Andy Nichols

The cherry on the Sundae — in 15 years at Sundae Sound, Dave Alcock got to do what he wanted

Any fan of local music has at least one album in their collection that was recorded at Sundae Sound. They probably have several.

Everyone from Huevos Rancheros to Key to the City has spent time at Sundae Sound studio laying down tracks. And chances are, if you check the liner notes of those records, you’ll see Dave Alcock’s name. He’s a musician, an audio engineer and a producer, and for almost a decade he’s been the owner of Sundae Sound. But soon that laundry list of credentials is going to get slightly shorter. After nine years at the helm, Alcock has decided to step away.

“At this point, it’s more a matter of me deciding that I’m ready to move on,” says Alcock. “It’s been great. I love this job and that’s pretty much the only reason I did it, because you could never really make sense of it as far as making money. It was always something I just loved to do. Now I’m thinking about going back to school. It’s time to pass the torch.”

Alcock first stepped into Sundae Sound 15 years ago fresh out of audio school, and at the time he was an unknown quantity who worked for free. Over time, he built his reputation to the point where he was bringing in bands (including his own, Chixdiggit, and later Falconhawk) to work with him. He eventually graduated to the post of house engineer and, when the owners decided to pull the plug on Sundae Sound, Alcock decided to step up and buy it.

“That was nine years ago,” he explains. “I was still super keen and I wasn’t ready to see it stop at that point. So I sat them down and said, ‘You know, this can’t be over yet,’ so we figured out a way for me to buy it.”

And so began the Alcock era of Sundae Sound. After moving from its longtime home at the north end of Edmonton Trail to new digs in northeast Calgary, the studio continued the tradition of being a home for local bands that wanted to get their material recorded.

“That’s all I was ever really about — getting independent records made, whatever it took and whatever their budget was,” says Alcock. “The vast majority of what I did was independent bands who were paying me with their own personal cheque with money they’d saved. So if someone came to me with enough money for one day, we’d cut a record in a day. And if they had more, we’d stretch it as far as we could.”

There’s definitely a nobility in dedicating yourself to the underdog, but the flip side is the obvious financial stress that comes with relying on artists who are working on the cheap, and usually in their spare time, to get it done. Add to that the fact that in the almost 10 years that Alcock has been running the studio, digital technology and home recording have advanced to the point of being ubiquitous, and the music industry as we used to know it has gone through epic restructuring.

“That’s progress,” says Alcock. “It’s a lot easier for bands to get their music out there. It’s a lot harder to get recognized. It’s so wide open right now that it’s hard for everyone on every level to have a business model for it. And I always tried to avoid thinking about it in business ways. It was my pursuit. I just loved working with music and, whatever it took to do it, I would do it.”

So, as Alcock moves on from Sundae Sound to go back to school, the fate of the studio, like the music industry itself, is in question. But that doesn’t mean that the 30-year legacy of Sundae Sound is over for good. As he wraps up his final projects with Chris Gheran, Knucklehead and The Great Evil, Alcock is also looking for someone to take the reins. If the right confluence of finance and personality is found, the studio could rise again. In the meantime, however, Alcock is content to relish the time he had at Sundae Sound.

“I learned what I did from the guys before me,” says Alcock. “They took over and learned from the guys before them and that’s the way these things work. I really loved my phase of it. I did what I wanted. It was the music I listened to. I like independent punk rock — punk rock in the old sense of the word — and I got to do that. And I got to offer it to Calgary and Alberta and that was no small feat and I am pretty proud of it.”