Award-winning music producer Steve Bigas has sold his studio and is heading to warmer temps
Steve Bigas has sold his Beach Road building and is heading for warmer temperatures
STEVE BIGAS is saying goodbye. It’s not because he didn’t feel loved here. At the last Hamilton Music Awards, he left with trophies for both Producer of the Year and Recording Studio of the Year.
He built the music in a space like no other, Porcelain Records, down there on Beach Road, deep in the grit zone.
The building went up in 1930 as a Croatian community hall. That group used it 50 years for dances, weddings, banquets. It was a warehouse after that. Then nothing much at all, until Bigas came along.
He’s not Hamilton stock. Scarborough was home, and music came early. His father, a glass plant worker, ran a little band on weekends called the Greek Canadian Orchestra. And Bigas, a young teen, was up there with them, on the bouzouki. He liked playing with Dad, and liked the pocket money.
School, he didn’t like so much. By 15, he had pretty much left. He lied about his age and landed a job with a show company, doing sound for conventions and gigs like the Mariposa Folk Festival.
And he was in a band called King Clancy. In the mid ’90s, they set off for Los Angeles. They made a few records, though didn’t set the coast on fire.
But for Bigas, the real thrill had always been to sit at the big console, engineering music. And he got work doing just that at The Mint, a landmark L.A. nightclub where Stevie Wonder or Bonnie Raitt might show up to play its small stage.
Bigas met Hamilton-raised musician and record producer Daniel Lanois down there. And along the way, Bigas picked up a Grammy award as an engineer.
He was living the dream. Some find trouble in paradise. Not him. “As Dan would say, we were good Canadians with good moral fibre.”
But everything has its day, and Bigas came back to Canada about a decade ago.
He knew he didn’t want to pay L.A.-style rents anymore. Hamilton seemed liked the place to be. “So I went looking for the cheapest house in Hamilton,” he says. He found one in the east-end for $40,000.
Next he needed a place to work. “I wanted a building. I wanted a big room.”
He looked a long time. The moment he saw that old Croatian hall, just east of Gage, just south of the steel mills, the search ended.
He paid $80,000, then spent twice that turning the place into a recording studio. First step was to strip tons of old plaster from the ceiling and the walls.
Wood is way kinder for sound, and there’s every kind on the surf aces of Porcelain Records — oak, cedar, birch, Douglas fir.
Mix in soft lights and dark drapes and you have a vintage, comfortable living room, only really big.
This is where rock ’n’ soul’s Laura Cole and band gathered to make their award-winning Dirty Cheat record. “They just sat there in the centre of the room,” Bigas says. “It’s old school.”
But there are changes on the home front. Bigas is a family man now. He met Jen in an L.A. music store 10 years ago, and five years later they got together for good. They have two sons, one who arrived just a month ago.
Bigas, 42, says a few things made him change gears — the kids, the death of his father, the weather. Then there’s the loss of his f avourite burrito place on Ottawa North.
He’s sold the building to Toronto drummer Marc Pizer, who’s “part of the music family” and will move here. The deal closes in a month.
As for Bigas and f amily, it’s North Carolina next. His passion is still sound and he’s teaming up with whiz kid Chris Brown from Michigan to develop a line of ultra-hi fidelity tube recording equipment.
“I’m super stoked,” he says. “It’s on to new adventures.”