(04:
42: 48:) First of all, I'd like you to resume the young years of your career.
(04:
42: 53 ) The young years. Well, I was born in Cleveland, Mississipi in
1944. And er..that was the town where in which the blues was discovered,
supposedly, according to the father of the blues WC Handy in his biography.
My mother was a science freak and my father was a music freak. Not real
freak, but they loved science and loved music. And as a result I was influenced
by both and er...I started a band in the third grade and I started building
sounds(,) for projects in the fifth grade. And er...I started getting sounds
for ? in the sixth, seventh, eighth, nineth, tenth, eleventh, twelveth
grades and I was playing the tuba from the third grade until college. And
how I came to play the tuba is my mother asked me if I wanted to be in
a band when I was eight years old, and I said I was interested so she took
me to the band hall and the director meets us at the door and says "Hi
you can learn to play any instruments you want in the room, go, pick them
up, look at them, whatever you want to do and the biggest shiniest thing
in the room was a big brass ? horn. You know and it's gold, and the lights
? and I ran over it first and my mother looks a little worried
and she says "How much does it cost?" and he says "That's free, we furnish
it". She says "He can play that" so that's how I came to play the tuba.
And of course, doing the work at home on a tuba was very disturbing.But
it was fun. And er...then in 1960...in the tenth grade I got my first big
? award, I was awarded Navy Cruiser Award and Air Force Electronics Award
for a science project. And then in 1962 I was elected to the National Honours
Group in the Westinghouse Science Talents Search. And I was a National
...?.....?... but I was still playing music all the time. Then I got a
scholarship to Ole Mis for the fall of 62 as a physics major and I found
out that Ole Mis was going to be integrated for the first time, with a
student by the name of James Meredith, a black student and I decided I
was too big a target to be on a campus so I went to Mississipi State instead.
And I switch my major to electrical engineering.
To electronics?
(04:
45: 53 ) Electrical engineering. We didn't really have electronics then,
the first electronics course I took was half vacuum tube and half solid
state. And the computer we had just got ride off was a big old IBM vacuum
tube computer we replaced by an IBM 401 which still is a big old 4 bit
the punch and everything. And er.. but I had a surrogate father because
my father died when I was seven, his name was Pete Crawler, and he taught
me band(?) in junior high school and he had gone to Mississipi State to
be Assistant Department Head. And it's one of the reasons I went to Mississipi
State. And Pete Crawler was also a chess master, and so he taught me chess
too.. And he replaced my father who had died when I was seven, and er..so
I went there and I didn't get in a band till my second year at the state,
the Mississipi State. But I did meet, in my first year I started playing
music professionally.
(04: 46:
58 ) You were doing studies and training to be a musician..?
(04:
47: 03 ) Yeah! You'll hear about that when it...Cos I didn't know how to
handle it first...cos my studies started going like that and my music started
going like that and er... in my first band there was a young man named
Hartley Peavey
(04: 47:
19 ) Hartley?
(04:
47: 20 ) Hartley Peavey. Peavey electronics. And he decided that he really
wasn't a good player so he said why don't I manage the band. So it was
funny.
(04: 47:
34 ) And so what happened after that?
(04:
47: 37 ) So I played more and more, and I switched majors to physics which
I was doing in the first place. And er...I decided electronical engineering
was just to narrow for what I was interested in. And er...my third year
at Mississipi State, I flucked out(?) and I went to play music for a year,
went back to Delta State College in Cleveland, Mississipi where I was born,
finished with straight A, you know, and got my major in physics and mathematics.
Just a
second...
(04:
48: 16 ) Oh it moved! (04: 48: 23 ) And continued to play the music...I
finally figured out how to manage my life so that I could study and play
music six nights a week;
(04: 48:
35 ) What kind of music did you play at the time?
(04:
48: 37 ) At that time we were playing..er...I guess you could call it fusion,
what we would do is we would take, you know what show tunes are from the
Broadway plays and the movies and we would take the Rhythm and Blues' rhythms
and we'd put that together and that was the music we were playing.
