Recording Manifests (2021)

About a year earlier, an old friend from University came by my guitar amp repair shop. He didn't have an amp that needed fixing, instead he took out his phone and started playing audio recordings of song ideas he had. Tim told me that he started writing songs after his friend died in a car accident and wants release an album before he dies.

We started out working on his ideas, I tried to contribute by coming up with drum parts that matched the songs. Soon Tim started finding other local musicians that wanted to help and soon had an entire cast of musicians willing to contribute to this project. Every time I would see him, he had a new idea for a song or a change to something we did. Since Tim had two other drummers interested in helping, a lot of times I was simply lending the rehearsal space in the back of my shop.

We scoured the county for a large building record in. Tim had contacts all over the place and we went and checked out old barns, horse stables and churches, bringing with us a guitar and snare drum to check the acoustics in each. Eventually Tim came across the "Freight Shed" in Belle River Ontario, an old railroad building adjacent to tracks that was mostly original but in the gradual process of being renovated. On our first visit, my foot and entire leg went right through the rotten floorboards of the second floor that we were scouting. After determining that the acoustics were good and the rotten floor was relegated to a small patch, we started setting up the space for recording.

We had a lot of conversations about the types of recordings we like, both of us preferring when bands record "live off the floor" where all musicians are in the same room and the entire performance gets recorded at the same time. I set up my old Windows XP computer and 8-channel recording interface. While I would have liked more channels to record, 8 was our limit and the little money available for this project was spent on renting a few decent microphones.

My buddy John helped me rescue an old Hammond L-100 organ from an old age home and after cleaning it up in my shop and attaching wheels, we brought it to the freight shed. Tim and I bought bulk wire and soldered extension cables for headphones and microphones. When I wasn't there playing drums or setting up microphones, I showed them how to operate the recording gear and left detailed instructions.

Towards the end of the recording, more friends came in to do overdubs and then we took the recording gear back to my shop. "Live off the floor" vocal recordings are very difficult, the vocal microphone is very sensitive and often picks up too much of the other instruments to be useful during mixing so Tim came back to my shop and we did some new vocal takes on some of the tracks.

We mixed the album in my office, on the yorkville studio monitor speakers I scored at a garage sale for $10 a few years earlier. Once we were happy with a mix, we'd listen to it in the car or at work and come back and make some changes. Eventually there were no more changes left to make and Tim sent all of the files off to a record pressing plant in Ontario.

Tim brought over the test pressing and we listened to it together on my home stereo. Immediately we both noticed that the vinyl pressing had "taken the edge off" the recording and given it a timeless feel that we were hoping to acheive. Some of these songs still come up when my music library is on shuffle and I'm always proud of the recordings and have good memories of the time I spent in the freight shed with all of these musicians.