Adrian Stuckey - Far Too Busy to be Idol

If you have succumbed to the arguable pleasure of watching the latest series of New Zealand Idol you will likely have caught a glimpse of the guy in the house band playing a most unusual-looking custom twin-necked nylon string/electric hybrid guitar.

Built by New Zealand luthier Phil Whitehead, it’s an eye-catching rig, and, being a twin-neck it seems an appropriate choice of instrument for a guy who wears so many different musical hats. Adrian Stuckey is a producer, engineer, programmer, studio owner, multi-instrumentalist, mastering engineer, songwriter and soundtrack composer. Hell, he even custom wires his own guitars.

Stuckey has recently re-located back home to Auckland (for family rather than purely business reasons) after a ten year stint in Australia. In his own quiet and unassuming way he has quickly re-established himself and begun to inject his diverse musical talents into the burgeoning Auckland music scene.

We meet at Stuckey’s West Auckland home, the bottom level of which is dedicated to his Big Note Productions digital studio, where all the major track laying, mixing and mastering for New Zealand Idol takes place. As this is his current and probably most topical project, I kick things off by trying to get a feel for how the music comes together in the pressure-cooker environment of weekly live television.

He explains that having chosen the song, on Tuesday each contestant gets an hour with himself and Eddie Rayner (musical director, producer and keyboardist of originally Split Enz fame). In that time they have to settle on a suitable key, work up a rudimentary drum feel, lay down some piano, guitar and keyboard bass and nail a demo vocal.

"It’s quickly sketched out in that session. I play a guitar part, I’ve got to make sense of it and work out where the backing vocals are, and bounce it out onto a CD. Then, basically, we throw that away. Andrew McLaren (also a producer, and drummer of Stellar* fame), takes all those multi-tracks and programs and plays in pads and all sorts of radical things. He does a whole lot of drum grooves. Then I’ll take it downstairs and we just track madly on Wednesday and Thursday, master on Friday morning and deliver the songs lunchtime Friday."

Stuckey reckons his studio is ideal for this most unusually demanding production job.

"It’s got to be a project studio where everything’s ready to go; all your Midi synths are plugged in, congas are there, your tambourines are there, guitars are hanging on the wall, everything is within reach, bang, grab, do, done."

To further expedite this hectic recording schedule he says he also uses "massive" numbers of Pro Tools audio templates for EQ and the like.

Outside of the Idol phenomena, one of the more interesting projects he’s been involved in recently has been mixing and mastering a double live Split Enz album from the 1994 reunion tour. Having only one 8-track ADAT machine made it a pain-staking process, what with having to lay down eight tracks at a time, then aligning all 16 tracks on Pro Tools and ensuring everything was in phase. This, and the difficulties inherent in mastering recordings from a variety of venues, made it a challenging but hugely enjoyable six month project. As soon as Idol winds up he is keen to start work on a re-mixed re-release of the third Enz album ‘Frenzy’, a record that Rayner believes was never mixed to its full potential.

I ask Stuckey how he has managed to accumulate so many diverse musical skills, which along with his obvious studio expertise includes percussion, bass, guitar, keyboards, programming, dulcimer, bohdran, Peruvian pan pipes and Irish whistle.

"Playing in bands," he replies without hesitation. "The best thing you can do is work with other musicians and learn. For example as a guitarist I just love listening to brass - the phrasing of brass players, if you can incorporate that with your guitar playing, it’s incredible."

He also mentions his discovery of Latin American music in Australia as a major ear-opener for a guy brought up on a diet of pop and rock.

"With the (Latin) groove you’re going from pretty much on the beat to off the beat, and I realised I’d never played on ‘and’ (the off beat), I only ever knew one (the on beat). All of sudden you’re playing Latin music where the bass and the guitar is off. Then I started to realise that conga players and percussionists play off, and you start to realise how white we are just doing pop and rock. That’s what happened to me - I fell in love with the off beat."

As well as producing jingles, albums and occasional soundtrack projects (he recently wrote and performed the music for the Jonah Lomu documentary) Stuckey also works up karaoke-style backing tracks for live singers. It’s starting to sound a fraction Idol-incestuous when he tells me that clients for this service include judge Jackie Clark and Suzanne Lynch, (vocal trainer and backing vocalist for the contestants), with whom he also works in a duo. And just to ensure he really has precious little time to work on his own compositions, he also performs solo to his own pre-programmed backing.

"I can make way more money than working with a band, and that’s really sad and I hate that. I’ve just found in the music industry, to some extent, I’ve had to compromise if I want to make a living for my family. Not everyone does that, not everyone has to do that, but I do."

"I’ve heard people complaining ‘Oh, I never got a grant’, but I mean you’re either in business or you’re not. Like, there’s no grants that paid for any of this gear around here. This is all heard-earned money - out gigging ‘til 2 in the morning playing other people’s songs that I don’t even like, so that I can buy what I want for the studio to produce real music."