'Do It Faster... But Slower' ...as a certain producer once advised a baffled Joy Division. Graeme Thomson meets six masters of sound and diplomacy in charge of tracks that kept changing shape.

Daniel Lanois On MOST OF THE TIME by Bob Dylan (1989)

Daniel Lanois began working collaboratively with Brian Eno in the early '80s, which led to him co-producing U2's The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree with Eno. He has since produced albums by Peter Gabriel, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson and continues to work with U2.

I first heard Most Of The Time at Bob Dylan's house. He played it on the piano and I thought that there was a power and depth in the lyric that required me to do something special with it. It's a dark song, but I like the way Bob talks about his dedication to love by keeping it small. Smart writer! The melody was pretty much there, but it may have been a song in search of identity. It's a good melody but it's not a big, travelling melody like, say, With God On Our Side. It was looking for sonic and perhaps rhythmic identity, and I think we found both of those.

When we got to the recording, Bob had moved on to the guitar with it. We were working nights at this point. He wouldn't listen to anything that was done in the day; he felt that this should be a night-time record. It was a kitchen setting in this old house in New Orleans that I'd turned into a studio. You don't put Bob Dylan behind a piece of glass. If you want to fuck it up, that's a good start!

We cut the basic track with a Roland 808 beatbox, the Sexual Healing drum machine. I piped the 808 into a full-size stage monitor in front of Mr Dylan, and that became our rhythmic reference. We were sitting at the kitchen counter, and there was a little coffee machine next to us. Like two guys on a back porch singing folk songs, we delivered a rendition of that beautiful song, Bob and I in those chairs. I had a bassline in my head that I wanted to act as a hook for the song, and after we cut the track I immediately did the bass because I wanted that signature to be there like a trail of breadcrumbs, so I would never lose my way.

Then Bob left and I began adding other dimensions to the music. I played those screaming, stratospheric 1953 Les Paul Juniors through a customised echo – there's four of them and they're like an orchestra. They are my Nelson Riddle. They provide the distant symphony in Most Of The Time. They supply the emotion. Bob's vocal is relatively dry, and the distant textures are like the mountain range that has seen everything go by, representing the things that will never change.

Two blocks over in New Orleans lives "Mean" Willie Green, one of the great funk drummers on the planet. I called him up and asked him to play, and he overdubbed drums with the same calculated echo as we had on the guitars. We're not smearing on a bunch of different effects, we're doing it like Lee "Scratch" Perry did in Jamaica: finding one good echo that works for the song and remaining loyal to it. So the drums belong to the rest of the track.

Bob didn't come from a time of studio innovation and scrutiny. He doesn't go there. He wanted to stick to lyrics and songwriting. So with producing Bob, the job in hand is to make sure you get something in the allotted time you're allowed. You might have to fill in the picture, but the most important thing is that when Bob walked out the door he left me with a nucleus that was absolutely flawlessly intact: the up-close, intimate, back-porch storytelling centre. That's very important, because if you have your centre – your vocal, a finished lyric, a soulful delivery – then anything you add to that will work. If you're living with false promise – if you think, "Well, the vocal's not great but we'll do it later, or we'll fix the guitar another time" – I've never known that to work.

He came back in the next night to hear it. I think he liked it. You see, I really wanted to do something special for Bob. It really meant a lot to me. He had not been making his strongest records prior to my arrival, and it's quite an undertaking to say, "OK, well I'll give it a try."

In the end the only tool I have to work with is my passion and commitment, but those are the most important ones. I consider this song to be living evidence of my commitment.

Nigel Godrich On NUDE by Radiohead (2007)

Nigel Godrich started out at RAK Studios, where he engineered Carnival Of Light by Ride and The Bends by Radiohead. He has produced Radiohead's last four albums, and has also worked with Travis, Paul McCartney (Chaos And Creation In The Back Yard) and on Beck's last three albums. He remixed U2's Walk On and produced Band Aid 20's Do They Know It's Christmas?

Thom's very prolific, he's always writing, and one time I made a list of songs that he had that they hadn't recorded. Radiohead have a little catalogue of songs that just never get done. It's almost because it's their best material and no version is ever quite good enough. It's too precious to them. I said, "You have to record them, because one day you're going to die and they'll go with you. It's criminal. And if you don't fucking record them, I'm going to fucking do it! I'll do a covers album!" And Nude was one of these songs.

After The Bends was all done and dusted, I'd seen them at a show and they said they'd been thinking about us all working together. We'd done a bunch of B-sides on The Bends and it had gone really well, so we hatched a plan to have a couple of little try-outs to see how it would work.

We booked a weekend in the studio to start recording what would become OK Computer, although it took a long time to really get into that. We recorded two songs; one was called Big Boots – actually, it was called Man O' War at the time, which is another great lost Radiohead classic. The other thing we tried to record was a song called Nude. Thom had just written it and it was almost a different song to the version on In Rainbows. It's recognisable, but it had different lyrics and it was a lot straighter. The idea was for it to be like an Al Green track. It had a Hammond going through it on the version we recorded that weekend. They liked it, it was deemed a great success. But then for some reason everyone went off it. We tried to record it a couple more times for OK Computer, probably about three times for Kid A and another three times for Hail To The Thief. But somehow it had gone.

