The Amazing Ebow

I have recently purchased a new and amazing guitar effect product called the Ebow. I really didn't know what to think when I first saw this little gadget that looked very alien and fit in the palm of my hand. I was instantly blown away when I saw this mysterious handheld device in action as it hovered over my friends guitar and produced some of the most rich fully sustained guitar tones that beautifully mimicked a cello or violin—this sound was popularized by many artists notably Frank Zappa and Metallica. I was especially impressed at how the Ebow could sweep all six strings in one solid motion and unleash super fast arpeggios that sound like Jimmy Page gone mad splintering one of his massive cello bows.

I used this device on one of the guitar solos on my bands new record keeping it low in the mix and soaked with lush delays to create a sort of ethereal texture in the background of a guitar solo. The Ebow is a great tool for create complexities in this way: it does wondrous things to a mix when it is used as a guitar re enforcement tool. I highly recommend playing around with this unit to see if this tool suits your sound!

There are three stylistic ways to use the EBow as a tool for guitar expression:


1.) Arpeggio bowing - Run through arpeggio shapes as the Ebow is swept across the strings the ascend and descne the arpeggio notes.

2.) Spiccato bowing - Touch the Ebow to the guitar string in quick motions to target individual notes. Let the note sustain as you see fit. This sounds great with reverb and delay.

3.) Bowing - Move the Ebow back and forth to gently "massage" the string and let the guitar sing like a cello or violin.

All these styles can be incorporated together to create the most dynamic and crowd-stunning riff runs. A 9v battery fits into the top of the unit and weighs it out beautifully for great playability.

Happy bow'in!

Production Collective

Remember that office building that used to be a dance hall back in the 50s that I was blogging about acquiring? Well I have recently collaborated with the Exchange District based business Music First to develop a section of this building that was formerly Absurd Machine's production studio and turn it into a collective studio space.

We are currently drafting up a membership plan to serve about 25 members of film makers and musicians. This space is incredibly modular and acoustically modified to capture great recordings and is a great set for visual artists. There is an office section below where the Music First company will claim as their home base to construct cutting edge events that promote community solidarity and myself and Dj Tubescreamer will be the studio managers on the upper level.

The challenge will be filling the empty studio with gear that will maximize the capabilities of the space while still being on budget! The 4 keys members (including myself) that are fronting this project have quite a bit of studio gear already between us, but the major unit that we will need to puchase is a studio mixing board or several preamp channel strips for processing.

We have a couple ideas for the mixing board we will use for the studio:

The main question that all new studio owners face is, "Do we go digital or analog?"

Here are some of the digital products we had in mind:

SSL Nucleus - Is a DAW control interface which has automated fader controls and full parametric sweeping EQ.

Avid C24 - 24 channel mixer with analog inputs optimized for ProTools.

Here are some analog mixer products:

Toft Audio ATB16 - A great vintage analog sounding mix board.

SSL AWS 16 channel mixing board.

We will be pooling our resources in the next month to find the perfect configuration for our new studio. I will keep this blog updated on how the project is rolling out and studio rates when we are up and running. Cheers!

Last Relapse finishes our studio EP

I recently had my first experience as a recording artist with my band Last Relapse as we put together our first studio EP at Bedside Studios. We were taken under the wing of the chief music producer and owner Len Milne. He impressed us with his Juno nominations, wall of Western Canadian Music Awards and the several Perpetrators albums he produced.

The project began with Len coming down to our practice studio spot for a pre-production session and we decided which of our original songs would best fit the EP. Now that I look back on it, this was the moment when our songs were the most raw and this is when Len started carving away at the big piece of raw songwriting we dropped on his doorstep. Our goal with the EP is to achieve radio playability while still maintaining our songwriting integrity and heavy sound: this required some musical carving and shaping...

I am sharing this experience because I felt that co-producing and playing guitar on a professional record has significantly challenged and improved me as a musician and as a person. Different stages of the process were humbling as we dissected some technical guitar parts under the microscope and some parts were celebratory as we pieced the 7 odd guitar tracks (played on 3 different guitar models) and the pieces fit perfectly like puzzle. The experience has made me realize that I want to hone my craft as a songwriter for my entire lifetime; it is the greatest sense of satisfaction I have ever felt to play my ass off and nail a track when recording.

