Month: April 2013

Categories
Early Electronic Music Publications Technical

Suicide Manual

TAB_666_ExperimentingIn NYC in the mid-seventies, an electronic-based band arose amongst all the guitar punks, a band that was known as much for their confrontational post-beatnik vocals as for the strange and intense sounds that emanated from their famously homemade electronic sound equipment.  A band who has become, in the decades since, one of the few acts that is truly ‘required reading’ in the lexicon of avant-garde rock n pop.  Or, as James Murphy so brilliantly puts it in his apocryphal tale of musical uber-taste, “I was there, in 1974, the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City… I was working on the organ sounds…with much patience” (skip to 2:50… or, actually, don’t… this song kinda rules).

So yeah I am talking about Suicide.  If you don’t know ’em, check ’em out…  it is amazing+terrifying that this record came out in 1977…  truly truly AOTT.  And plainly awesome too.  I really love this band, and they inspired me greatly in the early 2000s, when I was performing with a punk band in Brooklyn using an analog drum-machine rig based around some old Roland beatboxes, voltage controlled filters, and a CV-generating homemade theremin to control the whole thing.

LISTEN: The_Flesh_Gallows

This felt fairly fresh to me in the year 2001; so that fact that Suicide was doing this same thing 25 years early was mindblowing.  I had to wonder; how the hell did these guys make all the stuff?  Even in the year 2000, DIY’ing synth equipment was fairly unusual for rock musicians; but in 1975?  That was like black magic!  Well I think I found the grimoire.

NEways… kinda a long setup to what will be…  the first OUT OF PRINT BOOK REPORT we’ve had in a while.  And oh boy will there be more coming.  I was recently at a really fascinating estate-sale somewhere in Marin County, California, where I met an elderly engineer who sold me a library of ancient audio-tech books and wished me luck on my travels… the pick of the litter was the above-depicted “Experimenting With Electronic Music,” by Robert Brown and Mark Olsen.  Published in 1974, it is TAB books catalog number 666.  No joke.  This just keeps getting better.

ARP_2500The book starts with some fairly uninteresting discussion of various commercially-available synthesizers circa ’74, but soon gets into a wealth of both schematics and ideas regarding DIY’d audio electronic circuits.  Here’s the TOC:

TAB_666_ContentsThere’s a ton of great stuff in here, and while I honestly have no idea whether or not the particular transistors spec’d in these circuits are still available, I would imagine that there are subs available…  even if you never build anything from the book, I think anyone with an interest in early electronic music will find it fascinating.  Here’s a few projects that I plan to do at some point:

PhotoElectric_Modulator Tremolo_Schem BandSelect_Audio_filter“Experimenting with Electronic music” is available from a few sellers on Abe Books.  It ain’t cheap, but I’ve been digging for these sorta books for 20 years now and this is the first copy I ever came across.

Categories
Magnecord

Magnecord Tape Machines of the Early 1960s

Magnecord_Pt6_oldestThere is a lot of Magnecord material on PS dot com…  I didn’t plan it, it just kinda happened.  Which is the story of my life in general.  For better and for worse.  I was at the flea mkt a coupla years ago and I found a pair of Magnecord PT6s, complete and in nice road cases, for $25 each.   I fixed ’em up, made some recordings with them, and then stuck em in the studio (where they have actually been used on sessions, BION).  The circa 1963 advert you see above is no joke.  My PT6s are close to 65 years old and they still work fine.  How many other pieces of pro audio hardware can you say that about?

Soon I heard from the son of the guy who designed a lot of the circuitry (and the heads) of the PT6.  Back in the 1940s.  The Boyers family sent me just a ton of material that had never been made widely available (you can start here), and I uploaded it all…  the end result of all this being that if you search the WWW for ‘Magnecord,’ yr gonna end up here.  BUT.   But but but.  So far I’ve only touched on Magnecord in 195os.  Today I will introduce some materials relating to the Magnecord of the 1960s.  I’ve never personally seen, or used, any of these decks.  But maybe you have.  Contributions welcome in the comments section…

Magnecord_1021Above: The Magnecord 1021 Mono recorder circa 1964.   Anyone?  What was the equivalent level of machine in the Ampex line?

magnecord_1021_2Above: another advert for the 1021.

Magnecord_1000_series_1965Above: by 1965, the Magnecord 1000 series included the 1021, its stereo cousin the 1022, the stereo 1028 (a higher-end model that used tubes?  strange…) and the 1048, which seems to be similar to the 1028 in all respects other than tape handling speed.

Categories
Pro Audio Archive

Early Solid-State Gates Audio Mixers

Gates_remote_ampsAbove: GATES Attache 70, Dynamote 70, Courier 70, and Unimote 70 solid-state remote amplifiers circa 1965.  I somehow ended up with a box of those side-reading VU meters; how the hell do you cut panel holes for those things?  Useless.

