Toronto-based singer-songwriter Catherine Bacque is now featured on CBC Radio 3, a new service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that's billed as the home of independent Canadian music. Her limited edition EP Letting Go—produced by yours truly—can be streamed live from Radio 3, and is available for download on iTunes and CD Baby.

Each of the CD's five songs spotlights a different facet of Catherine's amazing talent. Kicking off with I Did, I Will, I Do, the album hits high gear right away with a brash, no-nonsense anthem featuring Catherine's insistent acoustic guitar figures and the incisive Telecaster of Tim Bovaconti (Burton Cummings, Ron Sexsmith) in a take-no-prisoners paean to the power of love.

In Fly, we hear in Catherine's voice and lyrics the determination of a triumphant survivor of the fickle fates of love. Montreal-based virtuoso bassist Alain Caron (Alain Caron Band, Uzeb) underscores Catherine with his six-string fretless in a riveting melodic duet.

Next, the haunting melody and lyrics of With You  are perfectly complemented by Jack Gelbloom's (Take Five) evocative jazz piano and Doug Cotton's (Format, John) tasteful precision drumming.

Kicking it up again with Say That You Want Me, Catherine shows that she knows how to rock with the best of them. Tim's guitar punctuation and Jack's joyously infectious B3 are anchored by my Motown-inspired bass line.

The album wraps up with You're Still Mine, a love song of steadfastness and faithfulness in the face of life's struggles and shortcomings, aimed as much at your children as your lover.



(Photography by Doug Cotton. CD design by Paul Kelly, Gecko Graphics)

Catherine is a Canadian singer/songwriter with roots in 60s and 70s folk, pop, and rock. Her style ranges from jazzy ballads to straight out country rock. According to her mother, Catherine sang in the cradle while her father played Vivaldi and Benny Goodman on the stereo. Later, her parents introduced her to the Beatles, Elvis, Duke Ellington, Gilles Vigneault, Monique Leyrac, Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell.

Catherine went on to discover Emmylou Harris, traditional Canadian folk music, and classic American country artists such as Patsy Cline and Hank Williams. Today Catherine loves to listen to Sarah McLachlan, Dala, The Dixie Chicks, The Tragically Hip, Melissa McClelland, Kathleen Edwards and Sheryl Crow.

More information, photos & lyrics: www.catbacque.com and www.SonicBids.com/CatherineBacque

I get asked this question all the time, so I guess it's confusing. In a nutshell, sound design is the art or craft (depending on your perspective) of recording, editing, processing, assembling, and mixing sounds together to create informative, convincing or emotionally suggestive listening experiences. While powerful software—such as ProTools—is available to facilitate many sound design processes on personal computers, keep in mind that using these tools doesn't instantly make someone a qualified sound designer, any more than having Microsoft Word on your computer makes you a professional speech writer.

The term “sound design” originated in live theatre to describe the creation of sounds and aural montages specifically for stage plays. In theatre, sound design is a unique department, like lighting design. In the film world, the term first became synonymous with sound editing in 1969, when the great Walter Murch was credited as sound designer on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People. Coppola recalls that, because Murch “wasn’t in the union, the union forbade him getting the credit as sound editor—so Walter said, Well, since they won’t give me that, will they let me be called ‘sound designer’? We said, We’ll try it—you can be the sound designer . . . I always thought it was ironic that ‘Sound Designer’ became this Tiffany title, yet it was created for that reason. We did it to dodge the union constriction.”

David Collison’s fabulous new book, The Sound of Theatre, is a wonderful, illustrated introduction to the development of sound design for theatre from the ancient Greeks to the modern digital age. For more information: http://www.lsionline.co.uk/books/?jzpz5l

The aurora borealis dancing in the northern sky served as a guiding metaphor in the design of the elaborate Opening Ceremony of the XXI Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver on February 12, as light and projection were employed in place of scenery to dress the gargantuan stage in the 65,000-seat bowl of BC Place, where the ceremony was held indoors for the first time in the history of the Olympics.

Lighting director Bob Dickinson went straight from Vancouver after wrapping up the Closing Ceremonies to light the 82nd Academy Awards in Hollywood. Two days later, he was on the phone with me, downloading his thoughts and feelings about the experience. I then caught up with audio director Bruce Jackson—founder of Apogee Electronics—who used 2,000,000 watts of amplifier power in his sound system design, design director Doug Paraschuk, and other members of his team to get their take on producing the largest spectacle ever mounted on Canadian soil.

