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music - Montage buy cds | church music | drum corps | game soundtracks | handbell solos | midi programming | montage | praise band | party band | studio recordings | television shows | my influences
Montage was the banner under which musical kindred spirit Chris Jones and I began writing, recording, and performing original pop music more than 15 years ago with guitarists Rob Lester and Jonathan Mayfield. The Montage Saga has been a long, rocky road, but at least we ended on a high note, with a video featuring footage from the vault, as well as a digitally remastered CD collection of classic orginal songs called Best. Read the Liner Notes for the whole story.
It was 1992. Rob introduced me to his friend Chris, and we immediately began playing and writing together. We spent most of that year playing and writing as a new band. During the course of rehearsing and getting to know each other, the group of five original musicians (a vocalist, keyboardist, bassist, guitarist, and a drummer) had reduced itself to three core members: Chris Jones on vocals, Rob Lester on guitar, and me playing keyboards, keyboard bass, and programming a drum machine. We wrote songs, rehearsed, and actually performed a couple of times at some venues in Marietta, GA. We went into Studio 7 in March of 1993 with four songs, and finished the recording in two sessions - on the first night we laid all the tracks, and the second night we mixed. 8 hours total - 2 hours per song. It must've been some kind of record. The time constraints were due to our lack of money and the fact that it took us an hour just to get to the studio. At the time, we were happy with the results. My old standby, the Alesis HR-16 drum machine, handled all the percussion those nights. We just hooked it up to stereo inputs, and let it play the entire songs, which I'd programmed ahead of time. No other instruments were sequenced. Rob and I just played everything live on top of the drum machine. If we'd had more time, we would've probably worked on getting a 'bigger', more real drum sound, but we didn't really know any better, and couldn't afford it, actually. The owner was very clock-conscious, and this studio was in his house. On the up side, the studio had some really nice keyboard modules to play with, so I was happy. As The Lights Go Down was the first Montage song, written by Chris, using drum patterns I had already programmed on the HR-16 before I let him borrow it. For me, the sound of these sessions is characterized by those canned drum sounds - they do the job, but obviously lack power. This demo was totally self-produced. The owner of the studio pretty much just taught us how to run the board, and left us to it. We mixed the whole thing ourselves on the spot, having never set foot inside a studio before. Cassettes in hand (this was before CD-R's), we set out to make duplicates (with handmade labels) and get the music heard any way we could.
Late in 1993, after spending the better part of the year distributing tapes, writing, rehearsing, and dreaming of pop stardom, we decided it was time to record more songs. We didn't want to go to Studio 7 again, and I had recently bought some equipment from a studio guy whose place was much closer, so we booked some time there. His name was Joey Allred, owner of Cowtown Productions in Atlanta, and he was probably the best producer we ever worked with - always eager to experiment and create something sonically new. He had been working heavily and successfully in the vibrant Atlanta R&B scene. School schedules prevented Rob from continuing with the band, and so he was replaced by Jonathan Mayfield, who had been a fan of the band, and had actually attended one of our previous shows. The first time around with Joey, we treated the sessions the only way we knew how: with us "producing", and him just pushing the buttons and running the equipment. Jonathan basically played all of Rob's parts, adding his own flair, and we laid down the songs exactly as we'd planned. Once again, the good-old HR-16 drum machine was loaded and ready to spit out four new songs, although this time, we changed the voicings in the studio so the drums would sound a little more "live", or at least slightly better. We also decided to start naming our projects. "Secret Dances" was taken from a line in Zero, Chris' least favorite song. For me, the sound of these sessions is characterized by the inexplicably sibilant vocal miking and those brain-piercing crash cymbals in the drum track of songs like Hidden Agenda and Zero. I don't know why we didn't fix that stuff. I guess they didn't seem as prominent back in the days of cassette dubs, but here in crystal-clear digital quality, I find them almost unbearable.
