X92.9 Xposure Contest

If you live in Calgary and listen to X92 you may have heard mention of the Xposure contest that they are taking submissions for. Basically you send in a CD of your band's best three songs to the station and "...the top 5 bands will each win $15,000, inclusion on the Xposure CD, $1,000 gift certificate from Guitarworks and a track in full radio rotation on X92.9.� Partial proceeds from the Xposure CD will go to each of the band as well." (Xposure Blog)

So here's the deal. This is a great opportunity for bands that have a good CD project but not much exposure at this point. I'd love to help your music get recognized and see some deserving new bands win this thing. So, if you are thinking of submitting a CD for this, but aren't sure if your demo will cut it on competitive radio airplay, CoLabs can help you out.

I'll mix your project to be submitted up front for FREE. You will get a totally pro sounding mix of your product that will really stand out and get some attention. If you don't make the winning top five, you don't pay a thing.

This thing will be over soon so contact me at info@colabs.ca if this is something you are interested in.

Later

Creative Voice in Mixing

I've always felt that I've had difficultly expressing my musical voice through any one musical medium. Some people are naturally gifted in one area, whether it be songwriting, some instrument that they are really proficient on or something like that, and they are able to express there creative voice effortlessly. It's a little different for me.

By "creative voice" I mean that inner creative identity that you try to expose through your art. Your view of the world, your statement.

But this voice takes time to develop. A painter must learn the appropriate techniques and skills before she can freely create without any technical barrier stopping her from realizing her creative vision. Until she arrives at that certain level of proficiency (it's different for everyone) she will struggle to give voice to her creativity and will likely feel that her work is always half finished or under realized.

I have found that I can't give voice to my creativity in any one medium. Practically, while I play a number of instruments, I'm not amazing on any one of them. Artistically, I've often found that one instrument, one sound, one color isn't enough to say all that must be said. Kind of like painting with only one brush and one color. This is way I have always loved producing, but especially, mixing.

Mixing may seem an odd medium for giving free reign to an artistic voice, but I find it to be a very creatively freeing experience. You could say that a song could be mixed a hundred different ways, but upon hearing a piece that I'm going to work on, I usually hear the end product in the first few listens. I then work backwards to realize that sound in my head.

Instead of a restrictive thing, this is a very clarifying process in giving voice to my creativity. After all, your creative voice isn't about infinite possibility so much as it is about that one thing that you are trying to say in that moment.

An artist is tortured in not feeling that he can give voice to his creativity, that he will never be able to express in a pure way just how he see the world around him. And this is the simple beauty in mixing for me. In the four minutes of that one song, I get to paint a view of the world as I see it. If you listen behind the music, you will hear my creative voice.

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...