I cut my electronic teeth with sound, and my love of audio is evident in all my work. For me the technical aspects of audio and the emotional impact of music hold equal fascination. Although electronics pays the bills, I’ve never stopped playing music. This has put me in the position of someone whose work is also his hobby. An excellent position to be in, I might add.
In 1962, when I was eight, I built a telegraph from my bedroom to a shack on our back yard. It used 120VAC for signaling on an open wire transmission line along the back fence. I used to do a lot of that sort of thing and never killed myself. (“haven’t killed myself yet”?)
At nine I'd moved on to making stereos with kits, and by 10 I'd wired the homes of all my friends in the neighborhood to be bases for the Man from U.N.C.L.E. Our street was crawling with secret agents.
In high school, my metal shop teacher, Truman Whorton, pulled me next door to the electronics shop and said “you should be here” because he had discovered me fabricating the chassis for an electronic control panel. That started the best student-teacher relationship I’ve ever had, whereby I absorbed all information he was willing to part with during the next 4 years. One result was that when I left I was licensed to operate a commercial TV station. Not that I ever did.
I found myself in a "been there, done that" mindset as a first-year student at California Polytechnic University. Impatient for new horizons, I cast about for ways to go beyond what I knew. I was incredibly lucky to find my own private institution of higher learning - the "University of Charlie Butten". Charlie was a crazy design genius whose shop produced sound systems way ahead of their time (late 60's early 70's) for the likes of Carlos Santana, Boz Skaggs, The Doobie Brothers, etc. I became Charlie's apprentice and protégé because I had learned about horn loudspeaker design at Cal Poly. I learned more about systems design and integration from Charlie than I could ever have learned from a public institution. Charlie and I used to go to local shows to service our equipment when bands came to town. After fixing a "Super Leslie" for The Doobie Brothers one night, I didn't go back to the shop. The next thing I knew it was four years on the road with The Doobies, Peter Frampton, and Gary Wright. On the road, I carried tools and test equipment and opened a traveling electronics shop, building custom equipment for my employers on the fly.
<< Circa 1977 in Gary Wright's studio ("The Dreamweaver")
with some of the Synth gear I built for Gary. Note the LA tan!
After a bit too much of that foolishness, I decided it would be better to stay put for a while. I made it back to my home in the SF Bay Area and landed at Francis Coppola's Zoetrope Studios, just in the middle of the final year of producing Apocalypse Now! The scene was pretty much what I was used to already, only it stayed put. Here I kept up my habit of building funny custom widgets wherever needed, and that became my position in the engineering department. I built lots of cool stuff like patching systems, monitoring systems and synchronization equipment.
I was at Zoetrope from 1979 to 1985, and was involved in the productions of Apocalypse Now!, The Black Stallion, One from the Heart, Rumblefish, Gardens of Stone, The Cotton Club, and Walker. I gained an intimate understanding of the process of film audio post, as once again we were inventing multi-channel audio as we went.
During that time I was building clientele in and around San Francisco for my independent services, mostly in the film production and recording studio communities. I worked for Different Fur Recording, Russian Hill Recording, Tres Virgos Studios, The Sound Service, Colossal Pictures, and a host of independents. I really got into building custom gadgets and you can see some of them here.
By 1985 I was ready to make it real and created DCE (David Carroll Electronics). We began with installing audio recording studios and rapidly moved to film post houses, radio and television broadcast facilities, corporate media production, government, and A/V jobs. Our first big job, in 1988 was as primary audio systems integrator at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch, where we built the film company's first dubbing stages and machine rooms. Over the years, we continued to land high profile, trend-setting projects such as the U.S. Senate and Sony Music Studios.
DCE closed in 1998 after a period of financial mis-management. My newest enterprise, David Carroll Associates, is focused entirely on systems integration which is quite the most complicated puzzle I've ever encountered and promises to keep me busy for as long as my wife has the patience to humor me in it.