Nashville (pt1)
Left-Brain
A Career On A Whim
I've often thought that most of us spend less time picking out a career than we do deciding where to go out and eat.
In mid 1981, after moving to Nashville, TN to pursue a career as a Recording Engineer, I found myself in need of short-term employment shortly after my "couple" of recording engineer leads just fizzled out.
So, after a quick once-over through the local classifieds, I had a few technical sounding jobs in my sights and took to the streets to drop off a pile of resumes.
Some of the subsequent interviews went well and others, not so much. But at the end of a few days, I had 2 contenders in my sights.
Both of them were "technician" jobs which I thought would be a good fit for my left-brain and my almost completed, 2-year Associates Degree in Electronics Engineering Technology.
But, both of those opportunities required me to pay a staffing agency fee (yeah, that was a thing in the eighties).
In the end, my decision was made, not on the actual job, but on the fact that one of those companies would reimburse the staffing fee to me - one half in six months and the other half after a year.
So, with dwindling funds on hand, and a financially challenging time ahead, the one with the reimbursed fee seemed like the prudent choice. After all, this was just supposed to be a short-term, make-ends-meet job until I broke into recording full time.
The Trap
In August of 1981 I started my training at EBM in Nashville, TN to become a full fledged, left-brain, Copier Service Technician.
As a side note, EBM was basically the company that I would eventually retire from some 42 years later. (I say "basically" because it ended up changing hands several times before I left in October of 2023.)
So, what the heck happened to the idea of becoming a Recording Engineer? That idea I'd hatched back in college the day I talked with my college trumpet professor and he mused, "Umm...what kind of job can you be both creative and technical at the same time? Maybe audio recording?"
More to come on that topic.
Right-Brain
The Bedroom Studio
Since the recording engineer jobs didn't pan out, I--as they say today--pivoted and just set up some homemade recording equipment in the bedroom or our apartment.
Not in a "spare" bedroom mind you, but in "our" bedroom. (Brenda was tickled).
I had the 2 track Sony reel to reel tape deck (the one I bought in high school) that I'd disconnected the erase head on so I could approximate sound-on-sound recording.
Along with a couple of cassette decks, a Harmon Kardon amplifier and a homemade mixer,
I was
Early Multi-Tracking
My goal in this early excuse for a studio, was to get a lot of tracks -- not a lot of quality!
After laying down a couple tracks on each of the reel to reel's 2-tracks (that's 4 total), I would mix those 2 tracks, down to cassette using the homemade mixer, while at the same time, recording a new, live track along with it (that's 5 tracks now bounced down to a single mono.).
Then I'd take that mono cassette mix and dump it back to one track of the Sony and repeat the whole process. I could get up to 8 or 9 tracks that way and the resulting sound quality was so amazingly awful it was barley recognizable.
But it was soooo much fun. I shit you not!
Even though, the whole thing was this montage of homemade and very low-fi consumer gear, I'd have to say that I probably had more fun making music with that setup than with any of the fancy equipment that followed!
Early Bedroom Studio (1982)
The Trumpet Thing
Before computers or even drum machines, I was forced to come up with interesting ways to create drum sounds. Here I used a small cardboard box like a bongo.Just What I Needed
And here I used a cookie sheet and a wooden spoon along with a Vector Graphics computer read-write random test!Disco Rhythmer Funk
And then came the Univox MR-12 Micro Rhythmer!"
This was one of many early collaborations with Rusty Nix.