• Studio Collection
• Studio "in Cinerama"
• Wendy Photos
• Fuzzy "Critters"
• Homage to my dad
• Miscellany

Studio Collection

Moog Studio just prior to starting "S-OB"

This photo, a rare 2 1/4" B&W shot, was taken during early 1968, before the Switched-On Bach project had begun in earnest (the Invention in F had just been done). At the left is the original, flaky used Ampex 350 stereo tape machine that was soon replaced by a much better Ampex 440 B. The Ampex 8-track had just been assembled from an assortment of used parts and home-built additions. A homemade VCO can be seen, with the tiny meter/control box just below the left speaker, its variable oscillator up above the Ampex electronics, and big kit power amp on the floor.
 
The custom Moog Synthesizer had just acquired its second tier, which eventually would grow into four stacked tiers. My dad helped me assemble the wooden shutter-screen that we stained to make a handsome back wall for everything, one that could be easily moved for the (many) maintenance tasks. A small Lafayette tube amp kit for monitoring sits on the base of the Ampex electronics. A mike stand juts into the frame on the left, and was used in several projects and demos. My first homemade pullout mixing board sits below the two custom touch-sensitive keyboards, with a "chord generator" (polyphony in 1967--imagine that!) resting just behind it, its long aluminum cover looking rather shiny. Patch cords are all over the place, as usual.
 
P.S. This is the actual print which we sent to High Fidelity magazine, to accompany the glowing review by Gene Lees that launched "S-OB" some 8 months later. (Thanks, Gene!)

A closer view in the Brownstone studio in 1977. We are here standing near the right side of the console, foreground, looking towards the Moog Synthesizer. An Ampex 1" 8-track tape recorder is located to the left of the synthesizer, and a 3-M 2" 16-track is located to the right. I generally worked in the left black chair while performing the synth parts onto tape, and moved to the right chair to mix or test out progress on a particular piece of music. During the daytime a large picture window to the upper left (you can see it best in the first view above) gave views of a tiny backyard garden. (Note that the glass was double layered, to reduce sound leakage, and the inner pane was tilted out at the top, to send any reflections way up over our heads. You try to think of these things, but always seem to miss a few... ;^)

Sunnuvagun, for many years I've been hoping to see and visit with Bob Schwarz again, somehow. But I didn't know how to find him, had no forwarding address or phone number, didn't even know where he currently called home. Well, thanx to this website, Bobby found ME in late 2006, and sent a cheerful note to say as much, and how he had been pleasantly surprised to discover the above photo and description of him here on my website. We nearly got together in early 2007, but wires got crossed and it fell through. One year later we tried again. Bob and Aggie, his "sig-O" and engineering partner in a versatile traveling sound reinforcement, design and audio consultant firm, were going to be in NYC for a week to handle all the sound for a major annual convention. And at the end of one not quite so hectic day, they stopped by here for a visit. The photo to the left shows them sitting in front of the venerable mixing console that Bob helped me design and build in the early 70s (I've kept updating it, of course, to keep up with the newest demands, but it's still mostly the same one he put together.)
 
What a treat that evening was for the three of us! It was great fun to showoff my homemade Wurly II pipe organ emulation for them with a mini-concert, and show how the rest of the studio had grown and changed. For Bob and me it was one of those stories of the clock and calendar seeming to stand still, as if not much time had passed since we'd last seen each other (before I moved into the loft, in fact). His dry, offbeat sense of humor is still intact -- he had us in stitches! The audio stories he's accumulated over the decades is astonishing, and great fun to hear about. Also evident is Bob's deep, infectious laughter and narrative skills as a professional radio announcer, in a former life... Same friend in my good memories, and although we've both aged as expected, we recognized each other at once. Aggie and I also hit it off preposterously well. Gee, I like her! Nice when friends find that the other has connected with someone they feel immediately at ease with, same bright, warm kind of person, same wit and easy going, yet fully aware, views on life.

Here you see two old friends reunited at last. I wish a dopey snapshot like this could convey the warmth and good cheer of that chilly, wet winter's evening. (Trust me, we didn't need much help from the furnace.) We've been trading regular e-mails and phone chats for two years now, and it's lovely to be connected again. Bob still is the proverbial "good samaritan", and offered to help me out with a few technical problems I've been having in the studio. While I'm comfortable around recording studios (you HAVE to be in order to survive as an "electro-acoustic-mechanician" [= synthesist and recording artist/engineer], after all). But Bob's knowledge and breadth of a lifetime in audio is magnitudes better than mine, and he has connections in the audio world I only know vicariously about.
 
Well, we certainly now plan to remain in close touch for the rest of our years. And I've added Aggie to my short list of people I'd most prefer to spend an evening or week or three with. This short description may sound rather gushy (sorry), but it's sincere -- I can barely contain my sense of delight that one of those funny ways friends lose contact with one another has been put into good repair for another decade or two. Still, enough time now has gone by that we are both on the other side of the generation working in these fields. We USED to be among the youngest kids on the block; now we're among the "fossils" pulling up the rear end of the brigade with stories and experiences that now are seen as "legendary" and "historical" by the new newest kids on the block. So be it... time to pass the torch.

