Fiction Music Production

Do you produce singer-songwriters?

Yes. A lot. We can take your project from inception to finished master and do that for A LOT of artists. We have in-house musicians for drums, bass, guitars, banjo, mandolin and keyboards and have a huge network of world class musicians we can use.

Can I record my band in your studio? 

Yes. Well maybe not...it all depends on how big your band is and whether you want to record live-off-the-floor. We can handle a live quintet easily, but anything over that we would need to use other rooms, OR overdub the rest of the players. Very often we start with bass and drums and add players accordingly so we can easily handle any project that way. However, if you have an orchestra or big band, then we would need to do the tracking somewhere else and do the final production here. We have done that for the National Art Centre Orchestra, The Canadian Arm Forces Big Band and  large ensembles like The PepTides, so it is all easily accomplished with a cogent over-riding plan and schedule.

Do you arrange as well, say I wanted real strings on my project?

Certainly. David is an accomplished arranger and orchestrator and has written a lot of classical music (symphonies and string quartets etc). On a recent project he wrote string charts for Craig Cardiff and had violins, violas, celli and basses send their parts in from Tokyo to New York (and a lot of points between). Now that covid restrictions are easing, getting a string quartet assembled in house is very easily done. If the budget does not allow for real players, David can do realistic mock-ups with his extensive orchestral libraries (Spitfire, VSL, East West, custom. etc).

Can we work online?

Yes and no. So much of the last few years has had an online component and we are totally comfortable with that, but real-time online collaborations have latency and are dependent on uploading and downloading speeds. We can take your voice track via i-phone (or any recording device) and build up the arrangement which you can then overdub to at your own studio and upload to ours for production. We have taken Soundcloud voice recordings done on an i-Phone and then created finished album cuts using them (check out Electrified into Love by the PepTides for an example where the final vocals were the original i-phone demos) so pretty well anything is possible.

Do you have a price list?

We have a contact form. Get in touch and tell us what you want and we can come up with a budget and plan of action. For TV cues with no vocals (or in-house vocals, meaning David) we can go as little as $300 for composition and final production, or if you want a mix done of existing music we can aim for a similar number, but realistically, it is best to talk and figure out what you need and then proceed from there.

I am a singer who has written a song, but I don't know how to play an instrument or write charts: can you do that?

Of course. We work with a lot of vocalists who have written songs but have no instruments or charts. We will do pre-production where we figure out what is going on harmonically and structurally with the song and  then start building tracks. We have drums, bass, guitars, banjo, mandolin and keyboards as in-house instruments and can add any electronic or midi sound easily (as well as write charts for any additional session player). 

Do you do mastering as well?

Yes we do, but if you are looking for a hugely compressed, brick-wall limited sound you might want to go elsewhere. We have mastered hundreds of hours of broadcast music in pretty well all genres so are conversant with the needs of artists and broadcasters. We use analog gear like Millenia Media tube and solid state EQs and Comps, and we also have a huge selection of mastering software tools by Waves, iZotope and PSP.