracks of Mr. Humble and a video of ''Hit the Road Jack'' for comaprison:

After a few months we decided to give everything a second go. She came to my place with a guitar and I decided to change my approach to the recording and producing process. I told her to sit down and play me everything she's got. It turned out she has these great slow tempo folk songs that reminded me of The Tallest Man (but this time in a good way) and out of 10 songs she played, I decided we should work on 4. The other difference was the recording itself. The first time around she wanted this warm guitar sound and she was kind of plucking the basic chords around without any true feel to it. This time, she used a capo so the guitar sound was way more clear, bright and present. The other thing was the metronome. When she was recording with the metronome the first time, she was just too rigid, trying too hard to hit every note exactly on point with the metronome. This time I told her to concentrate on the first beat of every bar with the metronome and to play the inbetween notes with more feeling, not trying to hit everything like a robot. The difference was amazing. The song she recorded is called ''Let Me Lay Somewhere'' and it's a beautifully simple folk song with clever lyrics, ideal for sitting at home wrapped in a blanket while it's snowing outside. This time the mixing was a real pleasure. I managed to get a really warm and present sound and her singing was way better than on Mr. Humble. Here's the difference:

I'm looking forward to working on the rest of the EP and I'll keep you posted on how things are going. I'm really happy with this mix but I'd appreciate any suggestions on how to make it better or different if you feel it needs to be something other than it is now. Also, tonight is the show I was talking about in my last post so fingers crossed and wish us all a lot of luck!