Five minutes with alt-pop duo Silver Tower.
What are three key pieces of advice for ensuring top-quality production while on a budget?
Louis Greaves (LG): My first piece of advice is try to know when a song is finished! They say an artist is never satisfied, but music has to be released at some point so having a realistic end goal is crucial. We often make checklists for what we need to record, edit and mix to get a song done.
That being said, anyone who has ever recorded music will have a huge pile of unfinished tracks just sitting about for a rainy day!
Don’t get too carried away with production. Your ears can act like a microscope sometimes, zooming in to the tiniest details – it is easy to forget about the bigger picture. Trust me, a casual listener isn’t going to notice most of the things that you’re sweating over. If the beat and vocal melodies are good, chances are they’ll love the track!
Third, remember that there are better ways to use your budget than on fancy gear and plugins. Most effects can be replicated with free VSTs and a bit of thinking! Your recording, monitoring and mixing room sound is far more important than how fancy your microphones are, so it’s worth investing in good acoustic treatment.
In this day and age, a song’s success seems to be more about how it’s promoted instead of how technically good it sounds. Balance your budget between creating the song and making sure enough actually people listen to it!
You recently released a new track called ‘So Confused’. What was the biggest challenge you faced while making this song, and how did you overcome it?
Oscar Bird (OB): It was originally written for my solo project as a blues-rock song. I sent a demo to Louis to see if he wanted to produce. He said yes, but only if we turned it into eastern European-inspired alt-pop.
A couple of weeks later, I went up to Coventry to get in the studio and put down the vocals.
I have this thing with second verses; the first verse and chorus is generally pretty easy for me to write, but the second verse is often very difficult.
I’d scribbled some stuff down on a notepad, but it wasn’t quite working. Louis then just comes out with “oh, by the way, you’ve absolutely got to see this cathedral”. We’re both atheists, so this was a rather confusing thing to hear mid-session, but we went to grab some lunch and, on the way back, looked at Coventry Cathedral.
It’s a kind of bizarre Brutalist building. It was hard to tell if it was beautiful, ugly or some strange combination of both. However, the idea of huge, imposing Brutalist architecture informed the sound and lyrics – the moment we got back to the studio, the second verse came out without a hitch.
Honestly, that idea of the Brutalist-inspired alt-pop is what started the whole Silver Tower project. It has been the north point on the compass when looking for inspiration or sonic guidance ever since.
What are your top tips for aspiring artists?
OB: If you use a guitar to compose, even if just to work out what chords to use, experiment with different tunings; the wackier the better.
If you play in the same tuning as everyone else, you are likely to come to similar conclusions. Put a guitar in a tuning you have never played in and you will discover that everything you know no longer works and that is quite liberating.
Also, your voice is an instrument. Look after it and learn how to play it. I hear some who worry that if they learn proper vocal technique, they will sound less interesting and lose their style. That’s simply not true.
LG: Make sure you genuinely enjoy the music that you’re playing. Seeing someone care about what they’re making is very inspiring and it may well be the key to making an impression on your audience.
Never say no to an opportunity. Remember that your place as an artist that’s just starting out is widely different to rockstars at the top of the industry – you won’t get very far by being mysterious and cold to your audience. Share your music with the world, say a lot of thank you’s and try to make friends with everyone who supports you. You never know where the next step in the ladder could come from!
What DAW and other equipment do you use, and would you recommend these to others?
LG: I use Pro Tools for production and mixing, but admittedly, it’s quite uninspiring to work with and can be expensive. I’m familiar enough with it to enjoy the workflow and find the possibilities almost limitless, but it’s taken a lot of swearing and sweating to get to this point! I recommend using more affordable options like Reaper, which has some brilliant features and a very active user community.
For our live rig, we use Ableton Live. There isn’t really an alternative – it’s the most versatile and creative live looping solution, and we’re constantly finding brilliant new features and stock plugins. It’s absolutely worth a try and is very hard to stop playing with!
OB: There’s a plugin called Zwobot that we use to pull off all of the live visuals. It does the job for playback and has some moderate levels of sound reactive image production, but if we get the budget, we’ll probably use something with a few more bells and whistles. For the pre-rendered sections, I always use Blender 3D to design and render VFX.
I tend to use Tracktion Waveform to make demos, record parts and come up with random ideas to send to Louis. It’s a bit of an obscure DAW but relatively cheap and I get on well with the user interface.
Describe your songwriting process.
OB: It’s usually a game of digital ping pong, by which Louis and I send ideas and things to one another until we have something that works. Sometimes, I’ll send Louis an idea for a song and he will ‘Silver-Towerify’ it, or sometimes we’ll jam in a studio until we get something that works – it’s pretty unpredictable.
LG: Sometimes it’s the opposite, too! I’ve made beats that feel like Silver Tower candidates, and we’ll improvise and sing to a looped demo until we come up with semi-coherent lyrics. We even use a whiteboard to rapidly jot down ideas, and somehow we usually end up with something that sounds like it was planned!
What’s next for Silver Tower?
OB: We have half-a-dozen singles to finish off in the studio, a couple of which only need some finishing touches. Hopefully, we’ll have more tracks out before the heating gets turned on.
On the live front, it’s going to be a busy few months. We’ve got a few shows lined up in the south, and a slot at Victorious Festival. We’re playing the Showcase stage on the Sunday at 10:15am, so we will be cranking the volume up to wake up all the hungover festival-goers!
LG: I’m very excited to finish off some of our other singles. We’ve played these songs live so much that they’ve evolved into a much more natural version of themselves. It’s like chiselling away at a lump of ideas until we end up with quite streamlined tracks. Now, we’ve just got to record them properly!
Further down the line, we’re hoping to work with several DJs and producers to make a remix project, as well as an EP to showcase some of our more experimental music alongside our tried and tested singles.
Watch this space, because we’re working hard on a lot of music that we hope you enjoy as much as we do!
Silver Tower’s latest single, ‘So Confused’, is available on all major platforms.
