Jen Miller: "Less than 3% of all music producers and engineers are women"

Jen Miller has a very masculine energy. Not Headliner’s words, but her own, although you'd expect nothing less from a woman that has challenged misogyny and the music industry’s lack of diversity through every step of her career. The American music producer, songwriter, and recording artist explains why she founded Girl Gang Music, The Indigo Incubator, and gives an insight into her home studio.

What was the music scene like in Columbus, Ohio growing up? How did you find your way into music?

I was definitely very obsessed with music as a kid, but I didn't come from a musical family. Ohio is kind of a rural state, so it's football, sports and drinking. As a real young person I was obsessed with music, although I wasn't playing music or doing anything. 

I was pursuing playing soccer, but I blew my knee out when I was 17, and that was the perfectly imperfect timing for that because that's about when you're signing your deals to go and play. Soccer was everything to me. I was like, ‘I'm a soccer player’, so once that was over, I was like, ‘What am I? What do I do?’ That's why I started teaching myself piano, because my parents had my grandma's piano in their house.

After you booked some local shows in coffee shops and bars, you ended up touring with a folk band when you were 19 and sharing stages with Ed Sheeran and Twenty One Pilots. How did that happen?

I ended up going to school in Ohio called Wittenberg, and there was not much going on in the town, so I started playing shows, because why not? I started playing in coffee shops in Springfield, Ohio and there's not very many people there, it's got a low population, but I was cutting my teeth playing live. I started doing that every weekend or whenever I could during school. 

Eventually, a few guys showed up at one of my shows, and they were like, ‘Hey, we've been trying to get in contact with you; we want to be your band’. I was like, ‘I'm not really looking for a band!’ Long story short, they became some of my best friends and we started booking and doing our own tours around the US while I was in college.

In my junior year I decided I wanted to go to Edinburgh to work for the Scottish Parliament and do research. I was studying political science, not music. So I went to Edinburgh for about six months and I worked with a member of Parliament there, but I still wanted to book a few coffee shop gigs. 

This dude comes in and introduces himself and says his name's Mike, he's playing a show, and he goes by the pseudonym Passenger. He was super nice and said, ‘If you want to come and play some songs, we're doing a show’. I'm like, ‘Sure, who's the lineup?’ He's like, ‘It's me, this guy Steve Larson and this guy Ed Sheeran’. I was like, ‘Sounds good. How many songs do you need?’ 

That actually happened. And we played The Caves in Edinburgh, which is this amazing venue that's all rock and it's illuminated really dimly. I did not really realise how famous they were about to all be, but I think that's exactly how the music industry works: be prepared for opportunity, and do it if it comes. Twenty One Pilots are friends from Ohio and I played some small shows with them.

How did you find your way back to music after your political science degree and moving to D.C?

I took a political communications job and did that for a few years in DC. It's funny, I thought being in a political field would be a little less misogynistic. It's not. That was a little disheartening and I got very jaded very fast being in DC. So I started going into studios at night basically, just making friends with the engineers there and asking if I could help in any way.

Through those experiences, I started learning what it is that an engineer does. Before that I had been an artist, folk singer, songwriter, and I always loved so many other types of music, but I didn't know how to make them. 

Folk music was super accessible to me because you just need one instrument and your voice, and you have a song. Whereas if you're trying to make rock or hip hop, there's definitely so much more production and sonic development that goes into that type of music. Being around other people making it and seeing all the nitty gritty steps of that really showed me that I can do this.

But I started doing that a lot to the point where I was going into work sleep deprived, because I would work from nine to five and then take a cab to a studio, and I'd be there until one or two in the morning, or later. On a random Tuesday, I just met my mental limit. I pulled my boss aside, and I was like, ‘I quit. I'm done. I'm moving to Nashville or LA’.

Girl Gang Music is an online community and network to support women and gender non-conforming folk within the music industry. What gave you the idea to launch this?

One of the things that stood out to me and why I founded Girl Gang Music was because I was regularly the only woman in the room, the tour bus or at the soundcheck. I was always like, ‘Where are my girls at? Why is this a boy’s club?’

I will say, I have very masculine energy and I started realising as I got older just how much I use that to protect myself and to get myself out of strange situations. Because in the music industry, there is some amount of risk. It's an industry where people get taken advantage of.

