Flash-forward to a Friday night far removed from any chicken-fried leisure and find yourself at Rocky’s Bar in downtown Bowling Green, the city’s buzzing punk and hard-rock music underbelly. Since the eruption of Bowling Green’s very own Cage the Elephant, a nationally touring alternative rock band formed by a group of Bowling Green-bred high schoolers who first cut their teeth at local staples like Rocky’s and Tidball’s around the mid 2000s, the city has become synonymous with loud music and all the grunge and sludge found in between.
On this particular Friday, however, the bar’s overwhelmingly woolly and Pabst Blue Ribbon-cradling patrons appear to have noticed something quite unusual — as opposed to the bar’s typical snare drum and power chord-laden offering of whatever musical talent it appears to have scraped off the street only hours before, this band seems different. Fitted with a black and dreadlocked frontman, a frizzy-haired keyboardist dressed head-to-toe in black and a redheaded bassist who looks shockingly normal in comparison, local hip-hop trio Waco Bell takes its stand at Rocky’s highly sought-after stage. Though the group has played Rocky’s before, its performance on this night appears to be especially ignited.
Rapping at the forefront, 23-year-old Reuben Bynes of Bowling Green slices through bars with a kind of in-your-face gusto even the most hardened of punks can bob a head to.
Keyboardist Scott Gardner, 30, a Bowling Green resident since 2001, and Bowling Green native Lee Williams, 27, the band’s bassist, stand behind Bynes with a calmness not indicative of their past musical ventures. Serving from 2009-2015 in Bowling Green standout Sleeper Agent, a band that achieved mild fame around the early 2010s and once appeared on “Late Show with David Letterman,” the two are regarded as legends in some circles.
As the group closes out its set, each member packs up his gear, steps off the stage and exits through the bar’s back doors.
Tonight was the band's first live performance since releasing its most recent album, "Black Matters," on Oct. 20, which it worked on for nearly a year. However, throughout the band’s entire 45-minute set, no one seemed to notice.
Home
Located in a dark, thin alley somewhere between State and 13th streets stands a gate reminiscent of a number of Hollywood-depicted haunted mansions. Fit with its own specialty padlock, when open, the gate provides access to a property Gardner and his mother have called home for nearly the past 20 years. Originally constructed in 1902, the property features a house and a diminutive shack placed just right of the house’s back door.
This shack, known fittingly to the members of Waco Bell as “The Beat Lab,” has served as the band’s rehearsal and recording space since February 2015 when Gardner and Bynes first started making music together. Boasting no more than a 250-square-foot interior, the one-time equine carriage house is tough to traverse, especially after taking into account the space’s overall lack of lighting and random lumps of audio recording gear and instruments strewn throughout.
“Everything’s black in this room,” Gardner said, dressed in all black himself, his hands resting in the pockets of a tight-fitting pair of jeans from which they do not move unless holding a cigarette.
Before arriving in Bowling Green as a fifth-grader, Gardner lived in Illinois, New York and Mississippi. Not knowing anyone, he took to the new city by making hip-hop beats on his PC through a pirated version of digital audio software then known as FrootyLoops, now FL Studio. The software was his introduction to the oftentimes expensive and meticulous work of audio producing, which eventually led him to record and produce music for his own bands and numerous other local artists.
“It means that I can have that level of quality control that I’m so obsessive about,” Gardner said about his passion for producing audio.
But how does a guy in a century-old shack create professional-quality music?
The answer isn’t one-size-fits-all, but the following is a quick and detailed rundown of the process Gardner adheres to in the initial stages of recording a single song.
Finding a beat
Before any recording can be done, there has to be a beat. Though Gardner moved away from FrootyLoops years ago, he is still able to create beats purely in-house from a more advanced audio software called Logic Pro and a 2011 Apple MacBook. With a set of electronic drum pads, a laundry list of downloadable drum samples and electronic keyboards that plug in directly to a MacBook-compatible audio recording interface from which all the magic happens, the power to create is completely at Gardner’s fingertips.
“One way or the other, a beat will start,” Gardner said. “Sometimes it’s completely by me, sometimes Reuben might find a beat that he likes and then bring it to me.”
At that point, Gardner compares the next stage to that of a dog chasing its tail. Though he and Bynes may agree on a beat to work with, often Gardner will adjust a mix to best “punch with” or isolate Bynes’ verses depending on what’s needed.
“That’s why it’s kind of like you’re chasing your own tail,” Gardner said. “You’re, like, replacing pieces of yourself as you build yourself up.”
From there, Gardner introduces Williams to the track, who works to churn out a suitable bassline as quickly as possible.
“Send me a bare drumbeat and give me two days,” Williams said at a brief band rehearsal in early December while clutching his prized 1978 Fender Jazz Bass. “I’ll come back with a bassline.”
The band then works to get a “scratch tape” recorded for the song, which is essentially an unedited demo that helps the band decide what does and doesn’t make it into the song’s final version.