(04: 48:
59 ) So you were interested by black music yet?
(04:
49: 02 ) Yeah, in fact when I was very small there was a..., I guess from
the time I was one and a half years old till about seven years old, there
was a black family that lived behind our house and every morning at dawn
there were still playing gospel music on their radio and that woke
me up every morning for my first four, five years, so it was stuck in the
brain, you know, and er...subconsciously influence I'm sure.
(04: 49:
33 ) And what happened after you graduate?
(04:
49: 35 ) After I graduated I went to Technisonic Studios in Saint Louis
and I worked under Bud Harrisson who was the father of, of remanescent(?)
acoustics, you know, you may not know what remanescent(?) acoustic is about,
it is a concept that you do not want in a room where you have to record
or broadcast information to have discreet reflections from the walls returning
to the point where the sound originated.
What you want
to do is to convert everything that emanates from the sound sources into
the reverberation field and this gives you a batter sound with minimum
confusion and so he wrote the papers in 1936 and he and Harry Halson
collaborated on some of the design work and the concepts and then World
War II started. And he couldn't build his first remanescent (?) room until
after World War II, he built the first one in 46 and that room was incredible,
I got to use it in the sixties after I got out of school. You could do
no wrong in room, you could put musicians anywhere, you don't need baffles,
it sounded beautiful.
(04: 50:
57 ) And it's the time that you started to work as a sound engineer?
(04:
51: 01 ) Yes! So he hired me because he was a physicist, Bob Harrisson
was...and he wanted another physicist at the studio. Technosonic studio
was a very interesting place because it had...in one roof we had a film
sound stage, we had film editing, disc mastering, planning plant, pressing
plant, two music rooms, and editing suites for doing radio shows,
all under one.......So I was very lucky, you know, I got right out of school
and I went there and I'm learning acoustics from Bud and doing record,
the first record he gave me was a Chuck Berry album. So it was wonderful
you know.
(04: 51:
43 ) And what kind of gear did you use at the time?
(04:
51: 47 ) Er...it's really an interesting thing cos also we had an eleven
isolater Moog synthesizer which was the second system Moog ever built And
Frank Harriss was the.Moog.. our commercial producer and he put the
Moog in the studio to use to do commercials. Many times we would have forty
musicians live with the Moog line...
INTERVIEW
D. BASKIND
2 OCTOBRE
1992 K7 5A
(05: 01: 06
) We had a Bushnel(?) consol which was twelve inputs, it used 11.08 pre-amplifiers
and semi(?)-amplifiers, the equalisation was high frequency with -3, -
6, + 3 and + 6 DB(?). The low frequency was - 3, - 6, - 9, +3, +6 DB, one
frequency for each course(?). We were using three er...early 3M(?) machine,
we had a four track and an eight track, but they originally were two track
and the four track was Fairchild(?) Electronics. But the Fairchild(?)
Electronics would decide when it wanted to go to record at random and...so
they couldn't keep using it...cos they'd be doing a session and all of
the sudden it would start a racing and mix sound, you know, so they put
the 3M electronics back in the machine and made them a four track and eight
track. And we had Ampex 351 and 300 two quarant(?) machines and we had
some early Ampex 4.40s. One of them actually at the time.
(05: 02:
21 ) And what kind of mics?
(05:
02: 23 ) Microphones were KM 64s, 54s, some 67s, er..some 7070Xs(?) and
er...we had 6,66 Electro Voice we used for bass drum typically and...that
was about it...we had a lot of them.
(05: 02:
50 ) Well how much mics did you use on one session?
(05:
02: 53 ) Well I had twelve inputs but I could mult(?). But like when I
did Reverend James Cleveland I would use all twelve mics. DB : (05:
03: 05 ) And for Reverend Cleveland it was real interesting session because
we'd have fifty people in the choir who would have drums, Billy Preston
on organ playing bass with a foot and pedals, and piano and a couple of
male singers and a couple of female singers. All black of course. And that
was a typical Reverend Cleveland session for Savoy Records. And...but there
were fifty more people they called it the Amen Section. And what they...Reverend
Cleveland would conduct all of these people and when he wanted someone
to say, when he wanted to say amen he had a signal to say amen, he
could control how loud and how soft, he could make them say yes, or amen,
yes Lord all these things you hear, you know, in the gospel stuff.DB :
(05: 04: 00 ) It was all choreographed, and he conducted, and he conducted
the choir and he conducted the rhythm section and that's how he did his
albums. And we'd go straight to two track and we'd record an album in four
hours and edit it in two weeks.
