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Art meets science meets shameful trickery

2008-06-16 - 11:02 a.m.

Loz's Suade Studio Diaries: Part 4

The observant will notice that from our 7-day studio lock-in, the diaries stop at Day #4. Well, the reason is fairly simple. By day #5, the work had become a giant slog, chopping out part by part, sight-singing it onto the tracks, the Colonel and I getting mentally lazy from fatigue and lack of creative engagement.

Recording is equal parts art and science, and for us, the laying of backing tracks is much more the science. We record each member separately, after learning an expensive lesson on our first disc that while group tracks can feel great and take much less time, if Ian gets a perfect take then I'm bound to stuff something up and the sound from the badly placed 's' or bung note will bleed into the other microphones. Once it's on the other tracks, it's impossible to get rid of in the mix.

The Beatles didn't have to record this way (although they did, sometimes, for effect) - and the long lost instrumental gods of Motown would cut everything down in a few full band takes about 30 minutes after first hearing the song. Today's artists operate in a very different world, a world in which the ability to knock out perfect first-take group tracks is dying due to sheer redundancy. Digital recording, like digital photography, is vastly easier to mix and match and fix than the old analogue media, so there's an expectation on the modern listener's part of total perfection - be it of pitch, tone, whatever.

So we've set up all the arrangements as midi files, and each track is sung in isolation onto that pitch-perfect guide. There's a 'scratch lead track' in there, hastily sung to give us a bit of context as we go through. Several takes are recorded of each part, some going all the way through the song, and a lot more concentrating on the difficult bits. It's not uncommon for us to have 15 takes of a difficult key change in one voice.

We then 'comp' each track together. We take Roy's bass, for example, and find the best take he did for each intro, each verse, each chorus, each transition, each ending. If there's a bung note in one take, we can cut a better effort in from another take - or even piece in a copy of another time he sung that note better later in the song. Logic 8 makes this process laughably easy - but this is not to take away from the Colonel's ability behind a mixing desk. If you can spot any edits on the new disc you'll be very perceptive indeed.

For systemic errors, or for long notes that drift off key, or for an easy fix if a tough chord isn't gelling properly, we use the shameful secret of Melodyne, a piece of software so diabolically effective at correcting pitch that it is now used on the vast majority of pop releases. It can snap any note to most any pitch, either with robotic perfection (like on Cher's 'Do You Believe In Life After Love') or, if more time is taken, with a degree of subtlety that makes it very difficult to spot in the final mix. Sadly, most pop producers these days simply turn all the knobs to 11 and auto-tune the life out of their singers. You can hear Melodyne abuse all over the radio if you know what to look for, it's an intense, metallic tone that results from the elimination of naturally random harmonics - a pure tone that ceases to sound like a human voice. Melodyne can be held responsible for a wide array of god-awful singers with ripped abs or big boobs making it onto the charts.

So you can see how we are conflicted when it comes to using such a tool on our own recordings. Our philosophy on the use of this disgraceful alchemy is to keep it to an absolute minimum, where chords are being lost or soured, to tweak things we can't tweak any other way. We try to use it in the most natural way possible, pushing notes toward their home pitch rather than snapping whole tracks into key. Thankfully, each of us has improved since the last album was recorded, which makes this easier and less frequent.

And so, once this is done, we have our backing tracks for each song. We're nearly at this point now, just a couple to go, which we'll do outside of a lock-in situation. As you can see, this part is quite scientific, which might explain the fatigue and lack of engagement we felt towards the end of the process. You don't feel like much of an artist or get excited about songs so much when you're focusing on such minutiae.

This point is brought home strongly whenever "One Week at a Time" comes through the studio monitors. It's a comedy song about footy, and we made the decision early on that it was much less important for this song to be in tune than to feel fun, alive and as if it was being sung by the a cappella division of the Collingwood footy club. It's deliberately messy and random and Aussie, and it cheers us up immensely when we run a playback. That sort of approach, however, wouldn't do justice to some of the other tracks.

Tracking leads is something we're treating differently - and, it would seem, differently to the wider pop market. A backing track is primarily there to give musical context on a vocal record. Done properly, it's unlikely to even be noticed by most listeners. A lead track is the exact opposite.

A lead track is equal parts melody, communication of the lyric intent, and that intangible 'soul' element that subconsciously tells the listener that not only does the singer believe what he's singing, but that he's experienced it and felt it. We're trying to place the emphasis for this record on the comunication angle, but more on that as we get into it. Effectively, we feel you can sacrifice perfection in a melody if it gives the track an honest or interesting twist somehow. The argument being that a random, natural forest setting full of life is more interesting and 'real' than a geometrically perfect structure, where every imperfection stands out as if it doesn't belong.

So we're about to embark on the more 'artistic' phase of the recording process, which will mostly involve the Colonel and myself because we've written the bulk of the album between us. Roy did manage to take enough time out from being an internet billionaire, single father and touring/recording member of Jackson Jackson to contribute one fantastic track that will surely be a highlight of the disc.

Onwards and upwards, more soon!
:)
Loz

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