With Gardner’s beat already laid onto the track, Williams records the scratch bass section through a cable plugged into both his bass and the MacBook-compatible interface. The interface then transfers the bass sound cleanly and directly into its own channel within the same track as Gardner’s beat.
The process functions exactly the same for vocals but with a microphone cable plugged into the interface. From there, Bynes is able to record vocal channels directly onto the scratch beat and bass track with the press of a “Record” button, which Gardner does from just feet away, seated in front of his MacBook and ensuring the process runs smoothly.
Though said process was once reserved for a team of audio technicians who manually faded in and out every instrument on a single track, Gardner said rapid advances in audio recording software and equipment have made the job something anyone can do.
“That job that was maybe a dozen people can kind of be reduced to one person in their bedroom,” Gardner said. “The technology is there to where you can have something that is as good, if not better, fidelity-wise than what would’ve been released professionally 20, 30 years ago.”
Ex-audio engineer intern at esteemed Nashville studio The Tracking Room, where the likes of Taylor Swift and Tim McGraw have recorded, Max Erskine, 24, of Bowling Green knows this all too well. Shortly after graduating with a degree in audio recording and production from Middle Tennessee State University in May 2017, Erskine founded his own studio, Erskine Sound, in the woods of Allen County, Kentucky.
Though Erskine witnessed all of the particulars of a professional studio during his time at the Tracking Room, where the height of the ceiling, angle of the walls and wall material in every recording area were designed specially by an acoustic engineer to maximize recording potential, he said he’s come to realize there’s no one way to record music.
“Ultimately, no matter how skilled you are or how lack of skilled you are or what equipment you’re using, if it sounds good, it sounds good,” Erskine said.
However, given the space limitation of “The Beat Lab” and the fact its interior has not been professionally treated, Gardner admitted his studio is less suited for a band that may prefer to record all of its instruments at a single time through multiple cables and a set of drum mics. Due to the electronic nature of Waco Bell’s music, though, Gardner said he believes his space is perfect.
“If you’re more of an electronic musician … your studio, your instrument can all be even on an iPhone these days,” Gardner said. “When you have sort of an electronic medium of the music and the composition is so tied into the recording, it’s almost like, ‘What would we even do in a studio?’”
Though Gardner also recorded his previous band Sleeper Agent’s scratch tapes in his studio, that was where the process ended. The tapes would be sent to the band’s music label, which then contacted a professional producer and scheduled paid-for studio time, and the band would follow suit.
Without the same luxury, Waco Bell has avoided recording with professional studios, which typically feature rates of $50-$500 per hour, according to The Recording Connection, an industry-recognized online audio production program, website. Instead, Gardner records every Waco Bell song intended for mass sharing in his backyard. The process for recording and sharing a song’s final version differs only slightly from demo recording.
Perfecting
Once a scratch tape has been sufficiently analyzed, Gardner organizes the final recording process by arranging a single session for each musician to record his part on a song as well as possible. Though individual tracks can be sliced and meshed with others depending on what sounds best, Gardner aims to get a single perfect take from everyone.
“We like that magic of or insanity — whichever way you want to look at it — of, like, ‘Let’s try to get it to where start-to-finish it’s rocking,” Gardner said.
Gardener said he especially depends on getting this “magic” from Bynes, who has the power to make or break a song with the emotion of his vocal performance. He said Bynes typically delivers exactly as he needs him to.
“[Bynes is] very much a ‘from the gut’ performer,” Gardener said. “It’s almost going to be less magical if he thinks about it and does it a million times.”
Once every musician’s part for a specific song is recorded, Gardener can begin the mixing and mastering process, which is most basically described as a rigorous task in ensuring everything sounds great. This entails choosing each musician’s best recorded takes, splicing certain takes together when necessary and placing effects like compression and equalization on every track to maximize sound quality. For “Black Matters,” an eight-song album, mixing and mastering took Gardener from March to early October.
“I bounced out probably 100 different versions for every song,” Gardener said. “I have that obsession where it’s not done until I know it’s done.”
Though Bynes and Williams are typically less particular, each said he appreciated the extreme attention to detail Gardner maintained in making each song sound professionally-recorded.
“I think it’s awesome that Scott has the time to double down and listen to something over and over again until it’s literally like a living, breathing thing,” Bynes said.
“We were going to take it from you,” Williams said jokingly while speaking with Gardner about the band’s recent release. “But then it was worth it.”
How to master a song
With mixing and mastering complete, the last step in getting a song heard is sharing it. Waco Bell does this through online music sharing service DistroKid, which costs only $20 per year to use. By uploading the mixed and mastered Logic file to DistroKid, within two weeks the file will be listenable across almost all major music platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.
Gardner said he believes sharing the music he’s worked so long with is one of the most difficult aspects of producing, which he hopes he gets to do for much longer. Until then, he has goals in mind.
“Not only do you pour yourself into creating it, but then you pour yourself into trying to get people to listen to it,” Gardner said. “I don’t feel I’m at Rick Rubin level yet, but hopefully I’m getting there.”
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