I have worked with a couple studio engineers with previous bands, but never a record producer. The big difference is that the producer crafts the arrangement of the songs as well as the technical studio wizardry. I could see how many songwriters could feel this process to be intrusive and difficult, but I was fortunate to have the same vision for this record as our producer and we both supported each-others suggestions. Listening to Lens advice was incredible training for my critical ear and he helped me extensively to listen for a song and not just my instrument. The process was difficult at times when we were discussing how to make the radio friendly four minute mark on our main radio single Miss Misunderstood when the song was written by us to be 5:15 mins. With Lens expert advice we were able to merge the pre-choruses and choruses making one technical but deliciously condensed main chorus that is much more progressive. After cutting and chopping our radio single we moved on to the others to perform surgery by simplifying and combining some of the technical drum and guitar parts.

Len expressed it well when he said that basically he was baking a layer cake with our song lol as a very proper metaphor for tightening up each layer of from the recorded instruments and merging them together in the mix.

I wanted the record to be stamped with my home town in some way so we used Garnett Amplification and Kel Audio microphones: all famous Winnipeg manufacturers. We just finished tracking the last guitar and vocal harmonies last night and I cant wait to hear the mixed product this Wednesday.

Summer film projects

The summer took off to a busy start as I jumped right into filming the movie Bunks for Disney XD in early June. The film was for a teenage demographic based on camp stories that come to life in mildly jarring horror fashion. I realised the golden rule of film continuity to be absolutely true on this film: avoid shooting child actors and animals... at all costs. Many of the child actors had difficulty remembering their exact actions for the "turn around" shots and made it challenging for the script supervisor to maintain continuity—oddly enough she was one of the most pleasant souls on set and was just an absolute sweetheart everyday.

Most of the shooting was on a remote island in Lake Of The Woods about a 30 minute boat ride from the Kenora harbour. The morning boat ride every morning was wonderful; we would hit breakfast catering in the hotel lobby then bring our coffee on the boat and enjoy the morning mist on our faces and the beautiful sunrise. We had a pretty moderate shooting schedule capturing 5 pages of script a day on average with plenty of options for angles and inserts. We were shooting on the Arri Alexa camera with two camera units and one splinter unit, which made my job difficult programming the time code and frame rate synchronisation for 3 cameras shooting simultaneously. There was many out-of-town crew on this show and I met some really great new friends from Vancouver, Toronto and L.A. I really enjoyed the company of director Tibor Takacs who is very Hungarian—if the name didn't give it away—our families are from the same region in Hungary and on top of that he also managed one of my favourite Canadian punk bands, The Viletones. Tibor told me some great stories from his life managing and producing a popular punk rock band in the height of the scene. My favourite story was when Tibor mention that once after booking Johnny Thunders (from the New York Dolls) to headline a show for The Viletones, Johnny pulled a slide of hand move and quickly snagged $100 extra on top of his show payment to buy smack outside of CBGBs and then disappeared for a couple days—what a crazy scene to have financial investments. Lets just clarify that I love Johnny Thunders for of his dirty-blues guitar playing and not his tragic lifestyle choices. There were some chaotic moments during the film, but that's how the business goes sometimes when the marketing vision and the creative vision don't exactly mesh, and do they ever really?

One of the most memorable moments on set was when the special FX department was rigging some weaponry, which the hero's were to shoot at the oncoming ghouls, and they over calibrated the launching device (I can't really give away too much here) suddenly the unit fired the projectiles high into the sky.. Well a couple seconds later, I was calmly programming my audio board and I notice everyone looking up. As I looked up, the projectiles were just about to rain down on me and a couple of the stand-in actresses that were sitting beside me. I ducked for cover under my mobile desk/mixer board but still got pelted by these things as did the actresses! It didn't hurt or anything, but we found it to be just hilarious seeing the shocked look on every ones face as these "things" came raining down. 

During our lunch breaks we had this gorgeous beach with plenty of swimming points to enjoy and suntan on with catering right on the shoreline, it was the best. The special FX department had underwater gear and they were pranking people relentlessly... I guess the crew members from California are always on shark alert. I worked on a couple more films throughout the summer, but this was the most fun.