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Tottenham-area studio hitting all the right notes

'Sometimes you need to almost make people angry to have them give their best performance,' says Dayne Polny, who also does sound at Mavricks Music Hall in Barrie
2021-01-07 We Love Sound
We Love Sound recording studio, just west of Tottenham, provides recording services for bands and individual performers. Recording engineer Dayne Polny takes the helm at the mixing board in the studio located in a converted barn on his rural property.

If you’ve ever attended the Sunday Concerts in the Park series in Tottenham during the summer, you have seen Dayne Polny off to one side of the stage with his mixing board making sure the sound is perfect.

While Polny is a professional in his craft and works in the field at concert venues with some pretty big-name bands, he also has a recording studio near Tottenham where he records and mixes everything from rock bands to individual performers.

He got his start in the recording industry after completing a degree in music business at Durham College in Oshawa.

“I had a good understanding of contracts and how to talk to musicians,” Polny said. “As a sound engineer, I’m completely self-taught. I got into it trying to record my bands playing when I was 13 or 14 and kept trying to learn how to record myself and buying books on how to do it. I’m still upgrading and having what I need in here to get people wanting to come here and record.

"I never really planned to do this, but people kept telling me I was good at it, so I thought I would try and focus on it," he added. "It was something I couldn’t get out of my head. I was always trying to learn and spent many late nights researching the best way to record guitars and the best way to record drums.”

In 2012, he took the next step and decided to build a recording studio.

He converted a barn on his family’s property into a loft-type studio on the second floor and called it We Love Sound.

Over the years, he has outfitted the studio with high-tech recording equipment and all the accessories that go with modern music recording.

Although he is a musician himself  and highly knowledgeable in recording, he prefers to refer to himself as a sound engineer rather than a producer, although he will make suggestions if necessary when recording a band.

“It  becomes more complicated when you have producers involved and stuff like that,” Polny said. “I don’t always take that role as a producer. I don’t always tell  bands what their song should sound like –  they tell me what they want it to sound like. I’m more of a recording engineer. Part of my job  and maybe this makes me particularly suited for it  is you almost have to be a bit of a psychologist.

"You have to understand how people are thinking and have to have ways when people are stressed, to calm them down," he added. "Sometimes you need to almost make people angry to have them give their best performance.”

Over  time, Polny began branching out and started doing the sound and concert production at live venues. He has worked some pretty big venues and worked with some well-known bands.

He now does all the shows at Mavricks Music Hall in Barrie and meets a lot of top names in the business. 

His set-up can do the sound for venues of up to 5,000 people.

Polny admits the pandemic has had a serious impact on the music industry due to lack of public performance venues.

“A lot of bands are quitting and giving up – especially at the local level. For a lot of guys, if they can’t play live, there’s no point," he said. 

Hopefully, when the situation settles down, live performances will once again be taking place in venues around the country.

After providing the sound for several years at the Tottenham outdoor concerts, Polny will be taking over the event this coming summer and plans to breathe some new life into the Sunday concert series.

“I want to add a little more,” he  said. “I’d like to incorporate some more original music. I’ve always felt the Tottenham concerts are supposed to encourage and promote local arts and culture.”

We Love Sound studio is located on Concession Road 7,  just north of Highway 9, west of Tottenham.

Brian Lockhart, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, New Tecumseth Times