At Two Speeds

This post is a bit of catch up since I have another album I've finished that I want to write about, but I did some amazing, crazy other things in between that I should mention first.

I played on the Oh Wells EP Roll With The Punches, which we recorded starting in March 2013 (when I'd just joined), and it came out a year later. I did guitar, backing vocals, trombone, and violin, and we recorded it with Paul Boechler at FaderMountain Sound.

We spent a couple days in the big room they used to use for recording commercial jingles (I know because my dad interned here in the 70s), tracking through their newly hooked-up SSL 4K console. As far as I know we just kept the drums from these sessions, since we overdubbed everything else later in the small studio. If I'd known nothing I was playing mattered, I probably wouldn't have tried so hard, but it did force me to nail down my parts, which made overdubbing pretty painless. Seeing all the fancy mics and where they went was fascinating, and I gleaned everything I could without making a question-asking nuisance of myself.

I learned about the typical path to becoming a recording engineer, which means being an intern (read: coffee-maker and food-getter) for a certain window of time, after which they either find you more meaningful work, or they don't. Meaningful work apparently means things like chopping out fret buzz from between every note of a bass part. Things like that happened on this EP. Can you tell? It seemed kinda like make-work to me, but I think it's more that when your role doesn't give you much control over the content, you can probably go overboard making sure there are no possible problems with the things you do control. Especially with slave labor close by!

There's a reason why people are willing to put up with all that, though, and it's because it is fun and exciting recording things. And when you're not there for the actual work of mixing, it really seems like magic. We pretty much just came in to record and listen to mixes in various states of progress, and I missed the power of choosing comps and finicking with note timing on solos. At the same time it's nice getting a result that's easy to accept for what it is as opposed to having to fret about every decision that's made.

The EP was done by the fall, and we applied to a couple grants to get a video made for the single, "Let it Go". We developed a couple concepts with a team of videographers that we didn't end up working with, which was an interesting experience anyway. In what I'm sure is a common dynamic, we had a strong but difficult-to-execute narrative idea, and the video people were preoccupied with disjointed images and arresting, ambiguous symbolism.

We wound up landing a MUCHfact viral video grant anyway. The contract had a short deadline to finish the video, so we decided to realize the second concept with a friend of the band who works in video production. The central idea of the video was to mirror the song, which is about not feeling limited by a diagnosis of mental illness. In the video world, a doctor physically tattoos the diagnosis onto the patient. We shot the scenes over several days, splitting our budget between the crew, props, makeup, and food for the unpaid actors. I just barely got the finished copy back to MUCHfact on time, and we released the video with the EP launch.


While this stuff was going on, the director of a theatre company in Toronto that I know through a Montreal bandmate asked me if I was interested in writing the music for an original musical they were putting on for Toronto Fringe Fest. So I said yes, because that's what you do when that happens.