Open Audio Society

BIO

Open Audio Society

September 5, 2019 

Almost 3 years ago (2016) my friend Wayne Woodworth and I (Chris MacInnis) endeavoured to write, record, mix and master a few tunes.

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Wayne’s recording experience gave him a head start and he had a small library of completed demos and previously recorded ideas. We started with a fresh song from an acoustic piece I wrote when I purchased my Martin guitar. I named the piece “Martinistic” because of it. Wayne added some melodic lead guitar and made it come to life! Next came another acoustic riff I wrote and then laid a bass track on. Afterward recording the bass and on his way out the door Wayne said “One More Thing Before I Go, what is the title so we can ID it when posted?” Or something to that effect. I replied with “we’ll call it One More Thing Before I Go!” He ran with it adding more magic guitar and drums that have it life! Thus began the random song naming thing we still do today.

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Getting a good sounding mix was slow and tedious however with our limited equipment and recording environment. Especially since we each work full-time jobs and can only record when quiet opportunity arises. We made every mistake, learned as we went and got better as time passed—Especially me as I had no real previous experience recording and mixing.

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We recorded separately and posted our tracks online for the other to download and with which collaborate with new ideas, suggestions, additions etc. One of us would record a track and the other would take it and bring it to life with some vocal or melodic electric lead pieces. Or some complimentary slide guitar or keys.

It turns out however, writing music with an intended vocal, but without a vocal is not very satisfying. And with a few bed tracks and demo ideas building I decided I was gonna write lyrics; at first not intending to sing them, but I decided to throw my anxiety about judgement to the wind and “just do it!”

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It wasn’t pretty and I hated the sound of my own voice, but after plugging away at a few songs we started to see some progress. Realizing recording is an art all in itself we researched some techniques for vocals and put them into practice—re-recording vocals sometimes five times.

I’m not sure what exactly changed, but after listening to our demo tracks and my own voice hundreds of times and trying different mixing techniques to make them stand out or sound like they fit the mix it was apparent to me that confidence was growing. I didn’t even hear the vocal as me anymore. It was just the vocalist. I even would refer to the vocalist as “he” when discussing the latest mix on our frequent coffee listening drives.

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As for Wayne, an established pianist, he was fairly new to guitar when we started this project, but all the same theory and skill applied; and we created music that we thought was good! We recorded anything we thought was good. Even if it wasn’t what we considered our taste.

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We decided that we would not narrow ourselves to a single genre of music and also not exclude any musician friends who had something to offer. We wanted to be inspired by what others could bring to the table. And there are some songs we have on the go that we’re the seed of another musician friend. You will see them in credits for the published songs. You will hear their performances in some as well. We are open to collaboration and different music.

So therefore we present:

Open Audio Society

Now live on almost any platform you use for consuming audio...