Where are you from?
I'm from Northern Ontario. I'm from Espanola, Ontario, which is this weird little town. There was nothing going on, so either you played hockey or you did music, so I started doing music when I was around 13 or 14. I moved to Toronto and went to Humber College. I was not the best student; I did the first year and then transferred over to the Harris Institute. I didn't have the discipline to become a guitar player on that level. I wasn't interested in playing somebody else's music. I met Daryn Barry at the Harris Institute. We got along famously. Then I went from there, and my first job was at Wellesley Sound. It was just off Queen Street in Sherbourne; it was a nasty neighborhood.
Near the Salvation Army men's shelter?
Yeah. At that time, that was like studio alley. Sounds Interchange, Manta Sound, and Wellesley were there. I started working there, and immediately went from sweeping floors to finding out that one of the engineers who worked the midnight shift didn't have an assistant. He was doing rap, and nobody else wanted to do rap. I thought, "This is a great way to get my hands on some equipment, and also a great way to get some credits." It turned out he was working with Dream Warriors [King Lou and Capital Q] and people of that ilk. I went in, made myself available, and became his assistant for the next few years. Paul Raven [bass] from Killing Joke moved to Toronto. This engineer, Walter Sobczak, they hooked up in a club or whatever. Walter was in a post punk industrial band called Sturm Group. Raven came over to Wellesley Sound, and we were doing industrial. It was a cool mix of a lot of different music. I've learned a hell of a lot there, things that to this day probably influence me. We were doing a lot of programming, sound manipulation, and computer programming. Working with tape, computers, analog consoles, and with the first digital workstation, the 2-channel Studer Dyaxis 1 [Digital Audio Production System].
I remember using it. Great-sounding 16-bit converters, but an awkward, challenging onscreen interface.
That thing was so clunky. We would do an edit on something, a crossfade, and we'd have to go home and come back in the morning to wait for the crossfade to be done. It was so slow! The hard drives were huge – you fired them up and it sounded like a car starting. From there I went to Hypnotic, around the time I first met you. I started working out of Hypnotic for Tom Treumuth and doing sessions for his label and his recording studio. That's where I went from working alone on all of this rap music to working on purely metal, more than anything else. There were a couple alternative bands in there too. Daryn Barry and I did a Made record [Bedazzled] for MCA [Records].
I totally forgot about that one.
We produced that. That record was almost the death of me, in terms of my career. It had all kinds of hype; it came out, and it absolutely did nothing. It was hard to get a gig after that for a little while. But Tom was cool. Tom gave us the rein of the place and said, "Here, go nuts."
Hypnotic Records and Studio was like a one stop shop, right? Everything's there, plus artists coming in.
Exactly. No other label on the planet would have done a Sons Of OTIS record [SpaceJumboFudge]. It wouldn't have happened. Not at that time, anyway. I did a podcast with Tom, and he was talking about how [the group] Big Sugar changed his whole thing. He signed Big Sugar, and then they went on to greater things. He did quite well with that. That funded Voivod [Negatron], Sons Of OTIS, and the other records that are a little bit more edgy.
There were a lot of heavy artists there. Were you prepared for that style beforehand?
The two things that saved me was I always had a love for metal and a soft spot for metal. I liked big, distorted guitars. I liked sounds that were big and heavy. I remember our mandate was always, "Whatever we do, it's got to be big, and it's got to be really aggressive." We didn't want the drums to sound like anything that had come before it. We didn't want the drums to sound like hair metal. We wanted them to sound raw, mean, and big. We wanted the guitars to rip your head off. We got into doing some interesting things with guitars: Putting them in small rooms and turning them up really, really loud, and also mic'ing. We used the common microphones at the time, like Sennheiser MD 421s and overdriving Neve 1272 preamps. Trying to get a bigger, saturated tone out of everything. We did a lot of weird mic'ing. I remember for the Sons Of OTIS record, we used AKG D112s on just about everything.
Really? The kick drum mics?
Yeah. The band was big, and it was loud, but it was so heavy on the low end that you could be in the room with them.
And you triggered samples from Melvins [Tape Op #142] records for kick drums, right?
Yeah. What happened was I started getting into doing that during Negatron. I can't even remember what Apple computer it was. It was not a very powerful one. We would lock it up to the 2-inch tape, trigger samples from a sampler, and write a MIDI program that would track all the parts. We weren't quantizing drums; we were trying to put samples to what was there already. I spent days doing that and making that happen. I started doing that on the Voivod record. We did a lot of that on the OTIS record. I did it for Anvil [Plugged in Permanent and Pound for Pound].
Yeah, what was it like working with Anvil?
[laughs] They're funny, man. I love those guys. They're great guys. They're entertaining as hell. They wanted to play big, play loud, and have a great time doing it. By the time I worked with them it was their seventh album, and they had the process down. There were some really funny moments. I remember we were trying to mic the drum kit. The roadies come in, and in the road kits they have an actual anvil. "The anvil's got to be in the recording studio when we record." Which is fair; I get it. They put it in front of the drums. He's got double kick drums, so I'm trying to mic the kicks, but the anvil's in front of the drums. I'm like, "Guys, can we move the anvil?" They're like, "No. Nobody moves the anvil." So, I had to mic around this thing in order to get the kick drum sound I was looking for. There was a lot of, "Oh, my god. This is so funny." He [Steve "Lips" Kudlow] came in with a ton of Fender Twin amps, and that was easily the loudest guitar session I've ever done. It was unbelievably loud. It was a lot of fun working on those records, because I just didn't know what we were going to be working on from day to day. I'll tell you this; they're incredible players. Robb Reiner's easily one of the best drummers I've ever worked with. The guy's almost like if Buddy Rich got reincarnated as a metal drummer. He's got those kind of chops. It was really easy to get tones.
You and Daryn Barry later worked at Orange.
I did some work as a freelance engineer at Orange, and I did a lot of mixing out of that recording studio. When they first started up, Daryn Barry was one of the owners. They started an Orange Record Label, too. They had a country act signed. They signed Dave "Rave" Ogilvie's Jakalope. I spent many hours in there with Dave. I didn't really work on the Jakalope record [It Dreams], though Dave would have us come by, listen to the mixes he was doing, and see if we had any input. Orange was a great studio. I loved working out of that place. The SSL in there was second to none, at the time. I loved mixing on that. I go back now and listen to work we did in that studio, and that shit sounds good. From that point on, I was at Iguana Studios too. Were you over there?
A few times.
Every studio in Toronto was in the industrial area back then. They had an 80-channel SSL console, a great mix room, but an okay live room. We were known for just mixing records, which was more or less how I got into the whole mixing thing. I did a Joel Plaskett Emergency record [Truthfully Truthfully] there. I did some work with Ogilvie there. I did a Lindy [Vopnfjörð] record [Suspension of Disbelief], I Mother Earth, and some Our Lady Peace there [Happiness Is Not A Fish That You Can Catch]. Those were mainly all mix gigs. I Mother Earth [Blue Green Orange] was a mix gig with David Bottrill [Tape Op #19]. That was a lot of fun.
You were working at the studio, and all those artists came to you?
