For several months in 2014, I worked closely with singer-songwriter Dom Ventura, aka Hyphen dom, on producing several songs for his album free-dom in chains?. Arrangements included drums, strings, bass and piano parts to fully round out his songs.

One of the biggest challenges I found as a producer was being able to embrace Dom’s loose attitude towards tempo. His songs would meander, sometimes adding extra beats to a measure, or rushing through a phrase. This meant that I could never record his guitar and vocal takes to a metronome or drum loop. Adding a lush string arrangement was usually not a problem, but adding bass and drums after the fact became a bigger challenge. I solved this by redefining the timing grid in the recording to match his performance, rather then trying to alter his performance to match a regular tempo. This allowed me to quantize the added MIDI tracks to the new grid.

In the end, I produced six of the songs on his album free-dom in chains?. I’m most proud of The DSM-5, as it rocks out the most with my arrangement of drums, bass, and small dashes of tambourine and organ. I also really dig the intro on The Name, which at the time, Dom didn’t get why I asked him to play the base chords for an extra 8 measures.

I got producer credit for these tracks, on which I also arranged and performed all the strings, bass, drums, and piano parts:

• The Said of This
• The DSM-5
• The Window
• Riders
• The Thought of Dust
• The Name

Download Hyphen dom’s albums on iTunes.