Bent Sound Studio

News

 04/18/02: Due to (leasehold) technical difficulties, Bent Sound has relocated. We would like to thank the Victoria music community for years of support.  

Please refer to Phase 2 of this website for current studio activites.

Bent Sound is scheduled to conduct 2 days of Beta testing for IVL Technologies, with their model VoiceOne, which is still in the development stages.

Bent Sound has been designing a webpage for Artforging.com, it can be viewed here.  On March 25, Bent recorded Pat Nichol at The Laurel Point Inn for the "Hot Flash" Dinner Series.  This material will be available through Pat's company "Communication Connection".

 04/04/02: Due to (leasehold) technical difficulties, Bent Sound has been inoperative.

Bent Sound would like to thank its apprenticing engineer Velle Huscroft for all of her creative contributions. Velle is an excellent engineer with a fresh ear, great attitude and amazing personality who brought 5 years Radio experience and broadcasting expertise to Bent Sound, as well as skillful instrumentation including guitar, fiddle and voice.

03/10/02: Alma's CD is almost mastered... Roland Grittani's CD "Paris In Victoria" is completed and should be available in the next 6-8 weeks. Nurture Services CD has been mastered and also will be available in 6 to 8 weeks. Chris Asselin-Rogers has completed a 2nd demo at Bent. Artemis is cutting rehearsal demos www.mp3.com/artemis23 and is also developing a Flash EPK presentation for 2002.

Bent Sound officially welcomes its apprentice and assistant engineer Velle Huscroft. You can look forward to working with Velle this year!

02/16/02: The studio has been very busy, working steadily with Alma, on their 13 track indie release! With only 4 more tracks to mix (tomorrow) we are all looking forward to celebrating a job well done! Check back for details on their CD release. Bent Sound adds a new client to its roster, Paul Byrne, who mastered his 4 track independent release to CD. Roland Grittani has mixed his CD, soon to be mastered and available! The CD is a dynamic arrangement of Parisienne accordian with bass and guitar, and at some points, a 2nd accordian. This CD has a wealth of talent involved and is a very soothing and pleasant CD to enjoy!

01/30/02: Happy New Year! ALMA has been back in the studio this month, tracking their CD. We have 3 songs mixed, and are booked in again this weekend- hoping for a mid February deadline... Bent Sound has contributed to the soundtrack composed by Anna Hostman for the UVIC play "The Monument" which opens in February. The Ecclestons are are Bent Sound again, re-recording their debut CD "Fir N Mna" for a successive release of 500 copies. The Artemis project is producing a series of live demos at Bent Sound which you can listen to here.... I am having GREAT success with my new Voice Prism Plus! Check out my review here....

12/29/01: Bent Sound has added a new client to its roster this week - Children of Celebrities- which is a manifestation of The MuskOx, a client from almost 5 years ago! Welcome back Rob, Mike & John, and welcome Wayne and Louisa! They are cutting a 3 song demo CD-R, bedtracks are recorded (3 piece live from floor), recording vocals 12/30/01, mixing 01/02/02.

12/25/01: Happy Holidays from Bent Sound! Merry Merry Merry! (Bent will reopen Dec. 27th)

Epiphany's (3 day) 7 song demo CD is completed and sounds great! Bent Sound adds a new client to its roster this month - ALMA, a 5 piece acoustic ensemble, recording a full length indie release. Roland Grittani has added stand-up bass and a 2nd accordian to some of the arrangements on his CD. We will be mixing this CD ASAP

12/09/01: OK, I finally got around to adding my equipment list to this page! So check it out! Epiphany's live from floor demo record went without a hitch yesterday afternoon. We completed 7 songs in 4 hours!

This week Bent Sound is adding a new piece of equipment to its list... We work with TCHelicon - a local company specializing in state-of-the-art voice technology development- and so we are reviewing their latest release, the Voice Prism plus which is really an incredible unit! Graciously, TC Helicon is parking a unit at Bent Sound for some practical application.  Bent also has a Digidesign Studio Vocalist from TC Helicon, which we use to generate harmonies, pitch correct the voice, stack vocal tracks etc..... The new Voice Prism has all these effects as well as onboard compression, gate, delay, verb, and voice modelling such as tremelo, resonance etc. Wow!

12/06/01: Well it's back to the grind tomorrow, as december fully comes into swing. This week Bent Sound welcomed a new client Roland Grittani- a local busker, he's an accordian player who excels at the very tasteful French style of playing his instrument. We recorded 5 songs and had a lot of fun getting KILLER tone with a hard panned balanced stereo pair  of C-1000's, an omni condenser overhead and a close bidirectional Sennheiser SpitFire. Tomorrow we are recording another 5 or 6 tracks for his Indie CD/demo....

This weekend we have Nancy Green's trio Epiphany in on Saturday for a live from floor... Nancy has cut 2 previous demos at Bent Sound.

