The first thing that comes to mind when the topic of the Railway Museum comes up is, of course, trains. That means locomotives, carriages, railway tracks and engineers. Added to that is the wonderful touch of past elegance in the beautiful heritage building, The Royal Alexandra Hall. So a Railway Museum usually equals all things to do with the trains.

But on Saturday afternoon, when a small group of musicians and sound engineers set up camp to begin recording Heather Gemmel's new CD, the ambience of the establishment underwent a small transition. Heather, by now, is a well-known singer/songwriter living in Cranbrook who is a staple on the local music scene. This summer she was one of the main acts at both the Kimberley Arts on the Edge Festival” and Cranbrook's Idlewild MusicFest.

Heather is currently working on a recording project that is supported by a grant from the Columbia Basin Trust. For the location of the first recording session Heather and her sound engineer Matt McKenzie chose the Royal Alexandra Hall. “It is such a beautiful, elegant room with great acoustics,” Heather said.

Physically the layout is good for a recording project. The ballroom for the musicians is very spacious with an attached hallway to act as a “the control booth.”

The facility does come with some significant but not insurmountable drawbacks. The building is sandwiched between the railway tracks and the highway and the low rumble of shunting trains can be felt from time to time. Every now and then there had to be an appropriate pause in the recording to accommodate CPR's need to make a living.

The recording was done during the normal operating hours of the museum and that also meant accommodating the tour schedules that pass through the building.

This is not Heather's first recording effort. She released a seven-track demo CD about four years ago. This current effort is just another step in a career building process.

On board with the current project is the sound engineer Matt McKenzie, his assistant Stewart Driedger, and for this session Steve Jones on upright bass and Neil MacDonald on fiddle.

This particular session was a “live-off-the-floor recording” — that is the musicians are recorded live with no overdubs or edits. The idea is to get a sound that is an accurate reflection of a live performance. On this CD there will be at least four live-off-the-floor recordings, and the remaining eight tracks will be done in a studio.

The goal of this day's efforts was to work out the arrangements and record Heather's “Sweet December.” This is a song reflecting the sense of homesickness she experienced during her recent travels. Heather and Matt worked out an arrangement that featured her voice and guitar floating over some gentle Arco and Pizzicato bass playing from Steve Jones and gentle obbligato violin from Neil.

The session lasted four hours with numerous takes before a number of acceptable alternatives where in the can. Most of them sounded fine to me, but these musicians wanted at least a couple of perfect takes and with live recordings this takes a bit of doing. With no fallback edits to patch up mistakes at a later date the final accepted take has to be perfect. On playback at the end of the session the song and the arrangement sounded gorgeous.

This is just one step in the process of producing what promises to be a great recording.