Yeah but it
was in the can in four hours.
(05: 04:
20 ) And the session with Chuck Berry worked very....
DB
: (05: 04: 23 ) That was all multi-track and this was an unusual album,
this was the Concerto album, one side is an 18 minute instrumental, it
was called "Johnny B. Good Concerto in G" and the other side was six songs
and Chuck wanted to play everything he could himself on this album and
he had a note-book that he marked off the mesures in and he would put pencil
dots in for each track we were in(?) the eight track machine and he had
a line for each track with the mesures mark and every time he, he'd be
satisfied we'd have recorded properly he'd have a dot for every beat but
if there were missing dots we'd have to go back and fix the song, and we
got through with that and we mixed it down.
DB : (05:
05: 25 ) And the 18 minutes instrumental originally was 26 minutes and
I had a breaks failure on the machine and I lost enough tape there were...
was 18 minutes which was good because you make a better record of 18 minutes
than 26 minutes. It was perfect, we were so lucky.
(05: 05:
35 ) Tell me one thing, what was the relation between black musicians...
(05:
05: 41 ) In Saint Louis, it was very professional, it wasn't like Mississipi,
you know. Mississipi we had very heavy segregation and er..to have a black
friend would have been very unusual for a white person or vice-versa at
that time, in the sixties. Although it, it just kept it low key, you know,
you didn't go out on the street, you didn't do this. But Saint Louis
was a, a fairly well integrated society and it was a learning experience
for me because I had been living in a segragated society until I got to
college then I go to Saint Louis, it's not anymore, you know. And er...so
what else can I say about that?
(05: 06:
31 ) ...After the Saint Louis experience what happened to you?
(05:
06: 35 ) After Saint Louis I went to Bill Day Studio in Jackson, Mississipi
called Jackson Sound and it was attached to a night club that B.J. Thomas
bought(?). I don't know if you remember B.J. Thomas, maybe not. B.J. Thomas'biggest
record was from "Midnight Cowboy", "Raindrops Keeps Falling on my Head"
Er... he build this night club called "B.J.'s" and we bought the
studio next door, in the same building and I ran cables over to the stage
so I can do live recording, which was wonderful. And er...we had a Sculey
twelve track, Sculey four track, Sculey two track and a Sculey mono machine.
And we had a Fairchild consol which I hated.
(05: 07:
23 ) Why?
(05:
07: 24 ) It just...the gain(?) structure was terrible, it overloaded very
wrongly, I ended up modifying it. That was probably my first real modification,
it also had a Lumaten compressors in every channel, you know the Lumaten
with the light bulb and the LDR. And er...so I discovered I could reduce
the gain easily and the moduls and the consol had maybe 85d of gain when
I started and I reduced it down to about 70 DB and it was much more stable,
I took the post fader ampstand to 10 DB and all of the sudden I got some
punch you know. So generally the lower you run the post-fader buffers,
the more punch you got on the consol. And you can push things higher...
so we locked out cos it was a big pain in the rear otherwise. And er...so
we were doing recordings in there, we were doing demos for Stax, and we
did some recordings for er..."Lowry Music"..that's what I did the first...that's
where I did the Tameswas for Lowry Music at Jackson Sound. (05: 08: 43
)And the producers and writers were guys named Bob McRea and Cliffonade
Thomas. And Cliffonade had their, their first hit with the Tame in 61,
it was called "Be young, be foolish, be happy", sold four and half million
records and it was cut on a Silver tone tape recorder in Muscle Schools,
it was Muscle Schools first hit. And er...yeah, one track.