Featuring the largest air-supported stadium roof in North America, BC Place offered executive producer David Atkins and his designers an unprecedented opportunity to stretch the boundaries of spectacle using state-of-the-art lighting, projection, sound and special effects. The fabric roof presented almost insurmountable challenges in rigging, projection, and sound reinforcement, however, and was sensitive to changes in barometric pressure, temperature, and wind conditions that caused it to rise and fall continuously 1.3 m (4’) during the course of the ceremonies. Furthermore, it limited the total hang in the stadium to some 150 tons.

“We were in a somewhat inhospitable environment that generated a lot of technical issues, just in terms of gravity alone,” said Paraschuk. “Because it was an air-filled venue, we were limited in the amount of equipment we could physically hang from the ceiling. The engineering of the rigging, which was handled by Riggit Services in Vancouver, was a technical nightmare. We had to be very careful about where the rigging points were located, and how we articulated the entire rig in order to get to where we needed to be. We also had to deal with the issue that the ceiling breathed. This caused nightmares in focusing, because it was moving all the time, and so all of our flown elements, and their relationships to the projection and the lighting were encoded,” he said.

“The victory ceremonies every day between the Opening and Closing Ceremonies required an entire additional set of truss masking to be hung in order to create a kind of concert bowl in the venue. The intent was to have it look like a different space on television, and this impacted greatly on our ability to maintain focus and continuity for the Closing Ceremonies, let alone physically rehearse the Closing Ceremonies. Our target for the bowl was 25,000 seats for the victory ceremonies. The full seating in the venue is 55,000, and we expanded the lower bowl lower for opening and closing so the total capacity was about 65,000,” Paraschuk said.

The fabric roof let in so much daylight that programming and rehearsals for the Closing Ceremonies could be conducted only from midnight until dawn, following the conclusion of the daily victory ceremonies and pre-programming for the following night’s headline talent. “The lighting department worked 24 hours a day, with some individuals putting in 16 hour shifts, and that turned out to be more ambitious than we had initially anticipated,” Dickinson said.

Read the full story in the April issue of Lighting & Sound America.

In late 2008 I purchased Ultimate Collector's Edition of Taylor Hackford's Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock 'N' Roll from HMV and enjoyed every minute of it.   After thinking back to a recent conversation about Chuck Berry with a recording client at Find A Way Studios I suddenly decided to swing by their store to get an album or 2 of Chuck's songs after finishing teaching.  I got there just in time before the HMV superstore (located at Yonge and Dundas) closed and directly headed up to the 2nd level Rock and Roll Section where I was horrified to discover only 1 Chuck Berry CD, a greatest hits at that, in their entire store!  The Chuck Berry section was so minimal you might have fitted 3-5 CDs in it at the most.  The CD, part of the Universal Music's Green Series titled "The Best Of Chuck Berry", contained about 15 of Chuck's greatest hits and cost $12.99.  Noticeably absent from the compilation were songs like "Sweet Little Sixteen, Too Much Monkey Business and Nadine (Is That You?) but Universal managed to include "My Ding-A-Ling" Chuck's live rendition of the raunchy show tune staple that served up Berry's only #1 hit of his career in 1972.

I asked the staff why they had such a poor selection of the artist who was basically one of the founding figures of Rock and Roll.   They replied that some CDs were on order (who knows for how long) but that didn't help solve my dilemma.  Although I could see a few of the staff were as concerned as I was, most didn't even grasp the significance of this.  Maybe they didn't even know who Chuck Berry was. 

Leaving HMV I headed directly to Sonic Boom where they had a selection of about 7 different Chuck Berry CDs.  I was rewarded for my efforts and got a reasonably priced CD for $15.99 - The Definitive Collection of Chuck Berry from Chess Records that had 30 great Chuck Berry tracks.  Why Universal would publish a greatest hits without "Sweet Little Sixteen" is beyond me.   For 3 dollars more I had a brand new CD with double the amount of tracks and was a more fitting tribute this founding and contraversial figure of Rock and Roll.  Furthermore I would have had to buy 2 Universal Green Series CDs to equal the amount of tracks on the Chess Records release.  Although Universal's Green Series packaging is "made with of 100% recycled materials, using vegetable based inks for maximum environmental consideration" aren't they missing a very important point?  Wouldn't have it made more environmental sense to include 30 tracks like the Chess Record recording?   Nice try Universal but we can smell greenwashing a mile away.  Although I applaud Universal for the sticker prominently placed on the shrink-wrap of their 15 track Green Series Chuck Berry Greatest Hits CD "A portion of the sale of this CD goes to The David Suzuki Foundation" I'm curious to know what that portion is. 

Whether HMV is in trouble and only stocking items which they think will sell, it's a sad state of affairs when a music genius such as Chuck Berry is so under represented in one of the most hi-profile CD retail stores in Toronto.