We had a little holiday from each other. The band tried to record on their own, which – surprise, surprise – didn't work. Then they tried working with someone else, which also didn't work. During that time I went to see Colin, the bass player, and he played me a rough live version of Nude that they'd done in rehearsals. He'd written his new bassline, which transformed it from something very straight into something that had much more of a rhythmic flow. The chorus had been taken out – very Radiohead! – and there was this new vocal break and this new end section. It sounded like they were somehow terrified playing it, but it sounded OK. We recorded it three times and the final one – which we did in their house and then overdubbed in Covent Garden – is what you hear today.

Finally, for some inexplicable reason, it made it out! With Radiohead we always say, "It doesn't matter how we get there, as long as we end up at the right place," but actually I think the real skill is being able to recognise something that lands on your lap and is fully formed and wonderful. A big part of my job is trying to persuade Thom that just because this thing happened very quickly, it doesn't mean it's not great. He doesn't understand what it is about what he does that's great. He doesn't know or understand where it comes from.

Songs have a kind of window where they are really most alive – and you have to capture it. Nude missed its window, and it took a lot of reinvention to bring it back to the place where we could capture it again in a way that resonated for the people playing it. It was essentially the same song; nothing had really changed. What has changed are the people playing it.

Stuart Price On I LOVE NEW YORK by Madonna (2005)

An electronic musician and a member of Madonna's touring band since 2001, Price attracted acclaim for his remixes of No Doubt's It's My Life and The Killers' Mr Brightside before co-writing and co-producing Madonna's Confessions On A Dance Floor in 2005. He recently produced Seal's System and is currently working on the new Keane album.

We were at Madison Square Garden in the middle of the 2004 Re-Invention tour, and it had got to that point where everyone was just completely bored. Touring with Madonna is like taking everything you've learned from the age of 14 about playing small pubs and clubs in bands and chucking it all out of the window. It's more like Cirque Du Soleil than the Pheasant & Firkin, put it that way. Essentially, the show has so many moving parts that if you go out on a limb you might end up losing a limb.

Madonna can be quite spontaneous, but she's not spontaneous when it comes to doing a show in front of 20,000 people! Similarly, the soundcheck is often quite a choreographed affair, but this time she just started messing around. She started playing this very basic, two-chord riff on the guitar and making up these lyrics about how she loved New York. It was just a real fun, mess-around song. Later I went into her dressing room with a guitar and a portable multi-track and said, "We're just going to stick something down for a reference", so we had a rough sketch of the song.

Later on in the tour we were playing Slane Castle with Iggy Pop, and while we were watching him Madonna said, "Let's make the song a bit like The Stooges." She was making a documentary on that tour, I'm Going To Tell You A Secret, and there was a scene in it that featured New York, and she decided she wanted a kind of Stooges version of I Love New York to play over it.

So I took the riff and the guide vocal away to a friend's house in Reading. We went into his bedroom and propped the bed up against the wall to make room for the drum-kit. His brother played guitar, I played bass and we tracked this Madonna song in the bedroom of a house on the Wokingham Road! And that's the version that appears on the documentary.

Right after that, we started making Confessions On A Dance Floor. Madonna said, "We're doing a dance record. I really like this song, but it doesn't fit in. Let's work on it." That week I was going to Australia to DJ and I promised to try and figure something out while I was away. As a travelling producer, working by yourself, you don't want to book into a two grand-a-day studio. It's overkill. You're looking for smaller places. I was in Sydney and I found this guy who said he had a small studio – I got there and it was literally a shed in his back garden! Right, OK! Let's see what we can do! So I effectively started remixing it in a shed in Australia.

I did what I normally do when I remix. I pull it all back to just the vocal, stick in a kick drum and try and work around it. I had this old Yamaha ZX100 keyboard which had a nice Detroit-y sound. That's where one of the main keyboard lines in the album version of the song came from. I remixed it and reworked it, and it went from Detroit rock to Detroit techno. I was sending it backwards and forwards to Madonna from Australia. Obviously the time difference couldn't have been worse, but that was how the final version of the song began to emerge. While I was away patching together the track, she was forming the lyrics. When I came back to London I took a version of the track to a club where I was DJing and it really worked on the dancefloor.

Then we came back to Olympic Studios in London and reunited to finish it for the album. As a collaborator she knows exactly what she wants, but on the other hand she wants you to do it! She'll say, "You need to be the visionary now; I'll be the visionary later." It's a complex chemistry but it plays out really well. What's brilliant about Madonna is that she's blissfully unaware of how a computer really works, so she's not there saying, "Can we try this effect?" or (pointing at a screen), "Can we move that bit over there." There's none of that. She sits on the couch and says, "I don't like it", or, "I like it." You're left to do your own thing without someone leaning over your shoulder.

Madonna works on instinct a lot more than people realise. I Love New York travelled all round the world, but everything – the riff, the vocal melodies, the lyric ideas – really came pouring out at that initial soundcheck.

Read Part Two, featuring Crowded House, The Verve and Siouxsie & The Banshhes.