Using his Blumlein setup, Moore first worked with Cowboy Junkies on their 1986 debut album, Whites Off Earth Now!!, which was recorded live in a garage behind a house the band was renting in Toronto. “It was just a very small concrete garage in the back of the yard,” he remembers. “It was a little cement bunker. I put a mattress in front of the drums so that they wouldn’t be super loud. The way I treated Margo’s voice was I thought, ‘We’re not using acoustic guitars, we’re using electric guitars, so why not use an electrified voice?’ I had her singing through the PA.”

   

On Whites Off Earth Now!!, Moore used a proto‐digital recording setup comprising a Sony SL‐2000 Betamax‐tape‐based recorder and a Sony PCMF1 Digital Audio Processor. “That was the actual A to D to V, let’s call it,” he says. “The Beta machine is merely a data storage device, so the processor is the A to D, as in the D is converted to black‐and‐white video. You see black and white squares, a million of them going by you.”

    When it came to the recording of The Trinity Session a year later, although DAT machines were in use by this point, their sale in North America had been banned by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), who feared 

that their domestic use would kill off sales of the burgeoning CD format. “I used to go down to New York City,” Moore recalls, “and you could go grey‐market in the appliance stores. Under the table they were selling, illegally, grey‐market DAT machines.”

I    Instead, however, Moore stuck with the Betamax format having upgraded his setup with a Nakamichi DMP100 digital processor. “I modify everything I own,” he points out. “Nothing I own is stock. I’d ripped out the electrolytics and put in high‐quality audio capacitors. Plus, Apogee — who were a very new company at that time — were making these little purple A‐to‐D discrete circuit modules. So I actually had to cut holes in my Nakamichi to install them. It looked like a hot‐rod car with fins sticking out of it. ’Cause I’d taken

it to the nth degree and wanted it to sound better and better. So, contrary to the myth, none of the masters that you hear with the Cowboy Junkies stuff come from DAT.”

    Meanwhile, mic‐wise, Moore’s recording world had opened up when he first encountered the four‐capsule Calrec Soundfield while recording a jazz trio side by side with Stanley Lipshitz of the University of Waterloo’s Audio Research Group. “It was in a small chapel where these private jazz concerts were put

on and recorded,” Moore remembers. “Anyway, Stanley Lipshitz is there with his headphones and I’m sitting beside him because we both set up our gear close
to each other. Halfway through, I give
him a bit of the elbow, and I offer him my headphones, just say, ‘Hey, take a listen to this.’ He puts them on and he looks at me and he smiles politely and turns and gives me his headphones. I went, ‘Oh my God, what the hell is this?’

    “All my Christmases came at once. ‘Cause it was the binaural sound which I was so intrigued by, the feeling that you’re there. A Soundfield microphone records perfectly equal below it, above it and around it. I call it a spherical microphone. As soon as I heard this Soundfield, I approached Calrec to become a dealer for ADCOM. I couldn’t afford one. It was $14,000 back then and it still cost me almost $9000 wholesale.”

    When it came to the location for the recording of The Trinity Session, Moore already knew the Church of the Holy Trinity, having in 1985 used it to digitally record the soundtrack for a Japanese mini‐series called Chasing Rainbows, set in the prohibition era in the States and involving hours of jazz and orchestral recordings, sometimes treated as if they were being played through a Victrola gramophone. “It’s an 1840s church,” he explains. “It’s old wood floors and the pews slide, they’re not permanent. Early coarse stone work. Not a fancy church in any shape or form. But acoustically, the soft stone was gorgeous and the roof was all big oak rafters, as was the nave.”

 

D-Day

 

On November 27th 1987, Moore and Cowboy Junkies arrived at the church and began to set up, with the ambitious plan to record enough tracks for an album in a single day. “I only had one day, but I knew the church very well,” he points out. “There was a cloakroom in the back to one side where we’d already made little notches in the bottom of the door so the cables could run though. That was my control room. It was probably 10 by 12 feet, the size of a small living room. I’d already cut SONOpan sound panels that were up on stands that I could walk in there and throw up. The setup for me, technically, I could do quickly.”

    Monitor‐wise, in his cloakroom control room, Moore set up a pair of KEF P60s. His next task was to find a suitable place in the main body of the church to position Peter Timmins’s drum kit. “I had someone hammer the snare while I stood where I thought I’d put the mic,” he says, “moving the snare back and forth along the centre line of the church until I got the perfect ‘bah’. So where I found the sweet point for the snare, that was my anchor point, then I worked backwards from there.

    “I’m pulling back the microphone ’til I get the drums sounding really good. Probably six, seven feet away from the kick drum. Once that’s established, there’s your canvas. The Calrec was exactly at my ear height. I’m six foot, so the mic is probably at five foot, six inches, because the reflections off the floor are just as important as the reflections off
the ceiling.”                              

                                                      cont ...