Blast From The Past - The Jam House

stephen.king989 (64)in #music • 7 years ago

I found myself scrolling through some old photos today looking for the date of a specific music concert -- we called them "shows" -- and I realized I have a ton of old photos going back to about 2004 or 2005. This was just shortly after I moved to Sydney, Nova Scotia into a single room apartment. I was going to some shitty overpriced college to study music technology. The course was only ten months long but should have been 1/3rd that length, and 1/3rd the price.

The course did teach me a lot about music theory at the start because I knew zero music theory. Near the end, it was just the same old boring stuff to try and fill up the time with no real substance. During that course, I had been practicing with a new band for a little while and we were sort of jamming at different locations; wherever we could find space. This wasn't really working because most of us lived in apartments and we couldn't really crank the volume like we wanted to. We were able to jam at our drummer's house but it was a good 45-minute drive away and the only person with a car was.... the drummer; so that didn't work well.

Then when I was about half way through the college course, one of my buddies came across some money and was going to buy a house. To make that work, he decided to get three of us to move in with him to help cover the mortgage, power, food, maintenance, etc. Since we were all living in 1 or 2 bedroom apartments, this was a huge improvement for all of us and worked out to be cheaper.

So the plan went ahead and we all moved in. It was a little rough at the start. It was only a three bedroom house but now four of us were living there. So, one guy decided he was going to make a room in the basement, and he was going to do it on a budget. The basement was barely big enough to stand up in and he decided to put in a subfloor and throw up some walls to give himself a sort of room. I really wish I had a picture of that because it was one of the saddest things I ever saw. Dave, if you ever read this, what were you thinking?

Two of the rooms were a decent size but my room was super small. There was only enough room for a single bed, a dresser, and there was a small closet. This didn't bother me too much at the start. At least I wasn't living in the basement and it was way cheaper than renting an apartment by myself while trying to go to school. There was also a large living room, dining room, kitchen, and hallway with a large closet that we could all use so the bedroom was only really for a bit of privacy and sleeping.

Anyway, I'm sort of rambling.......

The best part of the house was that we were all musicians. It started out that we were only using the dining room for jamming. This worked pretty well for a while but it was pretty small when you started getting 4, 5, and 6 people crammed into one room with all their amps, guitars, mics, speakers, and a drumset. As you can see from the picture below, it wasn't a really big space.

After a little while, my band started getting pretty serious. The drummer, he started bringing pieces of his drum set over to add on to the kit I had. Both kits were almost the same; mine was a Mapex Pro M Series and his was a Mapex M Series. Eventually it made one big super kit with all kinds of cymbals.

We ended up moving the drums out into the living room and taking over that space too. I also ended up buying my 16 track ProTools setup for recording so that took up quite a bit of space. Soon we had both rooms filled with musical equipment. One thing that was taking up a bunch of space was the amount of guitars lying around. We ended up getting a sheet of slot wall and hanging it up for all the guitars and cords. I think at one point we had 16 guitars between all of us.

Eventually, we ended up with the final band members to form Magnum Opus. Along the way to the final band we played many different shows with many different members, which I'll post more on later. I ended up staying in that house until 2008 and, although it was rough at times, it was totaly worth it.

I'll finish this post off with some cheesy band photos we actually posed for and some old show posters.