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Loz's Suade studio diaries part 2

2008-05-31 - 1:08 a.m.

Day #3
After a mammoth day 2, we make a late-ish start at around 11, and track a couple of things with Roy.

We make a breakthrough on "Living Enough," which features a tricky 4-over-3 polyrhythmic feel but has to feel natural and groove the whole way. Poor old Roy has to contend with the fact that the bloke who wrote the tune (me) is both a drummer and a bass singer, so he'll be getting no easy breaks from the control room; he's got to nail it or he'll be stuck in that stuffy vocal booth 'til Christmas.

We get Roy to sing his part through in 16th notes, drumming the full value of each 16th note into his brain so he can feel every semiquaver, especially the ones between his sung notes. I've also laid down a keyboard drum track for him to groove against. And suddenly, his rhythm clicks into the pocket and stays great until we finish the track off. A great relief for all of us, it's a bloody tough track that will live and die on its groove - and now we've got a good foundation to work from.

Een comes back in by lunchtime. We're thoroughly sick of "Living Enough" by now so we put it aside and start getting him into footy bogan character for "One Week at a Time."

You have to understand how hard this track is for Een. He's just about the least ocker footy bogan sort of bloke any of us have ever met. He enunciates every word, sings in countertenor and finds it difficult to stray from oxford vowel shapes. And here we are asking him to sing like an extra from Crocodile Dundee.

He does an admirable job, even if his ocker accent falls into cockney when he's not concentrating - but the feel and the notes are there, and the track makes us grin, which is the main part, so we wrap it there. Now we need to decide whether to end on a properly tuned chord or stick a sour bung note in there to give it a funny, cringeworthy finish. A decision for later.

Next it's my turn to sing over some tenor parts on "The Way You Look Tonight." Lately the lads and I have been getting into Brett Manning's vocal technique CDs and I can't tell you how much of a difference the speech-level singing exercises have already made for me. I'd never have been able to track such a high but relaxed part without one particular warmup exercise. Manning is an annoying prat on tape and if I met him I'd be tempted to steal his lunch money and give him a wedgie, but his singing secrets stuff contains some very useful nuggets.

This is also my first experience with sight-reading straight onto a record track, and I'm pretty happy that only the weird key-change bits took more then a few takes. We catch a brief glimpse of an awesome blood-red sunset out the bunker window as I finish up, then it's straight back into it.

Een's track on "I Miss the Rain" is up next, and he's sounding better and better. Man, it'd be interesting to put his tracks from the first album next to the tracks he's recording now. Still, there's a bit at the end of this tune that is so far out of character that we're thinking of swapping him out for the Colonel on that part. It's a big rockin' wail over the final chorus, and it sounds like a choirboy's singing it. We fire him up to get as throaty and big as he can on it, and suddenly we're hearing noises out of him that I don't think he's ever made before. It's not half bad, much closer to what the part needs. We might track it with the Colonel as well, but it's got a good chance of making it.

After dinner it's on to "Singin' in my Underpants" - which is a song I thought we'd never record. But it's become such a live favourite that we thought to hell with it, we'll chuck it on the CD. We considered doing a cut-down version to make it closer to a radio-friendly 3 or 4 minutes, but eventually decided to slap the whole damn song down there and keep it faithful to the live version. So it's gonna be closer to 7 minutes of jocks.

My job on the undies track seems to be yanking all the fun bits out of Roy's part; we never really arranged this tune, it came together organically, so there's times where Roy's doing fun stuff that doesn't fit with the other parts. "Thanks, ya bastard" comes through the monitors a lot. Sorry mate! Still, he gets to do his favourite squelchy sound effect so all is not lost...

We start trying to record Een on another track but mentally the Colonel and I have hit the wall. He'll finish a take and we'll look at each other and have nothing to say, each hoping the other was concentrating that time.

Studio time's precious so after a very civilised wine and cheese break we go for a couple of easy targets; Roy and Een's parts on "I'm not Him" and knock them off by half past midnight. Then it's onto the NBA videos as our brains are totally fried but still working too fast for bed...