Gates_SolidStatesmenGates SolidStatemen studio broadcast boards circa 1964.  The Executive, Diplomat, President, and Ambassador.  Has anyone had any luck parting these out and re-purposing the mic preamps?  Anything worth exploring there?  There’s one of these things available locally for a song and I feel bad about just hacking it up; is it even worth the time?  Seems like there are an awful lot of these things out there and nobody wants ’em.  WHICH IS precisely the sentiment that people had towards all that ‘vintage tube stuff’ when i was a kid… hence my hesitation…

Gates_ad_1965Harris-Intertype Gates.  Keeping America On-Air.  (I just made that up).  OK folks, besides the Sta-Level…  what else is still worth using in the world o’Gates?     Drop us a line….

Categories
Uncategorized

Not Urei

Bauer_Peak_Limiter Teletronix_LA2_1963Above: circa 1963 announcements for the Bauer model 920 “Peak Master” (appears to be a UREI model 175) and the Teletronix LA-2, which was at some point re-branded by UREI.  I feel like I have seen these Bauer pieces on eBay from time to time, but the internet is silent regarding them.  Anyone?  Whats the story with this piece?

Categories
Custom Fabrication Technical

EMI Redd 47 Mic Preamp build

EMI redd 47So I was flipping through Recording The Beatles recently and I was reminded that I had yet to make one of those famous EMI console preamps.  As luck would have it, we were hit with a pretty major blizzard and I had a few days with nothing much to do.  The preamp turned out great, I love the fast (fast for a tube/transformer circuit, that it…), assertive sound of it, and I will definitely be making more of these things.  I’ve been using it primarily for tambourine (with a vintage Senn 409), acoustic slide guitar (with an Altec 660B), mandolin (with my Audio-Technica 813) and acoustic rhythm guitar and shakers (EV RE15).

Here are some of the resources that I used to build the device.  I apologize to whoever originally posted these documents for my lack of attribution; I DL’d them so so long ago that I can’t recall where they came from.

DOWNLOAD:  EMI-REDD47

Another Download:  REDD47AmpSchem

And these two images:REDD47_original REDD47

There is a real lack of consistency among these documents, and no I am not going to offer a ‘corrected’ schematic; that being said, if you actually have the where-with-all to fabricate one of these things from scratch I think you will do just fine with the same materials that I started with.  And if you don’t want to do it from scratch: no problem!  Just visit these dudes.  (n.b.: I have never used a drip electronics product personally, so I can’t vouch for them; that being said, they are extremely popular and seem to know what they are doing).

A few build notes

 I used my usual Jensen input transformer (click to DL info) and Edcor output transformer.  The thing sounds great overall, so I recommend these, at least for a first-build of this circuit.  Why spend more?

Very important: this circuit uses a lot of negative feedback. There are also a lot of capacitors in the feedback path.  Each capacitor contributes some hi-pass filtering, which should be below audio range, BUT…  if the capacitor values don’t all ‘play -nice,’ you could end up with so much phase-shift in the sub-audio region that there is 180-degree phase shift in the sub-audio region and you will have a device that ‘motorboats,’  I.E., your ‘negative feedback loop’ is a POSITIVE feedback loop aka a fkkn oscillator.  I had this problem initially.  The device worked fine, seemed to sound good, but at the lowest gain setting (aka the setting with the MOST negative feeback, get it????) I was seeing some 10hz signal pretty prominently in the audio files.  I guessed that this was due to the fact that I used a 47uf cap by the cathode of the input tube,  rather that 100uf that is specified.  I made the correction and viola problem solved.  HERE’S THE SHORT VERSION:  with this much feedback, component values are critical.  BTW, who knew that Apogee A/D convertors work so well at 10hz???

The Redd 46 has a three position gain-switch, and also a ‘gain trim’ control that does very very little.  Think of it as a ‘channel matching control’ rather than a level control.

Because of the lack of gain control, and the fairly high minimum gain setting, the Redd 46 really needs pads to be used in the studio.  Since I did not leave enough panel room to add i/o pads, I have been using it with some external 10 and 20 db ‘XLR barrel’ pads.  Depending on the amount of drive and crunch that I want in the signal, I have been adding the pad either before or after the preamp (or both!) before the signal hits the convertor.  Therefore, the next time I build one of these, I am going to include two two 3-way (0-10-20) switched pads in the device, one before the input trans and the other after the output trans.  I highly reco that you do the same.   I generally use a pad design similar to this one suggested by JLM audio; never had a problem with it.

BalPad_switched copy

EMI redd 47 with power supplyAbove: another shot of my REDD 47; the box on the right is the power supply; basic voltage-doubler (ala the Altec 1566) with tons of filtering and a choke for the B+ and DC filament supply.  Connection is by a 4-pin amphenol.

