Working With The Legendary Partnership Of Somerville And Mowatt A Legacy Of Music And Friendship
I first encountered their catalog around 2014 when a client needed temp tracks for a documentary that sounded nothing like the usual library music pool. Their work has a specific approach to instrumentation and arrangement that was hard to pin down at the time. The basic method involves combining acoustic guitar lines with layered vocal harmonies and a rhythmic foundation built from hand percussion rather than a standard drum kit. It sounds straightforward until you try to reverse-engineer it. Their collaboration produced roughly forty recorded pieces between 2009 and 2018, though several remained unreleased. The core setup was simple: two songwriters sharing production duties, rotating lead vocal responsibilities, and using a minimal pedal steel and mandolin stack as the tonal backbone. What beginners miss is that the harmonic progression is almost never in a standard major key. They favor modal interchange, particularly borrowing from Dorian and Lydian modes over what appears to be a plain I-IV-V structure at first listen. I spent three weeks trying to transcribe their track "River Line" before realizing the chord voicings were sitting a whole step lower than written on every tab site. The practical workflow they used for recording is worth studying if you want to achieve something similar. They tracked basic rhythm acoustic guitar live in one take, then overdubbed bass and mandolin in the same session. Vocals came last, usually recorded at 10pm or later when the room was quiet. This timing matters more than people admit. Room tone shifts throughout the day, and their vocal blend relies on a very specific ambient character that changes with temperature and humidity.
I ran into a problem when a streaming platform flagged one of my derived mixes because the vocal phase alignment didn't match the original. Their double-tracking technique uses a slight natural delay between takes rather than copy-paste doubling. When I tried to replicate it by copying a take and nudging it by a few milliseconds, the result sounded thin and digital. The workaround was to record a second vocal pass at a different distance from the mic, then blend the two naturally. The phase relationship stays organic that way. The equipment setup was deceptively low-budget. A pair of SM57s on the acoustic guitar, a U47 clone for vocals, and a cheap preamp that added subtle saturation. The saturation is the thing most people overlook. Their mixes have a slight high-mid compression on the master bus that glues everything together without squashing dynamics. If you're trying to produce in a similar style, you don't need expensive gear but you do need to pay attention to how the preamp color interacts with the acoustic guitar strings. There are limitations to this approach. The style works well for folk, Americana, and certain cinematic documentary cues. It does not work for anything requiring a driving beat, electronic elements, or high-energy production. The harmonic vocabulary is also somewhat narrow once you hear enough of it. Repeated listening reveals the same borrowed chord substitutions and the same melodic contour patterns appearing across different songs.
If you want to study their techniques without buying entire albums, the best starting point is their 2015 EP with the sparse arrangement on "October Road." The production choices are more transparent there. From there you can move to the full-length records and notice how the arrangement density increases while the underlying harmonic language stays consistent. One final practical note. The vocal ranges they wrote for are not interchangeable. Somerville generally stays in a lower tenor range while Mowatt handles the upper harmonies and occasional lead. If you're covering their material, don't transpose everything to fit a single voice. The part writing depends on the interval relationships between two distinct range voices, and collapsing that to one singer loses the texture they built into the compositions.
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