Studio A Audio Recording & Production

http://www.therecord.com/whatson-story/6408658-honouring-rosalie-trombley-the-girl-with-the-golden-ear-/

Bob Seger wrote a song about her. Now the Juno Awards pay tribute to Rosalie Trombley, the Windsor radio trailblazer who ‘could smell a hit a mile off’.

OurWindsor.Ca

By Linda Barnard

At a time in the music industry when women were more likely to be asked to make coffee than executive decisions, Rosalie Trombley was a hit-predicting force.

On April 2, “the girl with the golden ear” will be honoured with a special Juno Award at a Calgary gala as tastemaker and trailblazer in Canadian and American music.

Poor health prevents Trombley, 76, from attending but her three children will accept the award on her behalf.

Trombley became music director at Windsor’s Top 40 rock radio powerhouse “The Big 8,” CKLW-AM in 1968 — a key job at an influential station that had enormous reach into U.S. markets.

Her oft-proven ability to instinctively know what made a hit record ensured airplay for Canadian artists on the cusp of bigger careers, including Gordon Lightfoot, Bachman Turner Overdrive and The Guess Who, along with Burton Cummings’ solo career, during a time that preceded Canadian content rules, as well as after.

American acts also benefitted from her golden touch.

“She’s got the power,” sang Detroit rocker Bob Seger in “Rosalie,” the song (covered by Irish rockers Thin Lizzy) he penned for his 1973 album Back in ’72 after he and Trombley didn’t see eye to eye on his potential. Seger’s song takes her to task but also conveys respect, along with the observation, “she’s quite the mediator, a smoother operator you will never see.”

Canadian band The Sheepdogs released their cover of “Rosalie” as a digital download on March 25 — with proceeds going to the Rosalie Trombley Scholarship at Windsor’s St. Clair College.

Impressed with stories of a Windsor woman’s influence on American music, The Sheepdogs started playing “Rosalie” about a year ago. With Trombley’s Juno recognition, the band wanted to give something back in return for her contributions to music and decided to do the special release.

And she did have great influence. Trombley was legendary for her ability to recognize a song that would have “crossover” appeal between black and white audiences. It paid off for Elton John, who had been “told about her ears,” along with her hit-predicting abilities. He took her advice to release “Bennie and The Jets” as a single, said Trombley’s eldest son Tim Trombley, 57. It became a smash for the British artist.

A music fan, who started out as a receptionist at CKLW in 1962, Trombley could smell a hit, her son said proudly. More than instinct, there was also a science to it. She compiled detailed record sales-tracking information and used that to determine what tunes would be crossover hits, “from Parliament Funkadelic to Neil Diamond,” he explained.

“My memory as a young kid was going down to the radio station every couple of weeks and walking in and it was an incredibility exciting, dynamic, high-energy atmosphere,” said Trombley, who worked for EMI Music Canada prior to his current job as director of entertainment at Caesars Windsor.

“Just walking into her office with all the records, it was so, so exciting,” he recalled. “I knew in pretty short order that mom had a pretty cool job.”

Former MuchMusic host and Sony Music Canada president Denise Donlon is a past recipient of The Rosalie Award, named after Trombley to honour female industry trailblazers. Fittingly, Trombley won the first one, in 2005.

It wasn’t until Donlon won the award in 2010 that she learned about Trombley’s influence.

“She was a pioneering woman in Canadian radio management and one of the most powerful programmers ever,” said Donlon. “The gobsmacking thing was I didn’t know about her.”

But Donlon soon became aware of the woman she praised for her ability to “smell a hit a mile off.”

Donlon says the music industry needs to take “more great strides” involving women, crediting artists like Sarah McLachlan for starting Lilith Fair in 1997, which showed radio the drawing power of women artists.

When his mother was making decisions, “there were virtually no women in positions of influence and power in broadcasting . . . on the record label side as well,” explained Trombley, crediting her with mentoring other women who wanted to get into the music business during her more than 20 years as a radio executive.

Allan Reid, president and CEO of CARAS and The Juno Awards, said recognizing Trombley will help inspire young women working in broadcasting. “This is someone who helped pave the way,” he said.

“That golden ear is rare,” agreed Leah Fay, lead singer of indie band July Talk. Acknowledging Trombley is part of an ongoing need to talk about women music makers.

“I tend to think that there were likely women who were more than just muses in the ’70s when it came to figuring out what was cool and influencing what was going on,” said Fay.

