House and Garage:
James Tennant
2018-2021
From 2018 through to 2021, I produced tracks for a client, James Tennant.
When he approached me, James was a successful business-owner and enthusiastic ex-raver who had run club nights in the Birmingham area during the UK’s rave heyday.
He had an ambition to develop some of his rough ideas for house tracks into full-blown, radio-ready arrangements and productions, suitable for commercial release.
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A selection of tracks I produced and mixed for James Tennant between 2018 - 2021.
* LISTEN THROUGH YOUR BEST SPEAKERS OR HEADPHONES :) *
Much like a ghost writer, my role was 'ghost producer’. James would come with ideas in the form of loops, descriptions, and reference tracks, and I would be paid by the week to turn these ideas into concrete realities, doing the heavier-duty production, arrangement, mix, and composition work.
Throughout the process, James would guide the development of the tracks, often making tweaks, removing parts, and giving new instructions. He'd often commission vocals for other freelancers he'd sought out, for whom I'd create briefs and guide-tracks.
The job also required a great deal of organisation - proposals, action lists, and countless tables of data - to keep track of the flood of ideas being passed back and forth.
#7 in the MusicWeek Club charts, November 2019
Each track was built from scratch - ie, all of the parts are original, and not sampled. A great proportion of my efforts went into creating thousands of original bass and piano parts, percussion and vocal arrangements, and set-pieces like breaks and drops.
With that said, a couple of tracks could be described as 'covers’, where James would request a remake of a popular track, normally from the 1990s UK rave era.
For each track that reached the end of this process, I'd prepare a final mix and master, and ready it for commercial release, usually creating Radio, Extended, and Dub versions.
#12 in the MusicWeek Club Charts, June 2019
We were fortunate enough to land three of the tracks in Top-20 positions in the Club charts (#12, #12, #7), with several tracks getting airtime on 50+ UK major and independent radio stations, and we shared other successes along the way.
Over the course of three years, I followed a pattern of working roughly 3-4 days per week for James, which largely sustained me while developing my other projects in the remaining time.
By the end of 2021, I'd created thousands of mixes for him - in this playlist, I've compiled my favourite work from this period.
All told, James was a client of once-in-a-lifetime quality, and working with him offered me a fantastic experience to grow and develop as a producer, and as a music-maker in general.
#12 in the MusicWeek Club Charts, November 2020