Producer / Engineer
Colin Stewart
Producer and engineer at The Hive Recording Studio, just outside Victoria, BC.
Producer / Engineer
Colin Stewart
Producer and engineer at The Hive Recording Studio, just outside Victoria, BC.
Biography
Colin Stewart has been recording bands since 1996. In 2012 he won a Juno for his work on Dan Mangan’s Oh Fortune, and in 2016 he won Producer of the Year at the Western Canadian Music Awards.
In 2020, nipiy, the album he produced with nêhiyawak, made the Polaris Prize shortlist and was Juno nominated for Indigenous album of the year.
He works from The Hive Recording Studio, a staple of the Canadian west coast for 30 years, in the woods just outside Victoria, with the rooms and isolation booths to record a 4–5 piece rock band live.
Rule Tec EQ1A
“There is one plugin that I use on pretty much every instrument in every session, and that is the NoiseAsh Rule Tec EQ1A. I think it could be considered one of my “secret weapons,” although I don’t think it’s that much of a secret. Pultecs have been popular since the dawn of recording, but I do use and abuse this particular plugin ruthlessly. I use it as a tilt EQ, combined with a saturator. Just turn the bandwidth to 10, the low frequency to 100, the high frequency to 10K and have at it. Sound not bright enough? Crank the hight boost, which will shelf up everything above 1kHz. Sound not full enough? Crank the low boost, which will shelf everything up below 1kHz. Sound just not enough enough? Crank the high and low boosts evenly, which turns the entire bandwidth up evenly, but it has a particular magic to it that is much more than just turning up the volume over all. Sound still not enough enough? Put two of these plugins in a row with the same settings. Particularly helpful with thin sounds, or when using instruments that are generated entirely in the computer.”
