Watching it happen

For the past two months I have lived in a jam house rented by a Vancouver band called “Tenant”.

Two of the four members live here as well, and they practice fairly regularly on Tuesday and Thursday nights.  The drummer and singer of Tenant have studied music on a professional level for some time, and one of them has attained his Bachelor of Music.  As well, both of them teach music to kids in their spare time. The other two members of the band write and record fairly regularly on their own home digital audio workstations and are constantly striving to discover new bands and new sounds.  Needless to say, any time I come home, there is some form of music being played on the living room speakers, and talk often circles around the subject of new music, or plans for the band.

This is familiar territory for me, and it’s been a common theme for me to be living, working, and playing amongst artists and musicians most of my life.  Only now does it occur to me that a life constantly surrounded by music and it’s creators and contributors is not exactly a common one.  People don’t often get to experience the process of writing and recording music with the intention to release it to the world. I don’t want to sound cliche, but the first time you hear a song after or as it’s being recorded is nothing short of magical.  It’s exciting to be around a musician as he/she is feverishly frankensteining together a piece of music from thin air.  By the time an artist is ready to show even their closest friends anything they’ve put together in a demo recording, they have most likely already poured over it for hours or days. The bags underneath their eyes is always a clear indication of how much effort has already gone in to their latest work.  It’s such an exciting thing and sometimes it’s a struggle for me to find the words to describe it.  As an engineer in a recording studio, when you have a band that has already paid their dues into the writing, arranging, and rehearsing of their songs, the first time you hit the record button and listen to them play… that sound that fills the room for the first time and has a distinctly “live” feel, but a solid polished sonic quality that can only ever be heard in the studio, as the band plays…

That sound and that feel created in the first instant of recording is what I live for.

The never-ending thirst for new music seems to be a little better quenched when I live among people that create it.

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