11/30/01: Well, the month is over (whew) it was hectic. Bent has a few down days to recover from all the activity, then we are back at it come Tuesday Dec. 4. Currently Bent Sound is working with Kallisti on designing a CD ROM for promoting Artemis. I think multi-media CD-ROMs are the way to promote indie music- with the audio tracks playable and an embedded CD ROM Promo/Press Kit...efficient, cost effective, & totally pro!

11/27/01:Mixed JuliaKelly's 3 song demo, I think it turned out really well!

11/25/01: Recorded with Les Weiss & Lonny Koch tonight as they recorded session tracks for JuliaKelly's demo CD. We are mixing her 3 song demo on Wednesday- watch out for this girl - she'll win you over! Another killer production by Clint Hanson of Rhythm & Jam Productions!

GreyCup Sunday and I'm bummed the BC Lions aren't playing....

 I added a pic of Barry Clarke at the studio a couple years ago (pics)....

I found another artists' service site for MP3's, so that's 3 different sites I have found to date www.iuma.com , www.mp3.com , and www.garageband.com My least favorite personally of all those is garageband, as you have to review 20 songs to earn 1 song upload credit and I think this is a totally ridiculous amount of time to have to spend to upload 1 song! IUMA (the newest one I have found) is VERY user friendly, the interface is slick. What do you musicians think of these sites?  Check 'em out for yourself and let us know.... post some feedback in our guestbook!

11/23/01: I just published some pics taken from our Syren session last weekend- Thanks Peter for taking the pics, and thanks Fae for dropping them to disk for me!

11/22/01: Bent Sound welcomes a new client to the roster- JuliaKelly an aspiring singer/songwriter with a young & sweet expressive country style. Julia is at Bent Sound this month working with Clint Hanson a local songwriter and producer. Clint owns the song writing and production company "Rhythm & Jam Productions" which has produced artists including Diana Lynn, Terry Niles, & Kerri Lieppi.....Kitangus has mastered their incredible 14 track CD "Into The West". We are taking a month or so to approve this final master before going to mass duplication, this CD is great! www.mp3.com/kitangus

This month Syren is completing a 6 track pre-release just in time for the holidays! We recorded drums yesterday with the amazing Kurt Tyrrell, and their original tunes are springing to life! www.mp3.com/syren13

Jaime Rokeby-Thomas has started recording her original music at Bent Sound!

Billy Goats Gruff have finished mastering their full length CD "The Million Dollar Tip"... It's a 17 song CD! Look for its upcoming release!

Brian Anderson has mastered his next CD "Cool Tricks". Look for his independent release at his mp3.com Brian Anderson

10/24/01: I heard from Greg Madill of The Ecclestons yesterday- he has told me that their new CD "Imbolc to Beltane" is receiving rave reviews both from locally and also from CBC. It was listed as #1 new CD in a CBC release to stations nationwide, and is receiving airplay from coast to coast! This is wonderful feedback for everyone involved in the project, and testament that indie production can compete in a mainstream forum. The Ecclestons website is under construction but you can check it out here....On another note, The Ecclestons did not succeed in their FACTOR grant application, being told that their songwriting needs development- This in my opinion is testament to the arbitrary nature of FACTOR board decisions- anyone who knows The Ecclestons knows their material ROCKS and the songwriting of all 3 members is suberb! Colleen teaches songwriting at UVIC for goodness sakes! 

So for those of you who have been turned down and experienced such feedback, try try again and don't give up! Believe in what you do and find your audience! 

10/20/01: Kitangus has 12 of 14 songs mastered- only 2 songs remain to be mixed. 1 song has been arranged for string quartet by the wonderful Jaime Rokeby-Thomas of Salt Spring Music works. Recorded last Friday, this piece is a truly epic addition to their incredible "Into The West" CD.... Syren is recording bedtracks & some vocal overdubs on 10/23, Billy Goats Gruff are tracking bass & vocals this week 10/24 & 27, Brian Anderson has been working on his MP3.com site, and Barry Clarke signed in with his URL and many nice things to say (thanks!) I did check out his site- Barry is quite a prolific artist and has been involved in some great projects over the years I have known and worked with him.

10/15/01: I am finally revamping this webpage back to an html  based format, the flash format was a fun learning project but has remained undeveloped, so I thought I would simplify the page.

Current Projects: Kitangus are mastering their CD, hoping to be done by the month's end. We nailed all of our mixes right on save for 1 I can't live with that we will remix! :) Billy Goats Gruff are back recording bedtracks to complete a 15 song CD- they are tight and we are making great time! We'll be adding more tracks in the weeks to come. Brian Anderson, one of my oldest clients is working on some material he recorded with his cousin Warren on a digital multi tracker. We are replacing some vocals and mixing them through Bent's system, really bringing them to life! Syren is back at Bent Sound after 2 years (?) to produce their 2nd CD which will be comprised of original songs- their first CD "Waves To The Sky" was a traditional celtic work.