LA in October is, well, like UK in high summer and how the Antarctic will be in 50 years (but without the botox). Perfect bleached sidewalks, blue skies and damn hot, in the 80s or so.! I recall how last year, when we were over to record the real Homer Simpson at Fox sound studios it rained and temperatures hit the low 60s. To LA people, that is cold, whilst we were almost at the point of taking off our t-shirts (isn’t this what all Brits want to do when they go abroad?). We’d just got over the jet lag when Nick, our contact at Stampede, took us out for a power lunch at Café Primo on Sunset Boulevard. Sweaty, semi-beautiful people striding in from the ultra gym next door vying with surly waiting staff; you can’t get more LA than this (unless you consider the bluey white dentures I bought from a man in North Hollywood; only kidding, I’m staying with my true Brit tombstones).

Snoop wrote the additional stuff for the TomTom celebrity voices GPS script himself. He pulled together his Snoopisms and overlaid them perfectly onto our script. Reading it, we knew we had a hit! But we also expected him to improvise a little – after all he’s well known for this.

Grant and I recorded Snoop at Conway, where Guns n Roses made ‘Use Your Illusion I & II’, and U2 recorded ‘Rattle and Hum’ (gold discs up on the wall always impress an ex-muso like me). A really lovely place set back in quiet residential street; inside there is a walled garden with loads of trees nestled between the 3 studio complexes. I can see why you’d want to record your difficult second album(s) here. Our ops director, Colin, didn’t make it to the session, sadly. Food poisoning. Raw fish never gives me any problems. Still, there has to be some payback for having lunch earlier in the day in a Malibu café overlooking glorious pacific waves.

Best, Chrizzle…. Continue Reading

So, here you have it: big Snoop Dogg lends his voice to TomTom GPS! We were absolutely thrilled to be approached by Snoop’s management company, Stampede: Snoop had heard all about how we created the real Homer Simpson celebrity voice for TomTom, and wanted to be the first real megastar on GPS. What a coup! We’d just released Homer and were looking at a number of opportunities – all cool but most likely to take a while to put together. One of the things I liked about Snoop and his team is how easy they all were to work with. We had a deal and a recording within 4 months from flash to bang! Now that is quick.

Grant, our creative guy, myself and Colin all listened to a lot of Snoop – interviews, music, musings – everything we could find before setting off to La La land. We immersed ourselves in his speech habits and idiosyncratic way of speaking and rapping. We wanted to find a level for the Snoop Dogg TomTom celebrity voices (for there are three: the US version and the UK and EU versions). What you don’t want is something mechanical and wooden that doesn’t reflect the celebrity’s character and style of vocal delivery. iFizzle, Snoop’s cool iPhone app (effectively a ‘soundboard’ containing well known Snoop phrases, BowWowWow, yippee-yi-yippee-yay and the like) was a good touch point; here was Snoop playfully delivering well loved Snoopisms in that wonderful warm drawl. This was it – we had it. We waited for the day we’d fly to LA to meet Snoop and record his voice…read about the journey to LA and the recording session in parts 2 & 3 shortly.

Best, Chrizzle.