I have worked in and around studios in some capacity or another for my entire adult life. I’d like to tell you about my first.
My parents remodeled the basement of our house in suburban Chicago in 1984. The finished basement was mostly a rec room, with space for a ping pong table, pool table, and a small wet bar. They also put in a small office in one corner of the basement, somewhat fortuitously away from any outside windows or walls. On one end, the office had a long countertop with a single track lighting fixture overhead, space for a then-decent-sized 19″ RCA color TV, and our family’s Apple //e computer. I guess it started out as a space for the whole family to use, but it pretty quickly became the almost exclusive domain of my brother and me. We spent MANY hours on early dial-up services like The Source (User ID: AAD885) and CompuServe (User ID: 72436,255) down there.
After a while, though, my brother found other things to do than sit around playing Ultima all day, and at that point it became my space more than anything else. I wasn’t exactly a loner (and, hard to believe, yes, I actually had girlfriends in those days), but I was happy to go off by myself for as many hours as I could find in the day, for weeks or months on end, if it meant coming out on the other side with a production I was excited about showing off. So our basement office quickly turned into my own little hideout and first “studio”. Our house was the last one on a cul-de-sac, so it was already a quiet neighborhood. Having a carpeted room in the basement of the house, not near any outside walls, meant it was a pretty good place to record.
Our house was the last one on a cul-de-sac, so it was already pretty quiet. A carpeted room in the basement of the house, not near any outside walls, was a great place to record.
I got a pretty decent turntable for my birthday one year. Shortly after that, I got a small Radio Shack phono/line level mixer, and a pretty good sounding boom box with a cassette player. On Friday nights, I’d trundle all that stuff down from my bedroom, and my friend and I would record these little pretend “radio programs” broadcast “live from the studios at the MacPhail Building,” as we’d jokingly say.
My parents bought our family’s first VCR in late 1985, a Beta machine. As a family, we were kind of late to the VCR game. VHS was already seemingly winning the Beta vs. VHS format war that dominated the early years of the 80s. By 1985 it was already difficult to rent Beta format tapes at the local video store, with the format usually relegated to a sad, poorly-stocked corner in the back of the store, if at all. But we had unquestionably chosen the better picture quality of Sony’s format over the growing ubiquitousness of JVC’s (I don’t think I knew right away what a great editing machine that Sony would turn out to be, but read on). Within a matter of months we bought another VCR, an el-cheapo VHS machine, which we used almost solely for watching rented videos.
Problem solved.
The Beta machine we’d bought was the legendary Sony SuperBeta SL-HF900. It was Sony’s latest-and-greatest at the time, but in the era of the Internet, I have since discovered that the ‘900 was Sony’s all-time best selling machine. That strikes me as a little funny today, considering that my friends at the time already thought our family had picked a dinosaur when we bought it in 1985. Remarkably, refurbished ‘900s still sell for several hundred dollars on the used market today.
The ‘900 was unquestionably a “prosumer” machine. For its day, it boasted a remarkably advanced editing system, including a “jog wheel” that allowed you to advance frame-by-frame through the program to find the exact spot you were looking to drop an edit. The machine’s audio tracks had a signal-to-noise ratio of, I seem to recall, something like 93 db, which meant these machines were great as audio-only decks. They were great for mobile recording, because you could hit “record” at the beginning of a 3-hour concert and never have to stop to change tapes.
The Beta surreptitiously migrated from my parents’ bedroom down to the basement office before too long, at which point I really started getting into video production. Throughout my high school years, I did all sorts of video productions, including behind-the-scenes “documentaries” about plays I was in at school, travel videos, wedding videos, class projects, season retrospectives for the sports teams at my high school…you name it.
A lot of these shows were made in a very mad scientist, “that-machine-isn’t-supposed-to-be-able-to-do-that” sort of fashion.
I’d narrate them using a $12 battery operated Radio Shack electric condenser microphone (which sounded SO MUCH better than that cheap $5 dynamic mic I’d started out with…). I figured out how to use Fontrix, a crude graphic design program for the Apple //e, to do video titling. I later discovered that if I hung my blue nylon sleeping bag on the wall behind the rec room’s wet bar, it made a pretty good “anchor desk” for those times when I needed to appear on camera to introduce one of my shows.
I got my first MIDI keyboard, a Roland HS-10 (the “home synth” version of the Alpha Juno-1) for my birthday in 1986 and a Roland MT-32 sound module the following year. Together with my school’s choir director and a couple of the piano players in the group, we made backing tracks for the choir’s production of “Little Shop of Horrors” in 1988 (I still have nightmares about the lack of MIDI editing on the sequencer we were using on the Apple //e, so you’ll never hear me complain about the pros & cons of working in MIDI on a modern DAW).
As you can imagine, a lot of these projects were done in a very mad scientist, “that-machine-isn’t-supposed-to-be-able-to-do-that” sort of fashion. I also developed a pretty healthy interest in tweaking gear to make it do more than what the manufacturer intended. I think I express that interest today in the form of “do it yourself” (DIY) audio gear projects, one of which I’ll talk about in my next post.
Anyway, it’s during these years that I really fell in love with the process of production. Since then, I’ve always had some sort of place to make sound–whether it’s writing music, composing using MIDI on a desktop machine, or recording vocals in a closet–it’s been a big part of who I am. When Ann and I met in 1996 as founding members of the USC SoCal VoCals, I think we understood each other right away. We’re both musicians, sure, but we’ve always called ourselves “nerds in love.” So I’ve been lucky enough to be married to someone who gets me. Who else but Ann would think it was great idea to spend 6 months recording a CD of Catholic music in the vanity area of her apartment? (Is that “DIY Mad Scientist” enough for you?)
For me, Undisclosed Location Studios is a very natural extension of that basement office in my parents’ house outside Chicago. It’s still underground, still very quiet, and still equipped for all sorts of different types of productions. The track lighting is just a bit cooler at ULS.
As for the gear, it’s a LOT better…but I think that goes without saying after 30 years!
I love what I do and I’m glad that I get to do it every day.
-M2