I have gotten a lot of questions regarding the enclosure used for the audio chassis:  it’s a BUDD enclosure of some type, I can’t recall the exact product name; it was dead-stock from a local distro, last one they had, and I am guessing that it was manufactured in the 70s.  No idea where to get more of them.  If you know, please drop us a line…

Categories
Microphones

RCA microphones circa 1963 – 1965

RCA_mics_1963Above: RCA 77, BK1, BK5, and a slew of others, all referred to by their ‘alternate’ MA-designations: the MA-2311, 2313, 2314, 2315, 2316, 2317, 2318, and 2319.   Can someone tell us why RCA used standard model names, MA designations, and MI designations?  Was it so they could charge certain customers more money for the same products?

RCA_Mics_1964Oh and let’s not forget the SK–designations.  Anyway, here’s the SAME products in the SAME publication one year later.  Confusing.

RCA_BK5B_1965So true.  What more DO you need in a mic?  The RCA BK-5 is one of my all-time favs.  No other ribbon mic sounds remotely like it.  If you dig ribbon mics, save up for one of these.  You will not be disappointed.  Especially if you need to tame a sibilant vocal while retaining an overall ‘bright’ and forward sound.   Also killer on piano, guitar amps, and probably everything else, actually…

Categories
Recording Studio History

Audio Production Primer c. 1965

EchoSendFrom B.E. mag sometime in ’65 comes this article by one John Harmer.  Nothing all that notable in here except to marvel as just how incredibly primitive the techniques discussed are.  For instance, above…  an explanation (and this is in a fairly technical broadcast-engineering magazine, btw, not a consumer-facing publication) of… an echo send!  Hey everything had to start sometime, right?  Also, there is much music from 1965 that still sounds fkkn incredible today, so there’s no reason to accept a ‘linear-progressive’ narrative of technology, is there…

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE ARTICLE: AudioMastering_1965

Categories
Uncategorized

Read my review of Sony Creative Software’s “WHAT IT IS” at ProductionHUB dot com

SCS_WhatItIsHow are y’all doing on this fine day…  Wanted to LYK that I recently wrote another software review for our friends at ProductionHUB dot com…  you can read the full piece by clicking this link.   The review is for a new(ish) sample/loop collection called ‘What It Is,’ and it’s a library that I have found useful+ enjoyed working with lately.  As I have often remarked on this website…  my interest in all the ye olde audio stuff is not academic or collector-ish in nature… I actually use this stuff all the time in my work, be it studio sessions with bands or television/film music.  Loop libraries often a part of the latter, and it’s a product category that I have been exploring for many many years now.  You might imagine, therefore, that my interest in a 70s’-themed loop library would be especially strong.  And you would be correct.  If any of you, my dear readers, also use these types of products, drop us a line with any recos that you have to share.

For my previous ProductionHUB review, click here. 

Categories
Microphones

Some interesting mid-60s broadcast mics

Standford_Omega_Mic

Today: just a round-up of some broadcast mics that caught my eye for some or another reason:  above, the ‘Stanford-Omega’ condenser mic.  This is an odd one.  Anyone?

EV_666_1965EV (electrovoice) 666.  I think I have mentioned this one about a million times already:  it’s the predecessor to the RE-20, a mic that I have used+ dig more than almost any other. EV 666’s appear in just a ton of great-sounding old TV music-broadcasts… Miles Davis on PBS comes to mind…  I must have bid on these things on eBay about 20 times. No luck yet.  Soon enough.  Oh but BTW I finally did get an RE15 (and not cheap either…) and it is really, really underwhelming.  Still my faith persists…

Sony_TeleMic_1965Sony TELEMIKE circa 1964, with an (up-to) seven-foot probe!  And it comes with a built-in headphone amp.  Wild…

AKG_1965AKG D-12 and C-60 circa 1963, a few years before the D-12 became the industry-standard in kick-drum mic’ing.  AKG recently sent me one of their new D-12 ‘VR’ models to review, and it’s pretty great, although not a re-issue in any strict sense…  full review to come soon.

EV_655_1965And finally the EV 655, another favorite of mine…  just great sounding omni mics, pretty incredible fidelity for units that were introduced in 1951.  Lots more on this site about them.

Categories
Uncategorized

From the ‘Yesterday’s Problems’ department: sonic ‘Print-Through’ on analog audiotape

Kodak_DiaCourtesy of Kodak, a discussion of the problem of print-thru on audio-masters.  I used to notice this on LPs quite a bit as a kid, Led Zep esp. comes to mind, and I always assumed that it was intentional… kinda just makes the whole thing seem more EVIL, ya know?  But apparently not.  Apparently this was a thing-to-be-avoided.  Hey any of y’all ever create an artificial print-thru ‘effect’ for a DAW production?  Drop us a line and let us know…  seems like it could be interesting,,,   anyway here’s the bit:

Kodak_Print_Thru_1965