(05: 09:
12 ) And so is that the time when you've been working on demos at Stax
records?
(05:
09: 17 ) After that, well I had started doing demos because a lot of people,
writers for Stax were living in Jackson and the writers, some of the writers
for Lowry Music people were living in Jackson, so I got to start working
for these guys more and more and, and er...the other labels, we were doing
stuff for Capitol, One, Two...it was One, Two, Three Records, Capitol owned
it...and the other one was U.A. We had some contracts with U.A., United
Artists. And so we'd sort of do that stuff and then put my production company
together which was also a band and we started playing clubs too. And that's
when things got really interesting for us in Jackson.(05: 09: 58 ) But
meanwhile, I had been going up to Stax and working some up there too, and
I met Ronnie Capone who was the first, I believe he was the first engineer.
He came from commercial, they called it jingle miller, cranking up, tonnes
of jingles every month, called Paper Tenner(?) and the chief engineer in
Paper Tenner was named Walter Gitane(???) and he built the Stax studios
and he spectresonics cards with Daner(?) faders, you know the German fader
with the, the trade, the rubber trade in it. And er...they had Langeland(?),
the little equalizers with the little knobs and the slatters(?). And er...it
was an interesting combination, it was built in an old theatre at 9.26th
Macremoor(?) St and er...there were ultimately three rooms in there.
(05: 11:
02 ) It was quite a big studio....
(05:
11: 04 ) Yeah, it was a big theatre that they broke up and made into three
rooms. And er... I mostly was working with a writer named Tommy Tate and
a writer named Allan Washington, they were step writers there. And so..I
got a little involved with Luther Ingram(?) who was also a step-writer
and as he actually tried to buy Jackson sounds at one time er...we had
an other interesting problem because
DB : (05:
11: 30 ) the Vietnam war was going on and there was this writer named Jo
Shamwell who was, who wrote with David Porter and Isaac Hayes, they wrote
a lot of Aretha Franklin's records and Jo got drafted. We'd just finished
an album on him before he got drafted. And Hayes contacted the army, the
U.S. army and said, if you will put him in special services which was entertainment
division, we will make him a star. Cos we didn't want him to get shot,
you know, army they wouldn't hear about it, they didn't do it, so we never
did release the album until he got out. Maybe we should have anyway.
DB : (05:
12: 18 )But er...Hayes...I don't know if you want to record this but I'll
give it to you, Hayes' got a very interesting method for making records...this
is risqué...but he would take this girl into his office and er...after
he finished he would go to the studio and have her stand by the piano and
he'd start playing and thinking about what he'd just done. And when he
got into groove, they had musicians on call twenty-four hours a day for
Isaac. And the musicians would sneak in without interrupting his groove
and set up and then roll tape. And that's how he did a lot of the records
he did.
(05: 13:
07 ) Very amazing...
Very
interesting.
(05: 13:
09 ) it's a good way....I may try it...Who was it again?
DB
: (05: 13: 16 ) Isaac Hayes. Do you remember "Hot Buttered Soul" or "Shaft".
"Hot Buttered soul" he did that way.
(05: 13:
27 ) And that was the Stax period?
(05:
13: 29 ) Yeah and there's another interesting story too because
DB : James
Stewart was the president of Stax.
James Stewart?
DB
: (05: 13: 34 ) President of Stax, Al Bell was vice-president. But Jim...
I learn how
Stax, what Stax's strategy was...for why they had hits seasonely, it's
very interesting. What they would do is they would stock pile hit records,
they wouldn't release them, they would let the stock for the company go
down in value. When it got to where they think it was as low as it should
be, they would start buying back stocks from stock-holders...stocks that
weren't worth any money, they'd buy the stock back and then released all
these good records. The stock had go up and they'd sell stock again. And
then maybe would wait a year and a half and start pile hits again, the
cycle turned all over again.
(05: 14:
25 ) So was Stax a black company or white?
