26-year-old Toronto music producer hits all the right notes
Posted June 6, 2018 3:46 pm.
Last Updated June 6, 2018 10:20 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Riley Bell turned 26 this year and already is an accomplished recording engineer in Canada’s music industry.
He got his start at Revolution Recording Studios as an intern and remembers the first project that he had to work on just a few years ago.
“It was an acoustic session for City & Colour,” Riley told CityNews, “He was working on bonus track for a re-release. It was cool.”
Becoming an award winning music producer wasn’t the path Bell was originally set on. He grew up wanting to be a musician.
“It was kind of by coincidence. I played in bands in high school and then I started to produce our demos and thought about what comes next,” he says. “When it came down to college, I went to recording school and the formal training for this job is audio engineering which leads directly into the recording studio”
This past April he won the Juno award for record engineering for his work on R&B Singer Daniel Caeser’s album “Freudian.” Just prior to Juno win he was one of the many forces behind Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s ground breaking album “Space Sessions: Songs From A Tin Can.” It was the first album that was recorded in space and just one of the many acclaimed projects he has worked on.
“That was a really cool experience! I was a staff engineer at Revolution Recordings at the time. I also got to work with Buffy Sainte-Marie’s album “Power in the Blood” that won the Polaris Prize,” he says.
“The first project I ever assisted on though was for The Weeknd and that is when it all started.”
