Cedar & Salt started as four songs on a phone recorder and a plan to track the rest live. Jahlani had been playing them solo for a year, and the record needed to keep that room in it — not smooth them into something a machine could have made.
We booked two days at a rehearsal space in Tacoma with the full band in one room: drums, bass, two guitars, and a Wurlitzer that barely made it up the stairs. No isolation booths. If the snare bled into the vocal mic, that bleed made the record.
Tracking live in Tacoma
Most of the album is first or second takes. The band had rehearsed the arrangements for weeks, but we wanted the version where somebody was still deciding what to play — that's the take that made the record nine times out of twelve.
Jahlani sang guide vocals live with the band for feel, then flew to Kingston three weeks later to cut the real takes at our partner studio off Red Hills Road, in the room his father used to bring him to as a kid.
“We wanted the room in the recording, not just the song.”
Mixing the Kingston way
Back in Federal Way, we mixed the way the sound grew up mixing — riding faders in real time instead of drawing automation, spring reverb instead of a plugin, tape delay kicked in by hand on the offbeat.
Nothing on Cedar & Salt is quantized. A couple of the drum fills rush slightly and we kept them, because a room full of musicians rushing together sounds more like reggae than a grid ever will.
It's mastered twice — once for systems, once for headphones — but otherwise it's exactly what came off the desk. That's the whole point of selling it direct: nobody downstream gets to flatten it.