(05:
14: 29) Both! Because Jim Stewart was white, Al Bell was black. Al Bell
was a very popular disc-jockey in Memphis. I don't know Jim's background
but anyway he, I think he found the money to start it. And Isaac was just
hired as a... writer originally because he and David Porter and Jo Shammon
were writing Aretha Franklin's stuff and some other songs, Sam and Dave
songs and other things. And er..so anyway er..Ronnie Capone left Stax andDavid
Purple(?) was hired as chief engineer, if you don't....David was the guy
who mixed "Shaft" which was the first record which they eliminated bootleging
on. And the way they did it is Isaac hired five hundred private investigators
to watch the whole U.S.: all the pressing places, all the distributors,
all the retailers and they wouldn't let any bootleg records out. And it
was the first record to turn a real profit because of that, a big profit.
Yeah...Yeah....
(05: 15:
49 ) OK. Let's take a break...........We're rolling.
(05: 15:
55) So where were we?
You were
working for Stax...
DB
: (05: 15: 59 ) Well, I was freelancing at Stax because there was a race...a
racial problem: the black neighbourhood Stax was in did not want them to
hire anymore white employees. So I had to work freelance, I worked in Jackson
with the writers and I'd come up occasionally to the studio at Stax and
worked on and off there. And er...that's how I did it until I had the trouble
with my production company and the vice-squad in Jackson which I don't
think we got into yet, but we had the production company in Jackson and
it was a black and white company, half and half, and we were also
playing music and we got very popular with the college kids, both the black
and the white colleges. (05: 16: 43 ) And er..as a result the people in
power in Jackson did not like it, they were white, they sent in the head
of the vice-squad with two uniformed blue policemen and they told us we
had to leave town, and they told all the clubs in Jackson not to hire us.
So no more music in the clubs anymore. And few days later, the roof blew
off the house as I was...it was moving out unfortunately, and the day after
my car caught on fire and I left for L.A.
(05: 17:
19 ) What is the time, was it the period of Martin Luther King?
DB
: (05: 17: 24 ) Well, one year before that incident, there were some students
who were shot at Jackson State College, and er ....it was very unfortunate
and er...they were very concerned, the authorities were very concerned
about er...agitators coming in for civil rights issues and, so they were
paranoid and they got a rumour out that there were agitators on campus
and they'd put state police all around the campus. And there was a backfire
from a car, you know what a backfire is..when the muffler, you know...yeah..and
all these guys started shooting and they shot two high school students
who were walking across campus to their home, and killed them. They shot
a girls'dormitory and the girl who was the beauty page, well Miss Jackson
State at her jaw shot off and then....it was curious stuff. And Jackson
was an armed camp then. And everybody would lock(?) guns and bullets and
it was crazy. What were you asking?
(05: 18:
34 ) Yeah, I remember to hear about that in Europe, on French T.V.
(05: 18:
41 ) Yeah we kept a low profile..?..
(05: 18:
44 ) And so you went to L.A.?
(05:
18: 46 ) So I went to L.A., Larry Blackeley was there doing some consulting
work and he asked me to come out and also Herb Hunt(?) who was from Jackson,
he had V.M.E. Productions in Pasadena, so he wanted me to come make records
with him. And V.M.E. was producing Jackie de Shannon(?) at the time and
just got some contracts with A&M to do some stuff and integrator(?)
was the automatic processor for the west coast and also I integrated the
first J.B.L. speaker in stalls in studios with George Halsburger who was
still at J.B.L. at the time.
(05: 19:
24 ) You said it was the first J.B.L. standing in a studio at this time
when...
(05:
19: 29 ) Yeah, the first one was actually at Cristal, never heard of Cristal
Studios, they did the first James Taylor record there.
(05: 19:
37 ) And which year was that?
(05:
19: 38 ) That was like...70, 71. Like...I went to L.A. in 71, but er...that
was a terrible system, everybody hated it. But J.B.L. put so much
press on everything, you know, you know how you polish turds use a lot
of laker first.
(05: 20:
02 ) What do you think about J.B.L. now..?
(05:
20: 06) What do I think about J.B.L. now? Dear, well, you got talk about
Harman when you talk about J.B.L. They have a very fine staff of engineers
there, and they're very professional and er...they make some pretty good
products and they make some products I wouldn't use but that's like anybody
else You have to use your ears.
