“The people are tight, the walls are tight, the machines are tight, and so the product is going to be tight.”
-Mathieu Morin
“In the beginning, it was actually musical
projects only,” shares Lefebvre, listing off a
few album projects and film soundtracks
from the early years in the mid-‘80s. “It was
music, music, music, and the advertising
started a little later.”
The move into ad work, which began in
the late ‘80s and ramped up into the ‘90s, was
driven from two directions; in some cases,
ad agencies were approaching Lamajeure
directly with potential projects, but in others,
musicians they’d recorded in their first few
years of operations were being hired to do
scores and jingles for ad or corporate work
and wanted to work somewhere familiar,
with people they trusted.
“When you’re doing albums, you’re
spending 200 or 300 hours with those peo-
ple and get to know them very well,” Lefebvre
explains, “so when those musicians were con-
tracted to do advertising, they would often
bring that work here.”
“Sylvain has really changed the ad busi-
ness in Montreal,” enthuses Etienne Boivin,
the general manager at Lamajeure. “I’ve been
witness to it over the years. He brings a high
degree of professionalism to his work, but
also has that creative background as a musi-
cian, so he’s kind of a bridge between those
two worlds.”
When Boivin first joined the staff as
Lefebvre’s assistant in 1995, Lamajeure was
already well established in that side of the
business; however, his arrival did correspond
with another major shift for the studio and
the recording business in general.
Having just graduated from a one-year
recording arts program, Boivin had minimal
experience with digital workflows. “At that
point, digital was still very new and it wasn’t
clear which DAW would become the industry
standard,” shares Boivin.
When he was hired in 1995, Lamajeure
had just adopted the Pro Tools platform and
brought in its second Digidesign 16-track
system. “That was really special for me, being
there right at the adoption of a digital sys-
tem,” Boivin enthuses.
Fortunately for the studio, as they’d
later discover, they bet on a winning horse in
the now industry-standard Pro Tools family,
which Lefebvre admits gave them a signifi-
cant competitive advantage as other studios
were catching up on the transition to digital.
Boivin left the studio in the late ‘90s to
pursue new opportunities as a freelancer.
Business was good, and when his accountant
retired, the engineer found himself taking
over that side of his fledging operation. That
led to him enrolling in an accounting pro-
gram in the mid-2000s in pursuit of a new
career, but amidst his studies, Boivin got a
call from an old friend.
It was 2008, and Lefebvre had just split
with his previous business partner. Before
going gangbusters on a search for someone
new and trustworthy to take on some of the
administrative duties for the growing busi-
we’d get a final video master on tape and
then restripe the sound on it, and that was
always a much-needed service.”
In 2009, they were faced with the
decision of whether or not to invest in an
HDCAM SR deck. “It was a lot of money,
especially with the economy not being
great,” recalls Boivin, “but we knew we’d get
a return on the investment over time, so we
went ahead, and that actually started our TV
distribution department.”
The purchase made them the first
audio recording studio in Montreal to own
The Past
STUDIO A CONTROL ROOM
ness, he reached out to someone he figured
would be an ideal fit.
“We were out of touch for a few years,
but I knew Etienne was very organized, very
thorough,” Lefebvre says of his colleague, and
so in 2008, having gained experience in sev-
eral different studios in and around Montreal,
Boivin says he “came back to the best one.”
Whereas his first stint coincided with
the transition to digital, his second came
with its fair share of major changes, this time
at his discretion.
For one, they installed a fibre backbone
throughout the facility to better facilitate the
post, voiceover, and ADR work for which they
were becoming well known. Then came the
transition from SD to HD video and its related
infrastructure.
“We used to do restripes,” says Boivin.
“We had a digital Betacam deck for years, so
such equipment and enabled them to offer
services like dubbing and closed-captioning,
which meant they could save their clients
even more time and resources. “And then if
they had revisions, they could manage even
really late edits, and we could send master
tapes directly to stations,” says Boivin.
At the end of 2010, Lamajeure took
over another Montreal-based post-produc-
tion business – Coté Post – as its namesake,
well-known businessman Bob Coté, was set
to retire. They folded the largely tape-based
dubbing house into their mainly digital op-
eration and welcomed Coté’s two project
managers to the team, leading to a boost of
business from a heap of new clients.
In the years since, Lamajeure has been
transitioning even further towards provid-
ing complete, file-based turnkey solutions
for its clientele.
PROFESSIONAL SOUND • 27