Monthly Archive for February, 2006

I took an early night the night before so my vocals wouldn’t be bug­gered to bug­gery, how­ever, I ended up stay­ing up watch­ing Rob­bie Williams live on DVD as I couldn’t sleep due to how stim­u­lated my mind was. I was excited, and my head wasn’t going to let me sleep. I dozed off at around 1am…

The first day started off with a bang. I for­got the address for the record­ing stu­dios and had to call Mike for it two min­utes before I had to leave the house. I ended up writ­ing down the wrong address and couldn’t find where it was so I ended up dri­ving from mem­ory. Added to that, I woke up to find a cou­ple of “urgent” texts from Mike from the night before telling me to get online so he could send me some stuff.

I arrive at the record­ing stu­dios and every­one has dis­ap­peared, so that’s cool. I’m sit­ting on the steps out­side chillax­ing and orga­niz­ing some stuff and even­tu­ally Clarence comes back and lets me in. We chill for a bit and Mike comes in with the film crew to film the entire process of mak­ing the album.

After get­ting the pre­lim­i­nar­ies done (I felt so vain talk­ing about myself), we ended up doing the vocals for the first offi­cial song for the album. We went sur­pris­ingly fast through the verses and the pre-choruses, and as I’ve heard hor­ror sto­ries of spend­ing days work­ing on just verses so I was sur­prised. The bump came after­wards when we started record­ing the choruses.

The song is bloody bril­liant! Bea­t­les eat your heart out, this is gonna be a hit, and if it doesn’t, I will hit it so it has been hit so to speak. It’s so good, we’re already plan­ning the video clip!

The back­ing vocals were already recorded so we ended up lay­ing down the top lines, and some har­mony work for the day. We started around 12:00 and fin­ished at 7:00. The cam­era kept get­ting up in my face and half the time, I didn’t know what the hell to do so I ended up mak­ing faces in front of the camera.

Mike and Clarence were, anal, super anal, about a lot of things, so to speak, but you know what? You need peo­ple like that to push you to higher lev­els and make you achieve bet­ter things. A lot of times there’s a lot of things thrown back and forth such as, “That was absolute shit,” and, “Dump all of it,” but at the end of the day, you got to real­ize that it’s not per­sonal and that every­one is striv­ing for the same thing, a bloody bril­liant prod­uct so no hard feel­ings. I just want Clarence and Mike to not sugar-coat things for my sake and just lay it all on the table, I pre­fer it that way.

I learnt a few things that day. Hard work will get you where you want to go, but you bet­ter have the tal­ent and the goods to back up what you promise. In this busi­ness, when you’re work­ing with peo­ple, leave your ego at the door. Once you bring it in, you for­get that you’re also there to learn.

Another thing I learnt was, this thing is a bloody expen­sive busi­ness to be in, so don’t waste your time. Work on it, and make sure you get as much bang out of your buck as you can. That said, be fair and hon­est with those you deal with. They’ll give it back to you in return.

I also learnt that there are parts of my vocals that need to be worked on. So it was sug­gested I visit a dif­fer­ent singing coach to see if he could iden­tify the prob­lem areas.

It’s uplift­ing to have peo­ple like Mike and Clarence believe in me and what I can achieve. It gives me sense of con­fi­dence and in turn, I strive more than ever to push bound­aries, lim­its and estab­lished beliefs. It gives me the deter­mi­na­tion to keep truckin’ and at the end of the day, it gives me com­fort to know that while all I really need is my own self-belief, to have oth­ers behind me giv­ing me a help­ing hand and a push in the right direc­tion allows me the oppor­tu­nity to grow as a per­son, to appre­ci­ate the will­ing­ness of oth­ers to help, and to grow as an artist.

I just hope I don’t become a head-case, nut-job like peo­ple who let their own self-importance get the bet­ter of them. If I do, please send me hate-mail.

At the end of the day, we set a bench­mark that we can’t go below for future ses­sions. It’s always going to have to improve and each time it does, a new bench­mark is set. Get ready, get set, GO!