You have
to use your ears...
That's
right!
(05: 20:
33 ) And so tell me, you're in Los Angeles, you're recording with J.B.L.
and you're working as a sound engineer...
(05:
20: 40 ) No, I'm not working with J.B.L., I'm working for Integrate Corporation
with Larry Blackeley and Saul Wacker came out from Honeywell processors
we're representing and we started working on automation(?) concepts for
automated processors consols and one evening we sat down and worked out
the first automation fader, the 9.40D, Saul and Larry and I, and they weren't
made yet and we worked out the concept for the memories' little helper
which Allison(?) ended up getting because on many processors hired, Bob
(?) had to do some engineering and it was part of the deal. So this idea
went there(?). (05: 21: 25 )And we started to work with someguys from J.B.L.:
George McTalky and er..who's the other guy, he's a good friend and I can't
remember his name...he's back at J.B.L. now. Er..I'll come back to that.
Anyway George McTalky was the driving force on the, our first parimetric
equalizer which was shown at the 1972 A.T.S.(?) show and there was only
one other perimetric equalizer that had been introduced and that was a
? Shure(?) also...and that was George Massenburg's parimetric which was
under the...what do they call the company?...I.T.I. Is that it? I.T.I.
They had a big perimetric and we had a little parimetric, at that show.
(05: 22:
20 ) So you had the same idea at the same show?
(05:
22: 23 ) Right, and we offered that exclusively to Honeywell(?) processors
and they didn't take it. And then Larry Blackeley was offered a job with
D.B.X.'s marketing director so he closed Integra(?) and I started being
in the audio(?) now and we, we finished V.M.E. Studios, I designed and
built the studios and the consol in Pasadena and we continued to do recordings
for a...A&M and Playboy Records then. And er...also the V.M.E. got
me hooked up with the guys from "The Mad Dogs and Englishmen" band. (05:
23: 06 )Cos, well that's how I got to Leon Russell because what happened
is the first session I did for V.M.E. which was my second week in Los Angeles,
er..the players were Jimmy Keltner and Bobby Torez from "Mad Dog and Englishmen",
he was the percutionist and Jimmy was the drummer and er...so they say
we're doing a project won't you come help us, and so we went to Leon Russel's
house and we recorded this project with Sandro Morecase(?) who was a trumpet
player who is now in the Tonight Show band, and we did an album with him
doing vocals. And who else was on this session?... Dean Parks had just
come to town and was playing with us and er...Leon's ex-girl friend..er..I
have to dig back to remember the names...er...it's terrible when I can't
remember...But so we did that album there and I met Leon's tex(?) which
we called Freaky Fred, I don't remember his last name and er...so he got
me starting to work for Shelter(?) and when Leon moved back to Tulsa, Oklahoma,
they called me to design the church studio and so that's how I got involved
with Shelter. And er...I went to Tulsa, I had B.B. Audio running there
and er...we decided, we were into a condition where Leon had gotten some
old high school buddies to build these studios and they did a terrible
job and I basicaly was call in to fix the problem, and this church was
a hundred and ten years old church with beautiful stained glass windows
and Leon decided he didn't want stained glass windows and I got there just
as they were taking out the last few and I said we have to keep some, so
he let me keep a few. And everybody thinks that you can't put stained glass
in a studio but you can, it's very simple, you clean it and you put plate
glass on both sides of it and make it there tight with a desicant a sort
of moisture. And then you have a sound proof window with stained glass
in it. So it's not a problem you know, you get a real stained glass...
(05: 25:
38 ) And so you finished to build this studio for him?
DB
: (05: 25: 41 ) Yes, the church studio and I said I'll always like to try
out my studio and he said "well, go find a band and record them" and so
he said "take the limo, you don't have to drive, we'll send you out, you
can go look over Tulsa, see who you'd like to record. So he took me all
over town, and I was looking at bands and they were all terrible and finally
I say is there anywhere we haven't been? and he says yes "we haven't been
across the railroad tracks yet". And so we went to this black club across
the railroad tracks, they were showing me all the white acts in town.
