Tetrasonics (p2)
Left-Brain
The Apprenticeship
It's too bad that I don't have any pictures of the studio on 25th Avenue where I started work in the fall of 1977.
It had some brand (maybe Ampex?) of a 1/2" 4-track tape machine, a couple of older 1/4", 2-track Scully tape decks and some kind of really finicky console.
That along with a few pieces of scratch-n-dent outboard gear wired through the console's patch-bay, rounded out the setup.
Tom Schmidt (one half of the musical duo Jericoh Harp) was a working, local musician that was sort of filling in as the interim engineer when I got on scene. So he took a swing at training me up on the disparate montage of aging audio paraphernalia.
I remember a lot of that early training centered around the problematic equipment. Talking about things like which channel not to use since it had too much static and how that piece of outboard gear "never worked right."
My head was spinning.
Ongoing Education
But, Tom certainly got me headed in the right direction - always approaching everything form a "musician's" point of view. (I didn't realize it at the time, but that was a more important lesson than anything I learned about the equipment!)
But the studio had a treasure trove of several year's worth of db: The Sound Engineering Magazine.
This was a Recording Industry publication that had all kinds of technical, how-to articles on everything from How to Use a Compressor to EQing Vocals to Why and How to Use an Expander. (kind of like what we do with YouTube now but way before the internet)
I absolutely devoured this stuff and read everything I could possibly get my hands on. (Usually multiple times!)
Trust
From the very beginning on day 1, Mark entrusted me with a key to the place (which truly surprised me).
And because of that, I was able to spend countless hours during late nights at the studio trying and testing and playing with ideas and just plain learning.
It was glorious!
Right-Brain
The Artist Flourishes
During this period, I was growing and developing as an artist and a musician. To be able to sit in the studio while Tom and his partner Jim, talked music and worked with other musicians was glorious.
From where I sat, this was the big time!
While I was busy learning the technical side of engineering, I was also developing a vocabulary for communicating artistic creation and intent.
Learning how to interface with the full-on right-brainers of the world.
In the early days, the studio did a lot of jingle productions and those tracks were frequently recorded using studio musicians from Minneapolis. And a lot of those early sessions were written and produced by a guy by the name of Lee Blaske. Lee was (still is) a brilliant writer and producer and made the whole process seem so effortless.
Over the next couple of years, both Jim and Tom contributed enormously to my growth as an artist, an engineer, a musician, and as a person.
It's impossible for me to overstate how influential those years were for me!
The Musician Within
I'd been playing trumpet (and subsequently bass guitar) with Laverne & The Starlites during my second year in college. And continued that through most of the next year or so.
Laverne kept a pretty full schedule so the band was booked most every weekend.
So besides, learning to interface with musicians in the studio, I was an actual working musician, working with other working musicians. (How does this get any better than this?!)
Eventually, my friend John and I ended up taking guitar lessons from Jim Thomas as a barter payment for the nighttime engineering I'd done on their Studio Demo project. (Welcome to Travis Picking 101!)