PRODUCER: Billy Livsey
BAND: Five Star
TRACK: Rain or Shine

Billy Livsey has been making a living as a songwriter and session keyboard player for a number of years. He signed with Chappell Publishing in 1981 subsequently providing them with chart successes for a number of artistes including Give Me Your Heart Tonight for Shakin' Stevens and Our Love for Elkie Brookes. His latest success is the Five Star single Rain or Shine which he also produced. Here he describes his writing/production process.

"Most of my experience has come through simply writing and recording so many 16 or 24-track demos over the years and I've also worked a lot in studios as a session player. So through that I got a pretty good idea of how to present something and people were always saying I ought to try doing some production. Eventually Peter Robinson at RCA got interested and said why didn't I have a go at producing another track that I'd written for Five Star called System Addict, and so I went ahead. As that turned out to be pretty successful it seemed the natural thing to work together in the same way again.

"I wrote Rain or Shine as a track for the group's Silk and Steel album, and luck had it that they liked it and so it went out as the single. I haven't actually produced anybody else's songs as yet, although I'd like to, but as a producer it's really an ideal situation having written the song myself because I know other producers who have such a problem trying to match up to people's demos. It's a nightmare — I mean I even have a nightmare doing it myself. No matter what you do, at the time of making the demo you won't be too worried about exactly how the sounds are or how it goes down, and you may have a really horrifically distorted keyboard sound, or something, and it turns out that that's the actual sound, that's the hook, and it can be very difficult to recreate the coincidental combination of amps, instruments and effects that made it that way. Now I have a 16-track at home and I'm trying to do more of everything at home and just transfer it across to the studio 24-track so that hopefully we can get it nearer to the demo.

"The home set-up is a Fostex B16 mastering to a Sony 701 digital, with a Soundtracs 16:8:16 desk, although I have my eye on a TAC for the near future. I have quite a few bits of outboard gear that I used on Rain or Shine: a Yamaha REV-7, a Lexicon PCM-60 and PCM-70 which I really like, a Roland SDE-2500 delay, a Yamaha E1010 analogue delay which is an old dinosaur but I still use it for its warm sound, two Drawmer dual gates, and Drawmer, Ashley and dbx compressors. The main keyboards I used on Rain or Shine are a Prophet, a DX-7 and a Mirage. I do have an E-mu SP12 drum machine which is great, but actually I used my old E-mu Drumulator on this track.

"I do a lot of writing with Pete Sinfield, and as he lives out in Spain we tend to write over the telephone and by mail, which is how this song was done. I gave him a ring to say that something was on its way and then I sent him a rough cassette of the rhythm track with me humming the vocal melody. A couple of weeks later he rang back, I grabbed a pencil and paper and took the lyrics over the phone. It's a slightly odd way to do it but it seems to work very well with Pete, he's a very good writer.

"The band generally work out a lot of their own vocal parts and so after I'd put the basic backing track down on the Fostex they came round to the flat and we spent a while working out the harmonies, etc, and Denise, the lead singer, put a guide vocal down. Then I took the tape with all that and transferred it to the 24-track at Mayfair Studios.

"My initial idea was to get away from the demo by using live drums and bass, but we had so many problems trying to get the same feel as the drum machine. The playing was great but it just didn't have the right feel for the track. So we went back, scrapped the live bass and drums which we'd recorded playing together and started all over again with the drum machine — great fun (laughs ironically). Back to the machine! I have a Roland SBX80 sync box which is great for messing around with the feel of rhythms and I used it on Rain or Shine just to push the beat forward by a few frames, and it really made a big difference. So that way we gradually got the right feel back and then I got Graham Broad in, who I usually use a lot on drums, and he overdubbed on top of the machine. As far as the drum sound I tended to leave that to the engineer John Hudson, he's really the governor in that, and I don't say anything until he's finished, then I might make a comment or two, but he always gets a great sound.

"Dave Leevey then came in to overdub his bass part on top of that, using a Music Man DI'd straight into the desk with a little compression. They have an SSL console at Mayfair but they also have some outboard Amek eqs which are great, and we used those a lot in getting the sounds for the track. The bass line was doubled all the way through — in the chorus it was with a DX7 percussive patch of my own, and for the verses I used the bottom end of the piano patch from the Mirage. Apart from the keyboard pads that I did mostly from the DX and the Prophet, Nick Laney-Smith did some bells and springs and percussive bits and pieces from his Emulator, most of which were his own samples. We didn't use any guitar on this track and so part of the rhythm was created by using the drum machine to get a rim shot type sound from the Prophet 5 through a Drawmer gate, and that ran through most of the track.

"Gary Barnacle played the sax. He's a great player and has a huge array of old Roland pitch-to-voltage synths that he gets his saxes plugged up to to get some really wild sounds. One thing I've learned though is that you have to stay true to what the track needs which, in this case, was just a good straight sax solo, and so unfortunately we didn't get to use any of that this time. For most of the parts on the record I have a pretty good idea of what I want before the players come in, but here I just let Gary blow and it came out really well.

"Denise generally puts down another guide lead vocal once more of the production has been done, and then for the backing vocals we get in a kind of grouping around three mikes with Denise in the centre, and the two boys on the outside. Once that's done Denise puts on her final lead vocal which, because of problems with time and bookings, was actually done at Townhouse. I don't really have any definite preference for a certain kind of mike for vocals, it's different for every singer and song. Again I tend to sit back and let the engineer do what he thinks best or we'll sometimes put a few mikes up for a run through and just see which one sounds right. It's surprising how much difference there is. We initially tried a Neumann U87 for Denise but ended up with a U47 for its slightly warmer sound.

"We did a mix at Mayfair but the record company wanted to try something else, and so they got Phil Harding to try another mix which he did at PWL Studios. Phil's done a lot of work with dance music and really lent the track a steady groove that holds all the way through. He did a great job."