(05:
26: 14 ) And I walk into this club and I hear this band for about ten seconds
I say "Those are the guys I want to record" and they say "Well, we'll wait
for a break and then talk to them" So we talked to them and it turned out
that they'd called their band "The Gap Band". And it was "The Gap Band"
because their father was the drummer, he was fifty-two years old and the
bass player was the, his youngest son, he was thirteen years old. So we
took them, they didn't have any original songs or anything so, the next
day I worked with Leon Russell's manager who wrote poems and he brought
me a sack of poems and I pulled out some poems that I thought were promising
and rearranged them and set them to music and wrote charts. And I didn't
even know if these guys could read.DB : (05: 27: 00 ) They come in the
next day and we recorded two songs in two hours. Finished the record like
that..no problem! And then we took the recording out to Leon,
at er...he
had another studio called the Lake Studio at Grand Lake, Oklahoma, actually
it was called Tijuana, Oklahoma, its owned(?) by Grand lake.
DB : We played
him the recordings and he said "these are the best recordings ever made
in Oklahoma. He fired his band the next day and he hired this band to be
his road band which was "The Gap" then and er..they stayed with Shelter
for er...oh with Leon for maybe three years and he spoiled them. He gave
them all the studio time they wanted, you know anything they wanted and
they called me back in to work with them when they were on A&M and
they were very difficult to work with.
(05: 27:
54 ) How?
(05:
27: 55 ) Everybody wanted to produce his own record.w
(05: 27:
59 ) So they didn't make it finally?
DB
: (05: 28: 01 ) Well, we (The Gap Band) got a fifty thousand dollars budget
to cut two songs for A&M and we had some wonderful helps, Stevie Wonder
was helping us and D.J. Rogers was helping us who's an old Shelter artist
and er...we cut these records but everybody wanted their own mix and they
use the fifty-thousanddollars long before we finished...for two songs.
I can cut three albums for fifty thousand dollars....So it was incredible
but er...those guys went on to...they switch to RCA after that and they
had about twenty big hits.
(05: 28:
38 ) That many! The Gap Band! Under the name of The Gap Band.
Yeah, yeah....
(05: 28:
44 ) Before it arrive today is there an important thing to..?...?
(05:
28: 49 ) Yeah, the FX..(05: 28: 53 ) So let's speak about the FX..whenever
you want..
(05: 28:
56 ) OK, are we rolling?
Yes,
yes...
(05: 29: 00
) Er..I met Kirk Conaple(?) when I was working on a studio for Steve Cropper
he bought Clover(?) Studios in Holywood, yeah, and er...he had gotten the
rights to administer the Stax publishing on the west coast and so they
were doing that upstairs at Clover and we put an API(?) consol downstairs.
And er...anyway I met Kirk Conaple there who was the inventor of the FX,
or and exciter and er..at the time he had a prototype that was all vacuum
tube and... well it was a mix of vacuum tube and op amps and it had a signal
to noise ratio about ten DB. It was history..Pchttt! So anyway I had an
engineer working with me at the B.B.Audio named Gary Lion and Gary and
I got together and started to clean this thing up and er...we worked at
B&B on it. And meanwhile Kirk was a promoter so he went out and he
talked The Moody Blues into using it and he talked Paul Mc Cartney and
his Wings band into using the thing and we were building FX cards and shipping
them back and forth every day by messengers to these tourers until...
(05: 30: 35 ) So anyway we came up with a dio based great point apple F(?)
that emulated with the tubes we were doing and we improved the noise about
seventy DB. Shortly there after, Gary Lion was working on a model and he
had a very...was, we'd just been introduced to VCA, to 15.37 VCA which
I hadn't had long at the B.B. Audio and Gary was working more for FX and
he did a model, computer model of the FX.. process. And he showed me this
curve and he had these circuit, it was just enormous..(?)..it was on a
piece of paper like this you know,...and I said "wait a minute, that curve
looks familiar" and I said "pull out the 15.37. gain curve" which is the
VCA and it was incredible because I took the 15.37 gain curve and I put
it right on top of the graf(?) of the FX curve and they were exact, they
did exactly...one on top of the other. I said "we don't need all this junk"
and we built an FX with a couple of our pamps(?) and a 15.37 ship.
