How Tranquillamente Got Made – Behind the Music
There is one room in my house where everything happens. It includes making the music, the pressure and anxiety of just starting, or worrying about failing, and the tranquility when something comes to life.
My studio isn’t a commercial space. It’s not rented by the hour.
Its the room I have moved through multiple residences over 20 years, some equipment 24 years old from when I was a kid, writing song books from 2007 intact. If theres one thing I kept with me my entire life it was my music, anything else ive ever owned has been destroyed, but the music traveled and survived. Its been built up to 10s of thousands of dollars, stripped to 4 track recorder, to a phone, to a ipad, back up to 30 guitars and drum kits, to where I am at now. Sometimes I forgot that making the music you dont need anything but a single instrument and your talent, hell you just need sheet music blank paper and a pen. But I’ve built this room throughout years in Ohio, over and over again—
Cubase running on the machine always, pianos within reach, and mic’s techniques of simplicity after I lost my live setup. Singular mic, or ran through a live mixer is how I prefer direct into the computer. For electric guitars I still use this xbox 360 game cable from that plugs directly into the guitar if I want to use pure computer fx for some funky sounds with VST instruments. Then came the day where I found I had 300+ vst instruments, same with the real instruments TOO MUCH. So for this album and my demos recently not the Tranquillamente Album Ive used single, my FIRST acoustic guitar, and a Yamaha piano with a Single Blue condenser mic that they dont make anymore but I love.
Anyway my work clothes and door dashing bag is usually somewhere nearby, reminding me that if I dont do this and get my music figured out soon thats my future. That’s the reality of being an independent artist in 2026. You make it work in the space you have. And ANYONE can make professionally sounding track with a phone and a mic plugged in. My demos now actually I have gain and extra backround noise to try to get that demo feel because it all feels too clean. And sometimes roughness is good to high flaws in demos.
But back to the currently release for May 1st 2026
Tranquillamente was recorded entirely in that room. Well this iteration of it. No outside producer, no session engineer, no studio day rates. Just me, the instrument, and whatever version of myself showed up on a given afternoon. The first song was written pen and paper after getting out of the pysch ward from a suicide attempt, others were written based of inspirations of just feelings of lonliness, especially at night. And one song thats just a composition experiment to find any emotion I havn’t heard before.
The recording process was simple by design. I’d sit down, work through a motif with pen and paper, write some basic harmony, take those motifs get a nice a, a1, b, b1 and so on and just run with it then on the piano.
After writing it down by hand going on Dorico (rip finale) and engraving the sheet music. Something about seeing your music in sheet music form is just the best. Then I would run it once or twice clean, and commit. I wasn’t going for perfection — I have a composition degree and I’ve spent enough time chasing perfect takes over 10 years to get that damn degree quitting and stopping multiple schools to know they usually cost you the thing that made you want to record in the first place. What I wanted was presence. You can hear it or you can’t, and no amount of editing adds it after the fact. I recorded the pianos direct in with reverb, and mic overhead, for each song. They probably sound like demos, I just wanted that real feeling, I didnt want a perfect piano piece.
“Lumen” — the track I’m leading with — was one of the “cleaner” but dirtier grittty recordings after it was finsished ,which I think brings out the quality of the slow notation and melancholic sadness. It came together quickly, which usually means the idea was already whole before I sat down. Actually most of my music classical and my regular folk, rock, or singer songwriter, or poems even come out in one take and thats it. If I sit and try to write it, I can get OK songs, but the best come from spontaneous emotion and my first cuts always seem to be the best. Sometimes a piece has been living in your hands and head for a while before you realize it. That one had been. And so had the others.
I did minimal mastering, to keep the feeling of the tracks being “sounds between the noise” the theme of the album, There’s a control you get from that which I’m not willing to trade away, even when it means not as quality recordings and plenty of more second-guessing. I wanted the pieces to feel like they were being playing right with you, so I didnt add post effects, edit the volumes, I kept it how It came out with a DI and a condenser mic and piano. The final mixes on this record are the closest I’ve gotten to what I actually heard when I played the pieces. That matters to me more than I can explain.
Twelve tracks. One room. Recorded and “mastered” by the same person who wrote them.
Tranquillamente is out May 1st. Apple Music, Spotify and Vinyl through soundcloud. I will add links as we get closer. Sheet music is also available for purchase on the picture below if you click the image, this also includes poems from Trauma: Songs and Poems of a Failed life the book that was written and released at the same time this was written. I picked poems that represented each track individually.
I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you return for my future albums in other genres this year. My goal this year was to record my Piano album, and my 7 albums and 2 eps that completely written from 2009-now that I was always to scared to record. Its alot of work, but Im going to get atleast demos out of them all, and I just have to do it.
Dont be scared, Take the fractures of your life and turn them into a form of positvity
— Matthew / Fracture & Form
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