Several months later, as our relationship with Joey grew, and we started talking about recording more, he mentioned wanting to remix the original tunes. The "mix" tracks are the results of Joey spending some time on his own working with our songs. After You got a funkier beat & bassline, as well as an extended solo (played by Joey) at the end. Blame's time signature got shifted into a bouncier rhythm, and some 'grunge' was added to the bassline (although response to this sound has been mixed). Hidden Agenda got kind of a disco remix beat, and my tracks for Zero were radically changed. I think Joey really disliked what I'd done with Zero (probably mainly because of those cymbal crashes!), and only Chris' vocals and Jon's guitars remain from the original recording. The rest is a swirly psycho-trippy-dance Joey creation, incorporating, among other things, the sampled sound of him hitting a stainless steel pot filled with water. (He was always doing things like that - sampling household noises and stuff to stick in mixes. It made for great, unique sounds that make you go "what is THAT?") In our final session, we recorded four new tracks, but this time handed the production fully to Joey. I don't think we even brought in the drum machine this time. If we did, it was only to get the basic rhythms down. We basically just went in with the songs in mind, and set out with Joey's keyboards and computer to make them realities. Jon's guitar playing was crucial to our developing sound, and his contribution to the new songs was one of the reasons we went back into the studio. Xcite was originally going to be a complete album, including the four new songs plus the remixed versions of the Secret Dances tracks, but that collection was never released. Impulsive Behavior, the one-and-only Montage rockabilly tune (thank goodness), features about 4 or 5 different samples of Joey, Jon and myself playing various things on a snare drum and piled together to achive the big, jangly, almost drumline sound we thought the song should have. Submarine is one of my favorites. This was our attempt at an industrial dance tune, complete with metallic sounds and analog synth bubbling. At one point, Joey held a pair of headphones up to Jon's guitar to somehow get a kind of unique feedback that was then incorporated into the overall atmosphere of the song. I think I was inspired by the sound of Depeche Mode's live album 101 for this one. Hieroglyphics was a stumbling block at first. The programmed drums didn't sound right, and we thought the song could be our most "live-sounding" tune, so it was decided that live drums were the answer. Joey had a session drummer, Geoffrey Brannon, lay down a drum track one day about an hour or so before we got to the studio, and mixed it as we were arriving. It was the first Montage song with live drums, and sounded great. Looking back, I'm not sure why I didn't play the drums myself. I think it was just easier at the time to have them played by a session musican, who was already booked and had his drums set up. I was still into the idea of being the keyboard player anyway, so I was fine with a session musician handling "other stuff". Fragile Girl had actually been recorded at first using the "old method" - with us producing. I think it was actually during the recording of that song that we decided to start letting Joey produce us, and so he took the half-finished track and sculpted it into what we call the "final" version. That voice pad at the beginning is actually Chris' own sampled voice. We were proud of that!
Years later, during the remastering of these recordings at Evil Genius Recordings for the re-release, we rediscovered the original versions of Fragile Girl on some master tapes, but the best parts of the song were scattered between two seperate mixes. I really wanted to include elements from both versions, but there was no way to go back to the studio and remix, so we carefully spliced the existing recordings together (ala Strawberry Fields Forever), and created the "thin ice mix", which has since become my favorite version. For me, the sound of these sessions is characterized this time by all the tasty little "Joeyisms" that run throughout the tracks. The pulse and flow of Fragile Girl (final), the airy synths and resounding space of Hieroglyphics, the techno intricacies of Submarine, and the jangly vibe of Impulsive Behavior are just some of his invaluable contributions to the Montage sound. By the time these recordings were finished, however, it was 1995, and this chapter of the Montage project was coming to a close. After a show at The Strand in Marietta, GA, which featured Rob on bass, Jon left to pursue a solo career, and Chris and I continued to work and write together for a few months, and actually brought in another guitarist to rehearse with us a few times, but nothing ever really came of it. [Footage from the various recording sessions mentioned and performances from 1993 to 1995 can be seen in the new As The Lights Go Down video.] The band drifted apart. It wasn't until 1997, when we were contacted by a music distributor about releasing a CD of the existing material, that the next chapter would really begin...
The possibility of the old material reaching a new audience prompted Rob, Jon, Chris and I to get together to shoot some new promotional photos, and in the meantime, we took our master tapes to Evil Genius Recordings to digitally remaster them for the re-release. Although the re-release promotion fell through, we finished remastering, and the work led to an eventual new season of writing between Chris and I, and the completion of the epic project Manifesto three years later was the culmination of everything we'd learned over the years spent both together and apart. This was our first full-length album of new material, notable for several reasons:
The Manifesto sessions were the most fun we'd had recording up to that point, probably because of the amount of preparation we'd done, the relaxed atmosphere Ed provided, the grand scale of the project (for us, anyway), the prospect of getting our music heard via the Internet, and the excitement of just being back together. We took some new photos with photographer Ryan Barrett, and spent a few years updating the "Montage Network" web site, and promoting Manifesto over the Internet, with some mild success. At least this time we were able to go global, and Manifesto was discovered by and shipped to people across the planet, which was exciting in itself. No performances were booked, but we did make a video for Lavender, which may yet see the light of day. Time passed, the web site eventually expired, and Chris and I began writing again in 2005 for another unnamed project. Then, in 2006, some early-90s Montage performance footage surprizingly surfaced for the first time and generated enough excitement to create the As The Lights Go Down video, a compilation of some of our more notable shows from the Jon and Rob eras.
Response to the video was so positive that the four members of Montage: Chris, Rob, Jon and Andrew produced a digitally remastered CD collection of classic recordings in the Summer of 2006 called Best. As a bonus, It includes Jonathan Mayfield's I Can Dream Alone which, although technically isn't a Montage song, was recorded during the same time period at the same studio, and is an excellent track. Click the album cover to purchase the CD! buy cds | church music | drum corps | game soundtracks | handbell solos | midi programming | montage | praise band | party band | studio recordings | television shows | my influences |
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