(05: 31:
49 ) What do you call a 15.37? What is that?
(05:
31: 51 ) It's the VCA, that Harvey Rubens and I have a pattern on that
uses a 144 transistors interdigitated on a di(?) to keep them isothermal,
same temperature and the resistance base, the based resistance is like
4.ows(?) to keep the distorsion way way down and always way way down and
that's how we did the first VCA that actually sounded good.
(05: 32:
18 ) So the VCA has a certain..?..?
(05:
32: 21 ) Yes it's not a long run(?) VCA, it's an AGC circuit. Super Match
AGC which has a curve that is 1+E to the VC or a VT curve as opposed to
the one longer(?) VC which is a E to the VC or a VT curve. The one plus
puts some ascent ..??? in the curve so it's a long leanier curve
looks like this, ours looks like this. But it was the exact curve for the
FX...with .by.? just the right spot and the expand...segments(?) going
down and compressors going up.
INTERVIEW D.
BASKIND
2 OCTOBRE
1992 K7 5B
(05: 33:
00 ) So we arrive to
Yeah,
we'll wrap it up.
(05: 33:
05 ) And I would like you to, to talk about your latest product: The Groove
Tube.
(05:
33: 12 ) Yes, and the next... I did the equitech(?) mics for CAD and of
course with the FX I did some products, and er...then I did the Groove
Tube mic.
(05: 33:
24 ) What is the principe, what is the philosophy of the Groove Tube mic?
(05:
33: 28 ) Oh I would like to do the CAD mic at first because it ledto the
group tubs mic. In the CAD mic what is unique about it, the Equitek II
GT is that first I put in DC servos on the head amplifiers, what that does
is that it guarantees that the head amplifier always has maximum dynamic
range in all temperature conditions. Secondly, I put in a power system
so it would run on fan and power but add reserved power because fan power
can only supply 16 milli amps peak. So I put in two Niedd nine batteries
that are trickled charge for the fan power and when the electronics needs
it for like a kick drum or a void scream or whatever...I can supply two
hundred and fifty milli amps to the electronics. Those are
two unique things in a mic..but er..first, you know. And er..the G.T. mic,
of course it's a vacuum tub microphone and er...what you make about it
is that unlike the old microphones that use a common cathod amplifier I
use both halves of the tubs so I have a common cathod gain stage and a
cathod follower and peanuts converter so I can use low transratio transformer
because the old mics..?...transformers and it messes up transcient response.
But with the photo one(?) transformer I can have good transcient response.
And ..?..is actually flat, the electronics are flat from a 3 hertz to 200
kilo hertz in the mic, and the er...it will deliver plus A ..?... at the
back... without cliping so...
(05: 35:
16 ) What are your projects?
(05:
35: 18 ) My projects right now...I'm working on a er... high definition
sattelite distribution system.
Sorry?
High
definition sattelite television distribution system. And I'm working on
a system for directly taking television camera to film...with electronic
production, for feature film...production, reduce costs and I'm working
on this space maker which is a DSP, Digital Processing System for
generating stereo and surround(?) for old motion pictures and old recordings.
(05: 36:
00 ) What do you think of, you know there is this debate about digital
recording , analogue recording...What is your position about that?
(05:
36: 08 ) Well, my position is when digital recording standards were made,
they didn't consider anything about the sound. They considered the politics
and the pocket book and..they were forced to make the thing sound better
because the original stuff was terrible and of course, it's unfortunate
that sound is been an issue that has been lost in the audio industry, more
and more every year to me or in..?.. I guess. But you rarely see an ad
about it or the product that says "this sounds good", instead you see how
many knobs it's got, how many lights it's got. And I wish everybody would
first say "this sounds good", it's very important.
I think
it's a good conclusion.....
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