Article from Mix Magazine January, 1998

Whitehorse, in Canada's Yukon Territory, is a happening little spot. According to resident Bob Hamilton, it's got the vibe of a remote college town: "There's a vibrant arts and music scene," he says. "Three or four theater companies, 30 or 40 bands...At any given time, there's like ten clubs hiring live music. It's amazing, because the whole population of the Yukon territories is only 30,000 people - that's a small town in Southern California."

Hamilton is the owner of Old Crow Recording, a music-tracking/mixing studio in Whitehorse. Old Crow, which opened last year, is a quite attractive, very live space. It is Hamilton's third studio and, like the first two, was designed by Hamilton and architect Richard Klassen. "It's largely pine and poplar, except for the floors," Hamilton says. "I took a workshop at MusicWest [music industry conference] in Vancouver from Matt Wallace, who produced John Hiatt and Faith No More. He taught this technique he says he learned from Glyn Johns, miking drums using just two mics and phase-correcting them. It's this holistic approach to recording drums, and that's what got me on the path to create this space, to record drums in a really big live space using the ambience of the room."

The main room is 26x28 with a 15-foot ceiling and attached 6x8-foot vocal booth; the control room is 12x26x10. three acres of wooded surroundings and lots of natural light add to the ambience. "It's a quiet place, so you can have windows and you don't have to build a fortress," Hamilton says.

Hamilton is also the guitarist in a group called Jerry Alfred &the Medicine Beat, who won a Juno Award (best Aboriginal Music) in 1995. One of his reasons for building Old Crow was to have a great room to record the band, which combines Native American singing and hand-drumming with more modern instrumentation and production values. "We've been playing together for four or five years," Hamilton says. "The music includes ancient melodies and ancient language. Jerry Alfred is a native fellow, and a storyteller also, so he does some storytelling on the albums as well. We started recording our third album a few days ago."

Hamilton does all the engineering on projects he produces, but when he's one of the players, he hires a local engineer named Roly Mitton. Until recently, the facility has recorded mainly to DA-88s, but Hamilton recently purchased a Studer A80 MkIV machine, which he says will be his main recorder now. "These machines have come down in price to where you can buy a used Studer machine for a price comparable to, say, three DA-88's or three ADAT's. What I want to do is sync up the three DA-88's to the Studer. I'll have 48 tracks - 24 digital and 24 analog - and use Apogees [converters] to transfer stuff back and forth so I can work in either domain, because there's no doubt that digital is a lot better at certain things like comping vocals. You wouldn't want to just use one or the other."

Old Crow's control room is centered around a Trident TSM console and Genelec 1031A main monitors. Hamilton also has collected an assortment of outboard gear: four Neve 1073 and two Neve 2254 mic pre's and five API 550A EQ's, and he has a pair each of Neumann U67 and KM56 tube mics. He says he gets about a half-dozen album projects a year, and that, combined with touring with Jerry Alfred & the Medicine Beat, is enough to get by and do it all on his own terms. "there's a uniqueness in the north and in the people who choose to live here," he says. "It's a beautiful and incredible place, and there's definitely an independent attitude that gives us a different slant on things. we're not in the industry; we're making our own industry."