THE PRIVATES international band

Trevor Sacks writes in the diary again:

"The Producers

‘Producer’ in the music business, in case you
didn’t already know, is not the same as ‘producer’ in the film
business. A music producer fills more of an equivalent role of director
that we know from movies. So his job is to direct the performances of
musicians, to have a... vision of how the song should sound and sometimes
to provide ideas for song structure, arrangements (like, ‘wouldn’t be
cool to play that guitar line on an oboe instead?’ or ‘make the solo
sound more like a beetle struggling to escape a light fitting’) and
additional twiddly bits. Sometimes producers are crazy. Guy Stevens
famously threw chairs and ladders at The Clash while they recorded
London Calling. Nick Lowe wanted the drums on Elvis Costello’s This
Year’s Model to sound like a giant maraca. Lee Scratch Perry miked up a
palm tree. Okay, he also spent a year walking backwards and hammering
the ground but he didn’t put that in any recordings. The point is,
producers are special people. We’ve been working with two, very
different, producers.

To keep the movie analogy going, Darryl
Torr is the kind of producer who, if he were a director, would do all
the effects in-camera. Like a Michel Gondry, he likes to figure out how
to make things work in real time and capture them, rather than rely on
animation and special effects. We spent ages setting up the instruments
and mikes for the optimum sounds. The tones from the guitar, drums,
bass and vocals sounded rich and creamy from our first note (once this
elaborate set-up was complete). So, after recording the tracks, the
mixing process has been fairly quick.

J.P. at B-Sharp studios
has another approach altogether. Much more Peter Jackson in his way of
working, J.P. is a post kinda guy. The set-up in the studio was fairly
rudimentary. He knows his recording space and equipment really well and
can set up to record relatively quickly. We got our takes done and the
sound was, well, passable. Nowhere near the immediately sweet tones we
got at the SABC. But then the mixing began on Friday night. We spent
hours finding a good kick drum sound from a bank of high-quality
samples and used some clever software to trigger these sounds from the
recorded kick drum, also mixing the original sound with the sample. It
still sounds totally organic, it’s still Wesley’s playing so the feel
is there. But the sound is incredible. We did the same with the snare,
then moved on to the compressions, EQ’s and other tools to squeeze the
best tones out of all the other tracks. After four hours I suppose
we’re about a third of the way there - on ONE TRACK! It’s a much more
intense process in post with J.P. and we’re glad to have his expertise
since he really knows what works.

The point is, both producers
have a great understanding of how to get amazing sounds, as well as
appropriate sounds for our band, out of the equipment and the tracks.
They’ve got totally different methods of working, even different
philosophies on how to approach a recording. Yet, both recordings are
already sounding amazing and, incredibly, they both sound like The
Privates. And they’ve done it without throwing a chair at any one of us"

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