Youssef
MOTIF: A melody or series of notes that reoccurs throughout a piece of music
“Youssef,I listened to those demos you turned in last week.”
My boss pokes his bald head out of his office as soon as I walk into the cramped lobby of Schenkman Studios. Lobby is an overstatement; it’s a leather loveseat tucked into a corner across from a battered front desk that’s been empty since our last receptionist quit five months ago. Somehow no one has gotten around to hiring a new one.
“Any feedback, Jacob?”
“Hmm.” He narrows his eyes behind his thick black-framed glasses. “Well, I won’t be firing you. Yet.”
I nod as I fight to hold back a laugh. Coming from Jacob, that’s high praise.
“Good to know, boss. If you need me, I’ll be in my room.”
I head down the narrow hallway lined with doors to recording rooms and other studio apparatuses, my footsteps making the worn hardwood creak.
Mohammad keeps telling me I need to quit my day job, but I don’t think even a world tour and headlining spot at Ultra would be enough to make me leave Schenkman Studios.
Call it force of habit. I’ve been coming in here at least a couple times a week since I was twenty-one years old, first as a verbally abused intern who did things like take out the trash and mop the bathrooms in exchange for a few sarcastic comments from Jacob Schenkman about how shit I was at music production, and now as the studio’s main mastering engineer with dozens of records under my belt.
I take a seat at my desk and pull my laptop open as I wheel my chair into place. It’s ten in the morning on Monday, much earlier than I usually come in given that I’ve always been a night owl and Jacob doesn’t care when I work as long as I meet my deadlines. I couldn’t take another day at home after the events of Saturday night, so I got up and walked over here with the intention of working my ass off until I pass out at my desk tonight.
It seemed like a more productive alternative to replaying every single moment with Paige and dissecting them like a science project gone wrong.
The latest record I’m working on is a debut EP from some teenage, Québécois singer-songwriter based here in Montreal. I get all my equipment fired up and browse around for the right files, slipping into the rhythm of my work just like I hoped I would.
I can always count on this place to turn the rest of my life into background noise. When I’m here, all that matters is the music.
Schenkman Studios hasn’t made many famous records, but they have madea lotof records. In my four years here, we’ve worked with everyone from opera singers to rappers. I’ve learned more about music between this place’s acoustic panels than I could have doing a whole doctorate in the subject.
Plus, somewhere amidst all the insults, Jacob unearthed a passion for mastering in me that I didn’t know I had. I barely knew what mastering meant before I started working here, but now I get as much of a high off polishing somebody else’s tracks to perfection in the studio as I do playing my own stuff in clubs.
Mastering is like an excavation. It’s like getting handed a map and a metal detector and being told to dig for treasure. It’s about being hearing things no one else hears, looking for things in places no one else would think to search. It’s about making all those indefinable adjustments that take a piece of music from sounding very good to fucking amazing.
There are more technical ways to describe it, but to me, that’s what it’s about. The mastering engineer is the last person to get hold of a song before the production process is finished. They’re basically the gatekeeper of quality.
I flip some switches around so that the track I’m working on plays from the state of the art speakers arranged around the room. I close my eyes, taking a moment to just listen before I work. An acoustic guitar fills the air with a wistful set of chords that make something in my chest tighten.
The singer is good—really good. The songs are simple but honest, like pages from the diary of the teenager who wrote them. I can remember what it was like to be that young, to feel so full of life it’s like it was bursting out of me, clanging in my head and coursing through my body every second of every day, always searching for an escape.
It found that escape in music. I remember staying up until almost dawn on school nights, hiding the light from my laptop so my mom wouldn’t ground me, as I worked on what were admittedly very shitty pieces of electronic music made on very basic free software. I remember hitting play when I decided they were finally done and collapsing onto my pillow, headphones on as I stared up at the ceiling lit by the streetlight outside.
I watch the little bar passing over the sound waves on my laptop screen as the song keeps playing, but all I can see is Paige’s face lit by the blue glow from that neon beer sign as she told me it was too late.
Too late for us.
I haven’t known what to do with myself since then. I spent half of yesterday stalking her Chanly accounts on the internet, even though it hurt like hell. She doesn’t post much herself, but her music has got some rabid fans. After watching a few clips on YouTube and Instagram and checking out what she’s got on SoundCloud, I realized her set at Taverne Toulouse was just child’s play compared to what she’s capable of.
I’ve never heard anything like it. I’ve never seen anyone play the way she does. I read through a whole Reddit thread analyzing a photo she posted of her live setup, and the things she does with her gear impressed me not only as a musician but as someone with a degree in electrical engineering.
I don’t know how she isn’t huge yet. Everyone who follows her seems to agree.
Chanly.
I combed through my memories—and Google—but I couldn’t figure out what it means or why she picked it.
One of the many things I haven’t figured out.
