Ancient History

A bit of historical fun. I've always been building things, here are a few that I have pictures for. Unfortunately I am missing a picture of the electronically operated fireworks detonation sequencer I built in 8th grade.  

ADR MIXER: I built this for Francis Coppola's Zoetrope Studios for the picture Rumblefish at the request and to the specification of sound designer Leslie Shatz. A complete audio routing console for automated dialogue replacement, it was built in seven weeks total in the living room of my apartment in San Francisco in 1983. Featured all electronic logic controlled noiseless switching, soft switching on 8 track returns for seamless take switching, and SMPTE sync-sucker (another product I built several of) built-in. My friend Jeff Pam had worked in some studios in LA and did really nice wiring inside. Steve Sutter did the PCB layouts for me. I had to stay up for 72 hours straight to get it done, but it worked, and I stayed to do the recording. Barrie Osborne was the producer and he liked the concept of remote ADR recording so much that he hired me later to take the whole setup out on the road, Q-Lock, Stevens 8-track and all.

MONITOR CONTROL MIXER INTERFACE: Built for Agamemnon Andrianos, a well known location sound recordist, and as crazy with detail and his quest for quality as I was. This box formed the center of his sound recording cart, performing such functions as: metering, formating, monitoring, distribution, recorder control and timing, pink noise, tone generation, tail slates, etc. The most fun I had was designing the discrete JFET audio switching system. For some reason I had convinced myself that the oscillator had to be on and running 1KHZ in the background all the time (most consoles turn off the oscillator when it's not being used). But I needed to be able to slate one machine while the other one was recording. To keep the 1KHz tone below the noise floor of the active channel, the switch had to have an off isolation of -120dB! I learned a great deal about switch topology as well as wiring practice in this little box. I recently ran into Adam Lieberman who is still taking care of Ag's custom needs. 20 years later, it's still working, and Adam is busy modifying it for the umpteenth time! 

MONITOR MATRIX: built for Russian Hill Recording, it fit into the center section of their SSL 4K. It was designed to take in 24 monitor inputs and route them to L,C,R,S,LB,RB. It had input Line/Tape switching, solo/mute, and three mute busses, and allowed them to do film style music premixing. This was before anything like the Otari PicMix or the Martinsound box was developed. I did it for $10K. This was probably around 1987.  

MONITOR MATRIX: another, earlier monitor matrix, commissioned again by Kim Aubry, as a module for their Neotek console. It was just mono... but performed the same functions as the Russian Hill unit did later. 

SATELLITE RECEIVER REMOTE CONTROL: Something that Kim Aubry (now a big movie producer) commissioned for KBRW in Barrow, Alaska. It let them control their satellite receivers remotely, which is a good thing when they are located across town and it's 40 degrees below zero.

TIME CODE GENERATOR: I built this for Zoetrope Studios for the final mix of Apocalypse Now!. It was needed to facilitate carrying the 24 tracks in the mix, using Q-Lock. This goodie took in Bi-Phase from the MTM film chain and generated longitudinal SMPTE code which ramped up and down just like it was recorded on tape. It was built on an S100 bus single board computer with a board of glue logic and code designed by Don Kaufman. Whatever happened to Don Kaufman?

VSO: typical of many many smaller thingies, this one helped somebody run their 2-track off speed.

My first big power amp. I built this while I was working at Charlie Butten's around 1973. It weighed about 60 lbs and quit working about 1990, but I couldn't get rid of it. I just put it in the dumpster at around 2002. But I took a picture before I did...

Some stuff I built for Gary Wright when I was working for him around 1975. A Leslie speaker remote preamp and controller with equalizer, and some kind of synthesizer trigger box. I also built remote keyboards for him so he could run around the stage like a guitar player. 

This is a part of the "Guitar Sound System" I built for Peter Frampton around about 1974. The control rack went in the back line where you would normally find Marshall amplifiers, etc. We banished all of the actual guitar speakers off stage in dressing rooms where they could be isolated and mic'ed. The two white front units with rotary knobs were custom built tube preamps which were duplicate preamp circuits for Peter's favorite guitar amps. One was a Fender Twin, one was an Ampeg Echo Twin, and one was a Leslie preamp. All tube, and they were the front one or two gain stages, with a line level transformer feeding a balanced line. At the backstage location we had Marshall amps, Twins, etc., with the front end gain stages disconnected and transformers installed so we could inject the pre-amped signal from the stage. The result was that the amps sounded exactly like stock amps, but the controls were up front and the amp and speakers were off stage for isolation. A custom matrix mixer (upper sloped rack section) finished it off along with a custom footpedal controller that allowed Peter to insert his favorite effects in any sequence, including in an effects loop of the mixer AFTER the microphones. Each microphone had a Kepex gate that was triggerd by the switched direct guitar signal, so it was super quiet when he wasn't playing. A built in mic splitter sent the guitar feeds to the house console, but we also sent a processed feed. The whole thing sounded really great and was a big advancement, but a lot of stuff to carry and setup.