Romancing The Voice

Jan Skubiszewski has to be one of the busiest people in the business at the moment. A respected producer, engineer and composer, he's worked on records by artists as diverse as Wendy Mathews, Kram, Karnivool/Birds Of Tokyo's Ian Kenny, Mark Ronson, Daniel Merriweather and Jade Macrae, is one half of Jackson Jackson with The Cat Empire's Harry Angus, was the assistant engineer on The Cat Empire's debut album, produced and co-wrote Phrase's Talk With Force album and cowrote and arranged his second, Burn It Down, worked on Ella Hooper's forthcoming solo album and the debut EP by Grey Ghost as well as all the Owl Eyes records. And in there somewhere, he's managed to find time to write for and record his own solo project, Way Of The Eagle, with a debut single, Rattlesnake, featuring Dan Sultan on vocals, previewing a debut EP he's currently finishing off in the recording space he recently took over in Hawthorn East he's renamed Way Of The Eagle Studios.

“I've had a few studios over the years but this one was a real step up,” Skubiszewski admits. “It's got great equipment and the rooms were really well treated. There are a number of different tracking rooms; it's something that gives me a lot of options, and probably the best thing is there's a two-storey brick stairwell in the entry way and that's become my reverb chambers,” he chuckles, “where, on Rattlesnake, that big, bombastic brass sound is just mics in the stairwell and the guys just blasting out in there – it sounds fantastic.”

The studio was previously called Gigantic Studios and set up in 2011 by former Hunters & Collectors lead guitarist Barry Palmer, whose production credits include records for The Mavis's, Vika & Linda and his old Hunters offsider Mark Seymour among others. The heart of the studio is a 24-channel SSL AWS 900+ with a comprehensive DAW controller, with the option of eight Neve 1073 mic pre/EQs if you want them, running into Mac PCI Express running Pro Tools 9 HD. Monitoring includes Focal SM6 (twin 6e) monitors.

“[Barry's] priorities were changing and I was at a point where I was finishing up at the last space I had, and he proposed that I take this over and it's been fantastic. As well as the SSL we've got some really great compressors and things like that, but the best part would be those eight 1073s. They sound fantastic – they're just so reliable and give such a warm tone that I use them pretty much on everything. We've also got a Shadow Hills [stereo mastering compressor], which sounds really good. The SSL has a G Series compressor in it, but you can link that with an external compressor and I use the Shadow Hills.”

As to the recording of this first track of his debut solo project, Rattlesnake: “I guess I just try and make cool sounds and always have an idea of the end goal, of the song. So instead of just throwing random things at it, I try and just really sculpt it. It's that weird thing of wanting the production to be really flamboyant, and I love that sense of the romantic and kind of things over the top, but at the same time just being really honest to the song and [not] killing it with too many ideas.

“I met Dan Sultan a few years ago through friends and had wanted to do a track, not specifically for the Way Of The Eagle project. We're both signed to Mushroom Publishing and they had this artist/writing event thing where you could choose who you wanted to write with and we went to the Abbotsford Convent and had a little ProTools rig, really basic, and we literally came up with the song from scratch in three hours. I used whatever drums I could find on their system, and so we had that skeleton there and felt really good about it. I took it back to my studio and started working on the different synth sounds, then had Will Hull-Brown, the drummer from The Cat Empire come in and play the drums on it. Then I recorded the brass section – tenor sax, trumpet, trombone and bass trombone – then some more synths, the string section and then the final vocal track, though most of those are the vocals we did at the Convent, because we really liked them.”

For Skubiszewski, Way Of The Eagle is about showcasing the talents of the vocalists he invites to sing on the tracks he composes, “but also this sense of romance and a real sense of joy in the music.” The other singers featuring on the forthcoming EP are Daniel Merriweather and Tinpan Orange's Emily Lubitz. Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road Studios in London will be mastering the EP.

Regarding analogue tape, Skubiszewski has done a fair few printing mixes to tape, but no actual tracking. “I love the tone of tape – I think it sounds beautiful. I have just got a Sony 24-track tape machine – I'm just waiting to get it serviced and set up. It's a little more work than I thought it was going to be! An old friend of mine, Andy Baldwin, who's another record producer, moved to New York and had this old tape machine that had [been] going around from studio to studio.”