Round Table Recording Studio #

While I was still at C. W. Boon, I found out that one of my business accounts that I was putting money into had a bunch of money that I totally forgot about. So I decided that I wanted to put together a couple of tracks and release it as a 45 (Single 7” record). I was still doing some work with Rita Miller and one of the songs we were going to do was “Street Stories” and we were going to do this with 3 female vocals. Rita, her friend that I can not remember her name, and my business partner from the Studio, Catherine. The other song was an instrumental Jazz/Fusion piece that I originally wrote one night when I was in the studio that we managed. There was this very nice sounding Kawai Grand Piano and it was a very inspiring instrument. The first time I performed this piece was at my Mom and Dad’s 25th wedding anniversary. I was in charge of the program during this shindig and I wanted to do this like a big show, all the singers that were singing songs would be backed up by my band that I brought along for this.

The studio that I decided to record the tracks was Round Table Recording Studio which was at the time, the closest recording studio to where I was living. This studio was put together and was owned by Laurie Bertig and his long time friend and fellow bass player from his Centurion days, Ken Jasper, nick named Jazz. When I was writing out all those instrument parts out for Laurie, this was the studio that they were recording them. So that I would have complete and total ownership of all the tracks and master, everyone on the recordings was paid. This was a fully funded work for hire and I did the hiring. I used my usual crew of Richard Bell on the drums, Wes Yaciuk on Guitar, Randy Ritz on Bass, and I played the piano in one song and my Rhodes 88 in another. In addition to that I brought in an alto and tenor saxophone players and a Moog Synth guy all from Grant MacEwan. I am not even sure how I got to meet these people and have no more information about them. It was two boys and one girl and I don’t know any of their names. I also had one additional guitar player that was an acquaintance of Rita Miller, named Andrais Schuld and what I remember about him was that he had just graduated from the Guitar Institute Hollywood.

I do believe there were a couple of practise sessions where I think I might have recorded rough pieces to make sure that the arrangements would work. Today I can do all that with my DAW and some good samples and requires less imagination. We recorded the tracks and our Engineer was Dean, can’t remember his last name. He learned his craft in the San Francisco Bay area and was really good. Richard and I got along with him really well. We made rough mixes down to cassette copies to decide what our next steps would be. Both songs had issues. The saxophone parts for Hot Java just were not cutting it and just were not tight enough and we were all in agreement that we don’t think they would be able to deliver a better performance. So, I called my old Grant MacEwan instructor who always hurled insults at me when I was a student of his to offer him the job of recording a soprano and alto saxophone part onto the recording. He was a union musician so I had to pay him union scale which was quite a bit more than what I was paying everyone else. I can’t even remember what the rate was but I do know you had to pay for a minimum of 3 hours. I had to quickly rework my score and change the arrangement for the soprano to play the lead and the alto the harmony. Rick showed up at the studio in his tuxedo as he was off to a gig right after he recorded the tracks. He sight read the charts and was done in about 20 minutes. On his way out he stopped by and gave me the best compliment I ever got from him, “I finally get you, nice job”. An interesting side note is that just a year or two later Grant MacEwan added a recording and production track to their program.

The other problem that we needed to fix was the vocals on Need to Feel. It was such a powerful song but the vocals just did not have the power that they needed. I think Richard took it upon himself to get Joe Fritz to come in and record the vocals. This was a really good call and really made all the difference that the song really needed. We then mixed everything down to the final mix and I cannot remember who I got to press the records. It could have been through Round Table, but I have this feeling I might have given it to Ruben who still had all the pressing contacts and he could have brokered the deal for me. I just know that I designed the label for the record and used an Apple MacIntosh to write the text that goes around the outside edge of the label. I don’t even remember how many of the single I got pressed, and this time instead of just sending them out to radio stations I decided to take a road trip through Alberta and personally visit the radio stations and see if I could get some air play.