We’re midway through our first trimester of 2018 and now deep into our studio production project. Our group of future zooper-dooper-super-producers were given a choice from the school of two unreleased tracks to re-work into a different genre. We selected “Straight Out the Door”, with the intention of bringing this track alive with an emotional bluesy vibe in the ilk of the Ray Charles classic “I Got a Woman” .

What does Nando's sauce have to do with making a track? It's all about the process.

Building a song essentially from scratch is a daunting, yet exciting challenge. Kinda like your first trip to the bathroom after that loaded Nando’s UberEats order; when you finally take on the risk of moving up the Spicy scale- taking the jump from Medium to Extra Hot. You know The Process, things could get messy along the way, and at the end you’ll be more relieved than satisfied and still pondering how things could’ve gone better. The process has been interesting but it’s also nice to feel the pieces of the puzzle slowly morphing together. We’ve definitely put ourselves out of our comfort zone with majority of our group having little experience in the blues genre.

This week we’ve had multiple sessions in the studio, tracking bass and vocals with different team members being available for each session. We also re-amped the organ with Mr. Clarke's guidance in the Neve studio which was fun to learn.

Not having a clear picture of the end product in mind adds an interesting wrinkle along the way. This is where it has been important to trust the process, and to again keep things simple and efficient when working sans tutor in the studio. Hopefully this will allow us to be more adventurous with creative EQ'ing during the class time under the guidance of Mr Clarke and Mr. Liwanag. With 8+ members in the studio each time we have to balance our creativity yet at the same time it does help us keep one another on the right path as we often quickly recognise if we begin to wander too far off track.

Recording Drums is next, which if all goes smoothly leaves us time for two full mixing sessions in the studio which will hopefully give us the opportunity to embrace some of the creative EQ and bring some of the soul from the depths of 50's Louisana, to the Naughty Teenies of Port Melbourne.

Hopefully Griffin is as excited for this session as he was to record his Dad's vocals last Saturday in the Tascam.