In this view we are behind the console, in front of a two-track Ampex, and are looking to the right of the previous view. The console's layout is visible, as are two of the hanging speakers. The 16-track is to the left of the console, which was convenient while mixing. In the background you can see the half-flight of curved stairs which lead to the upper room, used for live instruments and vocalists.
 
Actually, that upper studio room sat at the original floor height of the building. The lower one was given an 11' ceiling height by having the floor here dropped by about 3-1/2'. That turned the rear part of the building's basement into a crawl space, for storage, while the front portion kept its normal basement height. Both rooms still exist, somewhat modified, as a very comfortable "floor-through" apartment. The studio itself has been relocated to my downtown loft since January of 1981.
 
The inside of the custom-built console featured in this photo is really GOR-geous! Reason being: the wiring was crafted by Donald Longmore (thank you so much, Don!), one of the good equipment engineers at Gotham Recording, Inc., where we met (there's some more background about Gotham on the new Eltro page HERE). He collaborated on my studio with Bob Schwarz (who we met above). Don was trained by Bell System professionals, assembling military-grade electronics, complex communications patching systems, and Western Electric style audio circuits. It showed: his wiring was meticulous, easy to trace, and dependably sturdy. Look, this now antique console has operated trouble-free for nearly 40 years! Try that with any of today's mass merchandised audio gear and studio wiring, I dare you. I learned a great deal by watching Don at work, (he was patient enough to answer all my questions) and have since tried to imitate his skill, technique and care as I've gradually made modifications and upgrades to the console over the years. 'Nuff said.

The upper room of the browstone studio contained a large Steinway grand piano to the left, and a set of drums over on the right. As with the main downstairs room all walls were acoustically treated, then covered with a porous fabric. This room even had a fireplace, with a decorative antique oil painting above. The windows to the street at this time had been blocked off with soundproofing to reduce street sounds. When I moved all of the sound panels got mutilated in attempting to wrest them off the plaster -- they'd been cemented(!) to the structural walls and so we were unable to remove them without utterly destroying them. This is why all sound panels in the current studio are simply hung in place, and can be moved with ease (for the next time I move...!)

Here you can see a much wider angle view of the same room (two photo-scans stitched together -- you may have to scroll it on your monitor) in its earliest configuration, for comparison with the shot just above. The walls were then still natural brick, and the windows were yet to be covered. That's Phunkalaro, my first Siamese cat friend (he sure made an impression...!), who's amblin' towards us to the right center.
 
Although my current studio is a very comfortable workspace, as you can see below (also as we get more current images of it up here), this was a special place, thanks particularly to Rachel's sense of design and theater. Many visitors to New York City insisted that we understand how seeing the brownstone and its studio had been "one of the real highlights" of their visit here. Of course today private-use "home" studios have become much more common, and much more democratized, all good news for music-making and music literacy. Viva MIDI! Yet the nostalgia of fading memories occasionally conjures up images of simpler music-making times back then...

This will give you a better view of the "Tempi Mark II" console, as it looked in the mid-'70's (I'm not kidding, that name is engraved in Old English in the upper right corner of the main plate, since this was a custom design and construction project, not a whit of catalog or standard anything about it!). Here's a pretty decent slide I recently rediscovered that shows the console as it was then better than any other photo I've been able to locate thus far. I've balanced some uneven lighting within Photoshop, from this new scan with the new Minolta Dimage Dual (an excellent new addition I purchased for the Beauty in the Beast and Digital Moonscapes remasterings).
 
The original slide is very sharp and detailed, and I like the way it shows the Yamaha Electone E-5 organ just behind the console. That was the only place it would fit. Caused no end of problems with all those oscillators being located so close to the console's busses and first stage preamplification (had to slide it as far away as there was room). We've since made many changes and improvements to the old "Mark II", which I still use somewhat from nostalgia. So the sensitivity to external signal contamination has been greatly reduced, the signal to noise is WAY better (needed that with digital), and the master sliders were replaced with marvelous ganged conductive plastic units. These exactly matched the other Penny & Gilles faders that had just been replaced in the individual inputs, shortly before this photo was taken.
 
Oh, yes, those are the remote controls for the various tape machines that you see on the far left, and just above, on the meter housing for the console, is a pair of Phase Linear Autocorrelators. These were a pretty decent single ended noise reduction devices that we had to use during the late 70's due to power buzzes that came from the light dimmers in the brownstone next door (not amusing). I'd nearly forgotten about that nightmare, since (as I just mentioned) the console is now immune to such things, and the new studio, in being a genuine Faraday Cage (conductive walls, ceiling and floor, tied to common ground) is truly free from essentially all external signal contaminants.