The reason I wanted to become a producer is because I felt like I wasn't being listened to in sessions, and that got really old as an artist, like, ‘I'm paying you. This is my song’. And for some reason, the final product never aligned with what I thought I was communicating very clearly. I don't know if that's a sonic choice thing, or if that was a deliberate thing that those guys were like, ‘I know better than this girl,’ but it just got old. 

Or when touring, I’d go to load-in and people would ask me who in the band I was with, and I'd be like, ‘I am the artist’. All that micro aggression stuff got really old. I started Girl Gang Music in 2016 as I was pivoting into music more full time, because I wanted to raise visibility of the 3% of the female engineers out there that do exist, and connect them to artists to each other. 

It's hard to find like minded people that you feel safe and comfortable to work with, and that's the goal of Girl Gang Music.

You also founded The Indigo Incubator, a music production company that helps indie artists, producers, and musicians grow. What inspired you to launch this?

As soon as I was doing music full time, I realised that all my friends and colleagues who also were able to do music full time had things they specialise in. So they might be a mix or master engineer, or they might be a topliner, or they sing on sync projects. All of them are looking for collaborators. 

I had so many people reaching out to me like, ‘Hey, do you know a mix engineer that could take on a four song EP, but my budget’s only $1,000?’ Or, ‘Do you know someone who's producing R&B and might want to work on my single?’ I couldn't take on all that work, but I knew that there were so many talented people within an arm's length of me and that it might be the perfect thing for their skillset. 

So I set up The Indigo Incubator to connect people – operating like a small indie label without taking any money from them, but still participating and fostering their growth as an artist. A lot of the time, you don't know what you're looking for and you need to talk to somebody to soundboard it, so that was what I did for everybody through The Indigo Incubator. 

I'm doing two albums for The Indigo Incubator myself currently, and I'm still connecting people every day and trying to let them work out their own rates and their own workflow.

In 2020, you were featured on Universal Music Group’s 100% Her album – the first ever album created, mixed, and mastered entirely by women. Were you surprised that this had never been done before 2020?

That's kind of mind blowing, right? Universal said it was the first time that a whole project was 100% made by women. I couldn't believe it, either, but that was a very cool project. 

The thing that really startled me were the numbers about women in the industry. I knew it was low, but the idea that literally less than 3% of all music producers and engineers are women…that is bad! That's nowhere near gender parity.

You released the self-produced, mixed, and mastered Waiting in 2021, and were very much in control of all the production decisions for your most recent EP, Please Come Back To Tennessee. Do you prefer to oversee the entirety of a project yourself?

Yeah, I produce pretty much everything that I have out, although there's a few songs that have been collaborations with other producers. I mixed and mastered Waiting myself, and I made that whole project in a month. 

I basically made a song a day and selected some of them to finish and put out – just to prove that I could because I'm used to having other people mix and master things for me. It was just one of those things where I was like, ‘I'm gonna finish this myself, and no one else is gonna touch this project’.

What is some of your go-to kit in your home studio?

I have a home studio and I'm actually about to be moving into a new place where I'll have an A and a B room for The Indigo Incubator, which is going to be amazing. So it's about to be expanding into two home studios which is cool, because depending on where you are in Nashville, it's legal to have a home studio as long as you operate within working hours. Some parts of the town have made it not legal, which really sucks for anybody who has home studios, but my home studio right now is sweet!

I’m using a Focusrite ISA One preamp, which I think should be anyone's first preamp, because it's so versatile and sounds very, very good. The price is super accessible, too. I use it a lot for my vocals and it sounds sick through my Jazzmaster Fender bass, and sometimes I run my Rhodes keyboard through it just to give her a little zhuzh. It's one of those toys that you fall more in love with the more you use it. It's very versatile and really user friendly.

As somebody who doesn't have a classical music education and who doesn’t have an audio engineering degree that I spent four years learning, I could understand and get to know the ISA One in about a month's time, whereas if you gave me a whole rack of very complicated routing, I would probably not know what to do with that. That's why I say this is a great first preamp for anyone.

Are you working on new music at the moment?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm working on three albums for some artists that will be coming out probably next year. I can't name who, but that's happening, so stay tuned for that. 

I'm also going to be releasing some music of my own. So starting in March, I'm going to be releasing two singles a month for the rest of the year. That's intense, but what can I say? I'm an intense person, and I make a lot of music!