The Story of CoLabs Pt. 2

So, to pick up the story from last time..

I found myself in a strange place in January of 2005. I knew that my place was with artists, making music in the studio, but I had just left a studio where I did that on a daily basis. I was pretty angry about how the last six months had just played out but I didn't feel like fighting any more. I knew that I needed to find my way back into the studio but it was becoming clear that it was going to be a very different road then what I had planned for.

I decided to pick up a job in some related field and to start looking for new opportunities to make records again. I found a company that installed audiophile equipment and home theaters and wired "smart" houses.

Close enough. I figured I would be there for a few months, maybe find a new home base to work out of and get back to making great music. Well, three months went by, four months, five, six...

I tried to stay sharp and keep learning in the middle of all this, so I read a lot, networked with different studio owners and keep recording on my own from home. I picked up the odd gig to engineer or mix something for people, but there wasn't really a clear direction as to where things were going. I started to think more about opening a studio and what that would look like in Calgary, but really didn't know if Alberta needed another recording facility.

Many of the studio owners and producers that I spoke with seemed to be somewhat frustrated with the way the whole recording industry looked like in Alberta and talked about things needing to change. One frustration I noticed was that the nicer "pro" studio owners felt that the guys with project studios where destroying the industry by charging people $20/hr. to make whole recording projects in their bedrooms and basements. I saw the point but surely the project studio/home recording trend was not going to go away. One thing I was becoming more convinced of through conversation with different studio owners was that the "one-stop-shop" approach was not working. Sure, it kept clients in the building longer since you would offer everything from songwriting to graphic design and mastering. But, in the end, the music suffered and people felt that if you had any real money you would need to leave for Vancouver or Nashville to get a really good product. Isn't there a better approach?

I kept chewing on these ideas.

It was November and I was working out in the mountains wiring a beautiful new vacation home. It was pretty cold and the walls of the building where only partly up so I was wearing some work gloves. I needed to use the table saw on the job site to build a guide for the wires we were pulling that morning. I'm not sure what happened, but I think my glove touched the spinning blade as I pulled the piece I had just cut off the table. I felt my left hand get thrown back to my side almost instantly as the saw made a quick hiccup sound. I switched the saw off. I thought the wood must have caught the blade and kicked back into my hand. But when I looked at my hand, my glove was ripped apart and my fingers where covered in blood. The blade had caught a small piece of my glove and pulled my hand across the top of it, ripping apart my middle and ring fingers in an instant.

I had reconstructive surgery done that afternoon by, thankfully, one of the best hand specialists in Calgary. I kept all my fingers, but lost the first two joints in my ring and middle fingers.

I went from this...









To this...

I couldn't work for about five months. Because I had four metal pins between the two fingers, I couldn't move them from my knuckles down. So I sat at home, healing up, hoping that I could continue to play bass and guitar when the pins came out.

As I waited to heal up, I realized that if I was going to live out this whole studio thing, I would have to make some major changes starting right then. I couldn't afford to wait any longer.

But that's for next time...