Allan Fine: Becoming a Full-Time Record Producer
HOME Member since 2018, Allan Boudreau-Fine is a Nashville based record producer with a growing career and a roster of impressive artists. But the road he traveled to find success was not for the faint of heart. Allan shares how he is overcoming the challenges of the music industry in the following HOME Story . . .
As a producer,
I had trouble finding artists who were the right fit for me to work with. Before discovering HOME, there were a few artists I was working with, and we didn’t always click. Sometimes we disagreed on parts, but I felt the need to force projects because I didn’t know many other people in the city who were making music. Other times it was hard for them to take my work or their work seriously. Almost no one was paying me money for anything. Because of that, I couldn’t get my footing and take my career as a full-stop record producer to a more professional level.
I had moved to Nashville to work on music, but I found myself working at a restaurant. It was spirit-crushing not doing music to the level I wanted. Feeling like my career was pointless, and living in the city for no reason...I was in a pretty low spot when I first joined HOME. But the community definitely helped me find my “musical purpose,” so to speak. Now I have a space I can go to where I constantly meet other people who pursue their passion in music.
HOME has helped me tap into an entrepreneurial mindset in order to focus on and solidify what value I can offer to other people. That’s the basis of the community, and that has helped me more than anything else.
One particularly eye-opening moment was during a Teamwork Wednesday call. We were talking about rates for records, and another HOME member basically told me, “The rates you’ve been charging are way too low. I’m going to CashApp you $100 right now and hire you to work on one of my songs.” He hired me for close to double what I was charging at the time. That was very legitimizing.
Before joining HOME
Two years ago I was practically begging people to work with me. I was offering production services for free, approaching artists at shows to ask them if they’ve recorded certain songs they had just performed. A year or so after I joined HOME, I got a DM from an artist that I had seen play once, briefly. They asked if I’d be interested in producing a single. That was the first time that had ever happened the other way around, where an artist approached me and asked me to work on their record as a producer. And that’s happened multiple times since then.
The only other concept similar to HOME I’ve experienced was when I was a student at Vanderbilt. There was a club called RVU Records—now it’s called VRS (Vanderbilt Recording Studio)—which was similar to HOME on the recording side. VRS was a small studio space for students to go in, work on projects, and see other people that you knew. Since we were all just students, it was more based on learning the actual processes and equipment for mixing and recording. Those resources were great when I was still a student. But after I graduated, I needed something more.
To me, HOME is a level up from VRS, where most members are music professionals striving to make careers out of their music capabilities in some shape or form.
In terms of production,
I use the facility for certain things that are beyond what I’m capable of doing in my studio at home—particularly tracking really quiet acoustic instruments or upright bass (my studio’s ceiling is really low, so I can’t fit an upright bass). And since I have a wall-mount AC unit, I’ll book studio time at HOME on especially hot days. I also use Studio A for mixing. I don’t have perfectly flat speakers, but HOME’s studio is very well treated. I’ll often book an hour there when I’m towards the final stages of a mix or master of a project. And particularly for hearing low-end, I trust that room to be more sonically true and without the biases of having an untreated room.
The fact that booking the space is available hourly and on-demand is really powerful. I use it pretty regularly to track things ad-hoc with a hybrid set-up. So, I do most things in my home studio, and things I can’t do at my home studio, I do in Studio A or Studio B at HOME. Obviously there are a lot of studio spaces in Nashville—and a lot of very good studio spaces—but HOME’s online booking system is what makes it such a strong augmentation to my home studio set-up.
HOME helps me make better records, which benefits both me and the people I’m working with. And when I’m working at HOME with artists, they see the facility. Two or three people outside of HOME whom I started working with have joined just because it’s a space they’ve enjoyed using.
Utilizing HOME to grow my career as a producer has been a very steady build.
It’s not an overnight thing. But I’m much further along the path toward where I want to be, and this community has helped me get there faster and faster ever since I joined.