Christian Gammon-Roy
Tribune
Local musician Jean-Marc Michaud is putting some finishing touches on an album project roughly 10-years in the making. The Sturgeon Falls resident has been sharing his passion for music for years, but more recently he decided to refine and perfect nine of his singles from a decade ago. The compilation of these songs will be made into an album due for release on April 15.
“I used to post these songs, and they were kind of half-finished, I wasn’t recording them very well, kind of just doing it on a laptop,” describes Michaud, who has been writing and composing for over a decade. The songs were posted to his Jean-Marc Michaud Music Facebook page back in 2016 but were recently taken down while he reworks them. “This last year, considering I accumulated a lot of equipment, and have been studying how to mix and record properly, I decided to re-record properly,” he describes, adding that he’s trying to get his pieces “up to par with a studio quality song.”
As Michaud explains, the refining process began roughly a year ago with nine songs that he had “finished” and decided to redo in parts. “One day I decided that I would record the acoustic part for all of them, and then when I had time I would add and try to complete them. The more I went through it, the more I started learning about mixing, and I got addicted to just trying to get the songs to sound the way I wanted them to,” he recounts. Bit by bit, the songs continued to improve. While he admits that the process was mostly just for fun, at some point Michaud forced himself to finish the project. “Eventually, when I was close to done, it was a matter of ‘ok I’m constantly tweaking something, and I should just finish and release them,’ because if you have no deadline, you’re always going to find something to tweak,” he says, adding that putting an album release date out there was his personal deadline.
