What’s with music and the name Barnside? There’s the Barnside Harvest festival every year, which if you haven’t been, you gotta go. It’s an amazing time, and they always break out the stars. But, that’s not the Barnside I’m talking about, I want to talk about Barnside Sound, a recording studio on Vancouver island.
Before I dive into the studio itself, I want to talk about the two guys who make it work. To start the lead engineer is Justin LaPointe. This guy has mixed and mastered over 300 songs at the studio since its opening in 2019. I mean the guy owns the place, it’d make sense that he’s y’know fairly involved. But there’s another guy there, an intern. His name is Ellis Frank, hes been making music his whole life, which hasn’t been that long. Guy’s like 21 or something, barely old enough to rent a car, but he’s already a member of the musicians union. But I mean he’s had a leg up this whole time, his dad was a member of Spirit of the West! He got to sit in on recording sessions! I mean can you imagine what it would’ve been like in there? I’ll leave it there because I don’t want to get too far off track. But these two dudes are definitely capable, and anyone who records here is in good hands.
Speaking of, who records here? They’ve got a few featured artists on their website, and they all sound great, of course partially due to the work done by Barnside, but also because they are talented musicians.
To focus in on one of them, Glisha is an RnB artist, and when listening to some of her stuff, I realized that I do not know what RnB is. I always thought of RnB as stuff like the Blues Brothers, which yeah, is a white guy thing to say I admit that. But the Blues Brothers are great and I’ll hear nothing otherwise. But Glisha’s music sounds to me like standing outside in the rain. Just absolutely soaked, but if that’s your thing, you wouldn’t trade it for the world.
That’s enough waxing poetic, Barnside Sound has everything you’d need to record what you want. And the studio is in this wide open room, with windows and it just looks gorgeous. I’d love to check it out one day, even if I don’t have a musical bone in my body.