Capital BS, live to you from our Capital City, Toby Lloyd of Tiny Triumph Recordings chats to us about All-Blacks, gentrification and demo-itis:

Tell us a bit about Tiny Triumph, your role within it, how it came about and everything like that!

I worked in the film industry, and at Park Road Production for close to a decade and the whole time I was working there on the Hobbit films and everything like that I was still producing artists and bands. I ended up getting to a crossroads where I had to decide where my priorities lay, whether it was producing music or mixing film.

I ended up jumping out of film and running the Massey commercial studios, the new ones that they built there for a couple of years. I became the head engineer there and during that time I realised just how prohibitive those large studios are for most bands. I was fortunate enough to work with like Shapeshifter and Hollie Smith and Salmonella Dub and all these incredible artists - but I found that the average three piece Wellington indie band just could not afford those sorts of rates and that was the stuff that I really enjoyed. I didn’t enjoy so much just turning up and hitting record on a really cool band, I preferred being involved in the development of the artist and really properly producing them, which I've been doing for about 15 years.

So my studio was born because of that basically, I saw that in Wellington a lot of artists couldn’t afford the big studios, but if they didn’t go to the big studios then they couldn’t get the quality that you go to big studios for.

I built my studio with the best gear money can buy but did it in a really small footprint so the artists that I work with don’t have to pay a huge amount of money for studio time. It’s done in a way where we can get world class results but using a smaller room rather than a large traditional recording studio room.

Every single day I get bands reaching out wanting to turn up and just record for a day or an hour or whatever but that’s not the way that my studio runs. It’s there as a facility for me to produce them and I only use it to produce artists from. I think that makes my studio a little different to a lot of the other studios around town.

What were the deciding factors in deciding on pursuing music over film?

The thing that I love about music is that I can listen to a Jeff Buckley song and you can just hear his soul, you know? You can hear that it actually really means something to them, and that’s something that I really care about as an artist and as a producer. Working with people who really care about what they’re doing, and you can feel it.

You’d say you’re quite involved in the Wellington music scene?

Oh absolutely, yeah, Wellington is home. I think I’ve been really fortunate to work with a lot of up and coming Wellington acts. It’s a really vibrant scene in Wellington at the moment, there’s so much cool music and so many of my favourite bands are playing at the moment.

I definitely feel like I’m kind of part of the scene. Even though I’m kind of in a weird position, because I work in my studio every single day it means that I don’t get out to shows as much as I’d like. I definitely make an effort to get out to gigs when it’s an artist that I’ve produced, especially like an album release show.

But to me the most important thing is every day that I show up to work, I'm giving the artist that I'm working with the best version of myself. I definitely find that if I go out to shows then I turn up to the studio a little bit hazy and you know. I feel an intense sense of responsibility towards the artists that I work with so it’s really important to me that I turn up to the studio excited and energetic.

What role do you think recording studios such as yours play in supporting NZ music?

I think it’s really really vital. A lot of bands that I work with go down the route of trying to do it themselves. Which is great, it’s so cool that we’re in a day and age where they can do that and should try and do that. But inevitably what happens is that a lot of bands end up reaching a feeling sonically, when they’re comparing themselves to bands that they love from overseas, that oftentimes their production is less wanting.

It’s usually because, to make great quality art in this field, it takes ten thousand hours, it really does. It’s kind of the equivalent of someone wanting to be an All Black but they only play touch rugby once a month after a few beers with their mates at the beach. The quality of music production is so high these days! When you listen to the Lorde’s of the world, they sound amazing. Back in the day when people used to release music on CD it didn’t matter as much if the quality maybe wasn’t up to par because people would listen to a CD and then take it out, there was no direct comparison between artists.

These days though, with everything being playlisted so you’re literally jumping from [insert local band here] to Kings of Leon. A consequence of that is when people listen to music and it doesn’t sound great, they immediately assume that it isn’t a great song, which obviously is not the case.

So that’s where the importance of studios lies. It’s not necessarily the building or the gear it’s the fact that a lot of people that have been running studios have been doing it for 15 20 years and they know that pointing a microphone one inch in a different direction is going to give you a completely different sound.

The other thing that I think is really important about studios like mine is it means that when an artist turns up to make their music all they have to worry about is turning up and performing. They don’t have to worry about the technical, they literally just turn up, play their music and then they get to go home and I carry on working on it. It’s a very different experience than having to research what equipment you need to buy and then trying to put mattresses up against the walls, trying to run cables, wondering why they aren’t sounding right. All of those things that really have nothing to do with making music. I mean, most people got into music because they wanted to be storytellers, not run cables.

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