Personnel

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Doug McClement

Doug McClement became interested in audio as a teenager, working in stereo stores and playing in bands around his home town of Kingston, Ontario. He set up Comfort Sound, a four track studio in his parents’ basement in 1973, recording demos for local bands and songwriters.

After graduating with an Honours Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University in 1975, he moved to Toronto, where he worked as a computer programmer for TD bank during the day, while running a home studio at night and on weekends. By 1978, the studio was busy enough for Doug to quit the bank, expand to eight track and go full time into recording. He also started to get requests from studio clients to record their bands on location. After a couple of years of taking gear out of the studio for these remotes, he purchased a cube van to accommodate the expanding live recording business.

Throughout the eighties, Comfort Sound expanded from eight to twenty-four tracks, and changed its focus from radio and records to music for television and film. Doug was hired by several television networks to engineer remotes outside Canada, in places like Nigeria, Jamaica, Germany, Cyprus, Spain and Kuwait. A portable multitrack system was designed specifically for shows outside the province. The remote side of the business grew to the point where Doug decided to sell Comfort Sound and go full time into live recording.

Doug set up LiveWire Remote Recorders in the summer of 1994, and has been doing location recording ever since, both with the truck, and with the portable airpack system. The system has expanded to 96 tracks.

Doug has been nominated thirteen times for a Gemini Award for Best Sound in a TV Variety Program, and won Geminis in 2003 and 2010 for his mix of the Juno Awards. He also been nominated for The Canadian Screen Award in the same category eight times and has won three times.  He has received platinum albums for engineering Blue Rodeo’s ‘Diamond Mine’ and ‘Five Days in July’; and ‘Bargainville’ for Moxy Fruvous. “Stevie Ray Vaughan and Albert King In Session”, engineered by Doug, won the W.C. Handy Award from the Blues Foundation for Best Blues Album of 2000. He also won an ADISQ award (Quebec Juno) for his mix of a Richard Seguin concert television special for MusicPlus.

He has worked on the OBS (Olympic Broadcast Services) audio team for the past four Olympic Games: 2014 in Sochi, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, 2018 in Pyeongchang and 2021 in Tokyo.

He is the chief recording engineer at Toronto’s legendary El Mocambo club, doing livestream concerts from that historic venue.

Doug has been a member of the Audio Engineering Society since 1974 and was awarded an AES Fellowship in 2020. He is currently the Director of the Audio Production Program at The Harris Institute in Toronto, where he teaches part-time. Doug has also done guest lectures on remote recording at Harris’ sister school, the University of West Scotland, as well as Fanshawe College in London, Ryerson University, The Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology (OIART) and the Recording Academy of Canada.

When not on location, Doug enjoys listening to Ry Cooder and Tom Waits, watching movies, reading, and watching baseball. He also plays bass for “It Ain’t Pretty”, a roots music band that his wife thinks should be named “The Grateful Alive”.


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Gary Tompkins

Gary has been with LiveWire since 1997, and is our “inside man”, responsible for interfacing our gear with the band’s equipment, and placing audience mics, intercom, and our stage-view camera. Gary also our liason with the artist’s stage crew. He says that being onstage with AC/DC and the Rolling Stones at the Downsview SARS Concert in 2003 is his most memorable LiveWire moment.



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Ken Friesen

Ken is originally from Manitoba, but spent his early years in Calgary, doing live sound for local bands while working for Rocky Mountain Sound.  He also worked on the audio crew for the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics. He gradually got involved in studio work, then moved to Toronto in 1989. A stint in Nashville at The Soundshop led to three years as house engineer, at Lakeside Studio near Ottawa. In 1996 Ken  became  studio manager/engineer at the Tragically Hip’s Bathouse studio near Kingston, Ontario for several years. He is now based in Almonte, Ontario, where he operates a studio in a Victorian house when not on the road doing the foh mix for artists like Holly Cole, Jesse Cook, and David Usher and the Canadian Country Music Awards.  Ken has worked with LiveWire as a freelancer since 1990, specializing in big national network shows such as The Juno Awards, Cover Me Canada, the Grey Cup Halftime Show, and the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

LiveWire Remote Recorders