Husband and wife duo, Scott Smith and Jennifer Ferguson Smith (Naked Blue) had the unusual task of collaborating with best-selling novelist – and sometime musician – Lee Child. The outcome was Just The Clothes On My Back, a collection of songs about Child’s long-running fictional character, Jack Reacher. Performed by them, the album was recorded and produced in their home studio.

Recently adding an iD44 audio interface to his “humble home studio setup”, which already included the legacy Audient product Mico, a 2-channel microphone preamp, Scott now has his sights set on an ASP880 8-channel mic pre, which will make The Wood and Stone Room “full-on Audient at that point”.

Scott describes his songwriting process with the celebrated author. “My wife Jennifer and I were fairly terrified in the beginning. We’ve done a ton of songwriting. We also run our own songwriting retreat and have taught writing at other retreats as well. Honestly, we had no idea what to expect. All we could think about was that while Lee has 300 pages to tell a story, we always have to squeeze it all in in 3 minutes!”

“We landed in New York and the first day we mostly finished 3 songs. Lee adapted immediately to the shorter format, and we adapted immediately to “speaking” in his character’s voice. Having been huge fans of his books made it easy to speak through him, and gave us an immediate focus of where we were going with it all. It was such an honour to work with Lee, and truly was one of the best experiences of our lives.”

Scott describes himself as a musician/songwriter/producer “in that order specifically”, avoiding the term ‘engineer’ as it “sounds too tech-y to be part of a creative venture”. He describes his studio setup as “really a quite simple, efficient, stripped-down setup as I find myself doing mostly everything ‘in-the-box’ nowadays.

“The iD44 has become the central hub of my setup. It’s my main tracking device, and for larger sessions, I slave extra channels via ADAT/SPDIF.  It also allows me to A/B my monitoring, and volume control my monitors, as well as functioning as my talkback through headphones.”