Howard Benson - Production Style

Production Style

"The main focus for me, you know, is on the songs, and the lyrics and the vocals. I don't let anybody in the studio when I'm doing vocals. I do them myself. No one's allowed in. That's like, to me, where I really get the impact of the record across. That's something that I didn't really pay attention to early on. I was like, 'Oh, I've got to get this great guitar sound, that's important.' It is important, but what's really important is the singing, the performance of the singer.

He has also expressed the need for star power in an artist. "When I don't see that compelling element in an artist or an artist's message, that spark you need to be an entertainment star, it can be hard. You can fix everything else, but you can't fix that."

Benson prefers to record in what he calls a parallel system: "We don't do one thing at a time. When we're doing our guitars and bass, a lot of the time we're recording vocals in another room at the same time. We constantly keep everybody working. So the songs are coming together all at once." After the recording of an album he has usually brought everything to his home studio, Sparky Dark Studios, where he does the arrangements, adds harmonies and his own keyboard parts. His personnel consists of main engineer Mike Plotnikoff, who had previously worked at Little Mountain Sound Studios, Pro Tools engineer Paul Decarli, Guitar tech Mark Van Gool, who had worked for Dave Navarro, and second engineer Hatsukazu "Hatch" Inagaki

Benson has exclaimed that he is happy to jump genres in his work, going from pop to really hard rock, and everything in between. "I worry about the songs only. If you worry too much about genres, it'll cause trouble as they change so much and so quickly."