“I’m really glad that she’s being honoured in this way and that people will hear her story.”

Toronto Star

http://www.therecord.com/whatson-story/6407766-where-are-the-female-producers-/

Waterloo Region Record

By Nick Patch

TORONTO — With one of her two Juno nominations this year for “Clear Day,” Emilie-Claire Barlow entered an exclusive club she wishes wasn’t so exclusive: a woman nominated for Producer of the Year.

She’s only the fifth woman in the past 10 years and the 14th in the 44-year history of the Juno Awards to compete in that category, which has crowned a female winner only four times. Engineer of the Year is even less balanced; no woman has ever won.

The daughter of two session musicians who has been immersed in studios since age six, Barlow isn’t surprised by that statistic; she figures she’s seen only two female engineers her whole life.

That said, she doesn’t seem that interested in making too big a production out of her achievement.

“I was laughing to someone the other day: at no time did I use my vagina directly in the making of this record,” Barlow said recently.

“The Junos are accurately reflecting the scene. Generally speaking, mostly men are in those roles.”

The numbers bear that out.

This year, the Junos received 113 total submissions for production and 75 for engineering; only eight women applied for the former and two for the latter. When women do earn nominations for Producer of the Year, they’re almost certainly also performers — not since Kerry Crawford in 1984 has a woman been nominated for producing someone else’s album.

Junos’ president Allan Reid calls the show a “reflection of the industry” and, indeed, one broadly accepted statistic estimates that women comprise five per cent of engineers and producers.

It’s also an issue at the educational level. Seneca College offers two holistic music programs: “independent music production” and “independent songwriting and performance.” Only the latter attracts women. “I’ve often wondered if the word ‘production’ in the name has limited the number of women who apply,” said program co-ordinator John Switzer.

Montreal electronic-music oracle Grimes has been dutiful in documenting studio sexism. She’s faced condescending engineers and unwanted sexual advances. And she alone handled the engineering and production on her brilliant “Art Angels” partially because she knew employing an outside engineer would lead people to assume: “Oh! That guy just did it all.”

“The music industry is still male-dominated and there is chauvinism,” said John Harris, founder of the Harris Institute for the Arts.

Harris says he’s long endeavoured to enrol women and hire female faculty, but he’s only recently seen signs of progress. And progress here essentially means “better than nothing:” where semesters once passed without any female students, women now comprise 10 to 25 per cent of the student body.

Chihiro Nagamatsu is one of those students. A classically trained pianist since age four, she wants to produce both her own music — which blends classical, pop and anime influences — and other artists’.

She’s one of only two women in her audio production class, but she’s undaunted. In her native Japan, she worked 12-plus hours a day trudging door to door selling Internet subscriptions. She had 11 co-workers and they were all men.

“I have courage and passion,” she said. “If women are a minority in the music business, I should change that a little bit myself.”

Of course, there are gifted female producers. Sylvia Massey helmed Tool’s “Undertow,” Linda Perry produced Pink, Celine Dion and Alicia Keys, and Brampton’s WondaGurl accumulated a career’s worth of credits before turning 20.

Karen Kosowski, who has helmed tracks for Emma-Lee and Jakob Dylan, first took up production out of a motivating mixture of necessity and curiosity, when she was a “broke artist” in the Winnipeg suburbs trying to forge a solo career on a “shoestring budget.”

While she hasn’t experienced the sort of studio sexism Grimes describes, she’s familiar with limiting assumptions about women.

“If a guy doesn’t know about his engine, he’s not as macho,” she said. “Women still aren’t expected to have the same kind of technical knowledge as men.”

Such presumptions aren’t only corrosively sexist; they’re also wildly out-of-touch with the modern role of a producer.

“There used to be people whose prime expertise was the technology of recording, no longer true,” Harris said. “Technology’s part of it, but if your only expertise is technology, you won’t have a career.”

If technology — or the related stereotypes — was once a barrier for women in audio production, the good news is that it now stands as the potential equalizer. There’s never been a better time for women with audio aspirations to make enough noise to shatter the glass ceiling.

“In five years, it’s going to be different,” Kosowski said. “It won’t be a special thing anymore.”

Want to be able to play music with your face? Well here it is!

http://www.psfk.com/2016/03/play-music-with-eye-movements-facial-gestures-eye-conductor-interaction-design.html