Watch: Winnipeg's Royal Canoe gives you the low down behind their ultra hot sound

Royal Canoe is dropping their new EP February 17 at the West End Cultural Centre.

The band, who have been reaping acclaim due to their genre-be-damned approach to making music, are poised to be Winnipeg's next big thing. 

Here at SCENE we've had a small office obsession with the new songs (they sent us an early copy) and the "In the Studio" videos they've been sending out. We thought we should leave it to the creative brains in the band, to tell you all about how their new sounds are being paddled out.

Here is Matt Peters, lead singer for Royal Canoe:

We spent the better part of the last 2 years sequestered in our rank, little practice space at the corner of Portage and Furby working on the songs for our upcoming EP and full-length which will be released further down the road.

There was a whole lot of, "What the hell am I still doing here? It's 4 a.m. and I've just spent eight hours working on a whistle sound," going on.

We spent just as much time exploring different soundscapes and tweaking those tones as we did writing the actual parts. Our gear became pretty essential to this process (by "pretty essential" I actually mean "absolutely imperative." As in, if we played acoustic versions of our songs we'd probably sound like a bad cover band...).



We have a magical pedal called a Vocal Transformer that we apply to almost every sound. It's ridiculously effective. If an instrument ever needs a new identity we just set up the pedal and sure enough, with annoying regularity the sound is reborn. It's almost like cheating. On "Bloodrush" you can hear this pedal at work. It's on the drumbeat, vocals, guitar,etc.. all magicked up.

"Caught in a loop" was written after I bought a new loop pedal and I was excited the show it to the other guys.. As a demonstration I turned it on, hit a drum, then a tambourine, played a simple guitar and bass line, and then Matt (other Matt) sang a quick vocal hook. All in the spirit of, "look how easy this is to use, everything sounds good." Suddenly we realised that we had a song all because of this new piece of gear. We almost used this original loop on the record, but decided that the song needed an arc so we re-recorded it live.

So yeah, the moral of the story is please don't steal our gear or we're sunk. Also, come to our show on Friday at the WECC and see us hide behind our towers of equipment, working hard for us...