Morph Productions

Morph Productions, my Toronto based studio ended up moving this summer and the new space required that I build a vocal booth.  I'm pretty handy and have tackled many home improvement projects but nothing so involved as framing and drywalling a room within a room from scratch.  In addition to that I also had to make space for a window and door (with extra wide) door jamb.  Sometimes when life gives you challenges you just have to give yourself a little pep talk before you get started and then... get started.  Here's a few pics and descriptions on how I made my vocal booth for the new studio.  I'll also put a few things in of times where I went wrong to help you if you're building your own vocal booth.  I'm by no means an expert and you'll want to reference other resources to build a booth of your own but hopefully you'll find a few useful nuggets of info that will help you on your build. #1 Supplies: I decided to make the booth double studded on the two...

2015 was definitely an interesting year with a lot of different challenges and success.  In the year previous I was asked by Tep No to come up with a classical guitar line for a tropical house tune he wanted to do.  I did it late one night and he developed a great song around it that wasn't released till January 2015.  We had the fortune to have it premier on the BBC on Pete Tong's radio show and that really helped launch it.  By the end of 2015 it had 2 licenses (Michael Korrs video and a US tv show) and it got  4 million listens on Spotify.  We'll see how much farther it can go in the new year.  Here's the song on spotify and the Michael Kors video: From this collaboration I ended up meeting other deep house producers who liked what I was doing and wanted to collaborate as well.  I've been doing a lot of work with Chicago producer Kiso Armic and a French producer Daitshi.  A remix I contributed guitars to for Kiso ended up going...

I just found out my favourite radio show, Wiretap isn’t going to continue this season after 11 years and I’m pretty heart broken about it.   I used to have CBC on all the time when I wasn’t working in the studio and I still remember the first time I heard it 11 years ago.   I was going into the fridge getting something as I turned the radio on and I heard this weird and funny conversation about someone who was watching their lobby security camera instead of an actual tv channel.   I’m not going to say I fell in love with the show that day but I was intrigued and a seed was planted. It wasn’t long before I was trying to make sure I could tune in every Sunday to hear what was going to happen next.   As time progressed the different personalities started poking out a bit more and I completely fell in love with the show. After 11 years of listening to something you amass so many memories of where you were in life while listening to different episodes.   Here ar...

One of the things I find puzzling when working with a new artist is when they choose to pursue a genre of music they don’t love or aren’t suited to because they feel that’s the only way that they’ll “make it”.   In my experience that attitude rarely works and the artist is left with a project that doesn’t reach its intended professional goal nor satisfies them artistically.   For a project to be successful there has to be a love and a deep understanding of the genre it’s in.   Sounds basic but without those two elements the project is unlikely to be successful. In general the music genre that artists think they can cash in on is some form of pop music.   One of the misconceptions that people have that drives me completely nuts is that pop music is easy to do.   If that was so we’d all do our one big pop album, make our riches and be free to then pursue the music we really wanted to.   Unfortunately this is not the case.    I’m a big believer ...

A question that has come up a lot recently from my clients is whether it is better to release an album all at once or release multiple singles over time. It has been coming up so much recently, that I felt it would be valuable to share some of my insights on the subject.   While most of us have grown up listening to albums and still want to release our music in that format, it's proving not to be very practical in today’s market.  The reasons for this are because of the way we all listen to music now, how much social media has affected our lives, and the way these two things have changed the way the entire music industry operates.  To be clear, when I say “album", I refer to a bunch of songs packaged together, either physically (CD etc) or digitally.   Twenty years ago, recorded music was sold as a physical product. There was a cost to create this product and deliver it to the consumer.  It made sense to package multiple songs onto it in order to be abl...

Well 2014 is finally over and I figured I'd write a year in review to close it off right.  This was my 15th year running my music production company Morph Productions and it was definitely a unique one.  Aside from my regular duties helping lots of indie artists with their music projects I was also put in the position of promoting my own band and seeing a song I co-wrote get released by Sony.  Always great trying new things and developing new opportunities! The beginning of the year had my band, As the City Rumbles Underneath  release their first EP. As I've said in the past one of the reasons I wanted to do this project was to put myself in the position of my clients and learn how to promote an indie project.  Starting from nothing was really daunting but I ended up having a lot of success with my promotion efforts.  The band's music was featured on about 50 blogs, podcasts and internet radio (internet and FM).  I was also able to build our twi...

A producer friend Mike Langford and I decided to have a geek out session and compare a few microphones for acoustic guitar recording use.  In the microphone comparison we used a Neuman u87 , Neuman KM184 , KEL HM-1 and Beyer Dynamic Opus 53 .  Basically some of the microphones we have available at our separate spaces to record acoustic guitars with. I don't have four each of the API and Great River preamps that I use at my studio so to keep the preamp out of the equation we used the 4 preamps that are built into my Apogee Ensemble.  These are very clean, kind of sterile preamps so they work well for something like this. In order to get placement out of the equation as much as we could we placed all 4 microphones as close as possible together and pointed them at the 12th fret of the acoustic guitar which is a pretty standard placement.  Acoustic guitar was a Martin D28 and Mike handled the strumming duties. Below are the results of our test.  I'...