Breaking ground pt2

Okay, so continuing on with last week’s writing, we had this recording gear but now we needed a place to record the CD.  My engineer friend just happened to be living with another friend of mine, Ken who ran a basement studio in his home called The Furnace Room.  Trouble was, he had kids….lots of kids that would run around, scream, drop things, just general stuff that children do so it was really hard to get anything done.

For drums, it was a no brainer, we went to a couple of local studios, booked the time, called up Randall Stoll (KD Lang, Tom Cochrane) and had him come down and play on the tracks.  Another friend of mine, Gerry Plant was brought in to supply the basslines and voila, we had one of the best rhythm sections on a rock record ever!

Budget wise, local studios were not the answer for anything else as things were pretty tight at that time since I was paying for the recording with my credit card.  We needed a quick fix that was cheap.

We decided on doing vocals at my apartment as noise can really ruin a performance.  We ended up building a couple of baffles and recorded a bunch of lead vocal parts but that proved to be short lived as my apartment ended up being too noisy an enviroment for recording, and my poor neighbours.

Our last resort was to just do a bunch of late night sessions at The Furnace Room when everyone was sleeping or just record when the family was not home.  This made things drag on a lot longer than they should have but in late 2003, we finally had 10 songs finished and later a French version of Satellite was recorded as well.

I met a mix engineer/producer named Darren Grahn on a recomendation from another mix engineer and ended up hiring Darren to mix some of the tunes at The Warehouse, Bryan Adams studio downtown.  I had Yannis Fysass, a friend of a friend mix the rest of the tunes and eventually master the entire thing.  Both guys did a great job as did Shane and I think their great work had an awful lot to do with that CDs eventual success.

Now the real work began.  I got a couple of thousand CDs made up and started tracking songs to the radio, in the meantime I found a band to play with and began rehearsing.  A thousand phone calls to music directors across Canada and a year later, we finally had our first top 40 song in Sunday Morning!  A few months later we would have similar success with Satellite as well. I booked us a bunch of shows, found a company to distribute the CD and hit the road a while later on a trek across Canada.

Next week, I will get back to the current CD and maybe,  just maybe I will have some lyrics or a video performance of one of the new songs on acoustic.

Chat later!