What had originally started as an outlet for a pair of Metro Moncton musicians to document some of their favourite bands with an online video series has grown beyond their wildest expectations.
Kyle McDonald and John Jerome, both members of Moncton band Pervert, launched The McDons House, profiling a wide array of bands in their first season including Les Paiens, The Strawmen and Cauldron. So far, the series has resonated rather well with audiences. The first season of The McDons House proved to be a success, earning McDonald and Jerome more than 20,000 full episode views and 285,000 partial episode views in addition to accolades from many of the bands they worked with.
Looking back upon their first full season, Kyle McDonald says the reception afforded to The McDons House was completely unexpected.
“John and I had started The McDons House out of our love of documenting live music and as such had no real expectation other than ending up with a presentation that really impressed us as fans of music,” McDonald says. “We were completely taken back at the response and overwhelming amount of attention and feedback we received throughout season one and in the downtime between season one and the launch of season two.”
The format of each episode of The McDons House has been fairly standard to date. Bands and musicians perform live in the basement of McDonald’s house, with McDonald tracking the music to a professional recording console. Jerome films the groups using a high definition digital video camera and during the editing process, McDonald and Jerome sync the audio and video feeds up to create an end product that is arguably unmatched by similar web-based series.
“With our approach, viewers are able to truly experience the best case scenario of how a band sounds in their live environment,” McDonald says.
The McDons House recently launched season two of their web series, located at www.superbob.ca/themcdonshouse and has already filmed many of the episodes that will be released over the coming months. Season two of The McDons House premiered exclusively online on Friday Feb. 10, with new episodes debuting every second Friday after.
The upcoming season of The McDons House has a promising lineup of talent featuring the likes of 2012 Juno-nominated psychedlic-country band The Sadies, Halifax indie-rockers Dog Day, Moncton band The Motorleague and Petunia to name but a few.
“At this point, season two has 14 episodes and counting shot,” McDonald says. “With season one, we were filming each episode individually at the start of the week and would then post the final product at the end of the week but due to the excessive workload associated with that, John and I had decided to pre-shoot the second season rather than having to film each episode weekly.”
As they say, good word travels fast and nowhere is this more relevant than in the case of The McDons House. Thanks to the obvious care and attention afforded to the series by both McDonald and Jerome, the duo are now in the position of having bands approach them to be included, a direct but pleasant contrast to season one where they had to seek out each band.
“We are incredibly proud of what we have accomplished to date,” McDonald says. “Having the opportunity to feature Juno Award nominees like The Sadies and Cauldron is a pretty great achievement in our books and one that we feel speaks to the quality and care of our vision we are releasing to the eyes of the public.”
Article published in February 24, 2012 edition of The Times & Transcript