Here are three views of the newest studio as it appeared in 1984, all derived from the same medium format 6 x 4.5 camera negative, taken with a Mamiya Full-frame Fisheye lens. (Note: You'll need a generous sized monitor to see the entire image at one time of these rather large jpegs. Scroll if you need to.) With a medium format high res scanner we obtained to produce the new artwork for our Digital Moonscapes remastering, many negatives that have been sitting here for some years can now be developed on the computer with little compromise. That's the case with this photo, which Vernon Smith captured as part of the publicity for DM when it was originally released.
 
Although most of that photo session was portraiture, I asked him to expose one roll with the fisheye lens, just for curiosity's sake. In this shot I was sitting informally in the middle of the room, back when there was room to spare (we'll add a current image of the near-clutter here shortly). None of these negatives got further than a contact sheet -- until now. Thanks to a perfectly amazing set of freeware (yes!) image tools developed for Panoramic manipulation by Helmut Dersch (der@fh-furtwangen.de), any decently fast computer can be used to explore the fascinating interplay of perspective and geometry as seen by the eye and captured on film and CCD. Kewl -- thank you, Helmut!
 
It's been an engrossing experience to use his Photoshop plug-in versions of PanoTools on my new Power Mac, and test out concepts I've tinkered with for many years. To get started, I made a high res scan of this original negative. The full frame fisheye format fits a 180 degree wide angle such that the film's diagonals subtend a full 180, leaving a horizontal angle capture of about 130 degrees. That was more than enough to see most of the studio's south wall and equipment all around, from the console at extreme left (see the old Moog synth way behind it), over and around the room to the 16 track 3-M tape recorder at the extreme right. There is only about six feet between the console and 3-M, where Vernon located the camera and tripod. You can see some of the wires leading to the umbrella strobe lights, two of which are included in these very wide views (the completely white shapes up high, left and right).
 

Let's look at the original fisheye image, just above (click on it for a bigger view, as usual). This is what the camera recorded, with no geometric manipulation. You'll see that the side portions look somewhat squeezed compared with what's straight ahead. Also, and more unsatisfactory, the outer portions of image are very curved in what's usually called "barrel spherical distortion." In reality, the curving is not so much distortion as the accurate depiction of each element in a spherical mathematical projection not unlike map projections. In fact, it very closely resembles an Orthographic Polar Projection (trimmed by the frame on four sides). If the film had not been flat, but hemispherical, there would be no such compromise, just as an Earth Globe has none. (Too bad it's so difficult to manufacture, load, advance, process, and enlarge "half sphere frames" of film...! ;^)
 
With Dersch's Remap functions I next converted the circular fisheye image into a modified rectangular projection, where it was trimmed and tweaked. Then this was remapped from a cylindrical PhotoSphere projection into a final rectangular version, and what you see above, a near duplication of an honestly unforgettable wonder of the early 1950's - 60's motion pictures, Deja Views of: CINERAMA! I've placed it within a dark theater-like frame, which gives a pretty fair impression of what these amazing films looked like in a good theater. I didn't try to duplicate the major flaw of Cinerama: there are no vertical seams between three projected image sections or panels! Read all about Cinerama at Martin Hart's wonderfully encyclopedic American Widescreen Museum website (gratuitously P.I. here and there perhaps, but also witty, chatty and well crafted).
 

And finally, here's another ultra wide version from that same fisheye negative (it's jumbo sized -- make that: "giant economy sized" -- click it and see). This is a novel ultra wide remapping, done in three stages, which shows the room very much as you'd see it if you were here, your naked eye's field of view. Neat, yes? The distortions have been juggled so that there is a minimum of the usual stretching out at the sides that most ultra wide angle lenses produce, while vertical lines are rendered straight, without a fisheye's curvature. The final projection is cylindrical, like that from a swing-lens camera, such as a Widelux, Horizon, or Noblex.
 
Long horizontal lines naturally appear to curve slightly towards then away from the camera, going from side to side, just as we see them in nature. I just picked up one of the Russian made Horizon cameras on eBay at an amazingly low price, and am experimenting with it now. Using Dersch's Panoramic Tools one can convert images from such a camera, add in views taken with a normal camera, a standard or wide lens, a fisheye lens, whatever works best for each occasion, then meld them together seamlessly. Stay tuned, there's much more to come on this topic, including QuickTime VR...!

Some Wendy Photos

This Portrait is a good candidate for the best photo of me. Photographer Vernon L. Smith is also a first-rate jazz trumpeter, and we got along famously from the first time we met, discussing music, performances and recordings especially -- such fun, and a fine way to relax a nervous subject, too. He was my preferred photographer from the late '70's until he retired in the mid-90s. (Most of the good photos of me on this page and elsewhere are are thanks to Vernon's handiwork.)
 
This one was taken sometime in the Fall of 1980, for promotional and magazine use (Keyboard used it several times). Shortly afterwards we packed up the studio in the brownstone for the move here to the Village. The Moog was still the highlight of the older room, and so Vernon posed me on a small bench in front of it. He usually can get me to laugh, and this shot was taken at the very end of one, when the crinkle/smile lines had not yet vanished completely. Vernon, I miss your artistry and warmth!

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