 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!)
Moog Studio as finally set
up, on West
End Ave & 79th Street, NYC. 1966-71. This picture, taken
in late 1970, shows the small "L-shaped" arrangement of,
(from the left): 2-tk Ampex, custom 1" 8-Track Ampex (with
homemade sel-sync panel just above transport), Dolby A-301
units on top (some also on top of 2-tk) and Klangumwandler
unit, and modular Moog Synthesizer, custom assembled over
period of five years, containing a custom Vocoder on top,
homemade 10-in 2-out mixer below (on pullout glides),
flanked by two homemade 8" ducted-port speakers. Two Marantz
power amps are visible on the floor, and control pedals for
synthesizer. Homemade patch-bay and VFO (vari-speed) are not
visible from this angle. Tensor lamps helped visibility, and
a big potted palm tree softened the look. This is how the
studio looked at about the time of the Beethoven 9th final
movement, and "Timesteps".
The
Brownstone Studio
on the upper West Side of Manhattan, in March of 1977. This
view is what you saw as you approached the top of the
stairs, looking down from the upper room into the main
mixing/control room. A Kalihm tapestry hangs on the left
wall, which is curved around a small circular stairway not
visible here. A few awards hang on the right wall. The four
Klipsch Cornwall loudspeakers hang on chains around the main
mixing location. A two manual Yamaha Electone organ sits
behind the console (to this side of it), where it replaced a
small listening sofa/bench we'd originally moved there for
others to monitor the audio while we worked at the console.
(I found the original 2-1/4" slide recently, and carefully
scanned and tweaked it, to replace a much poorer version
that was posted here some years ago.)
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... ;^)
I've
only recently
found this late 1970 snapshot of our good friend, R. Dennis
Schwarz, when he was wiring one of the Spectra Sonics card
holders for the new console seen on this page. Bob
(the
"R." is for "Robert")
worked together on the new console and studio wiring with
Don
Longmore. Both were
credited on all of the earlier LPs and current ESD
remasterings, as without them it's unlikely I'd have ever
considered trying to build my own studio. Personal studios
back then were thought to be weird and were difficult to do
well. You especially needed someone like Bobby, who knew
what to do, and understood the concepts behind custom
console design, studio layout and wiring. That he was so
generous with his knowledge, time and effort is a gift I'll
always remember. Thank you, Bob, in more ways than I can
say. You'll note that he's sniffing a soldering iron tip
here, to be sure the temperature was approximately correct
(no constant-temp soldering stations back then), and that he
usually could be found by following the trail of cigarette
smoke...
UPDATE
2008
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.
You
may enjoy comparing
our later views with this close-up of the main floor right
after the studio experienced what Astronomer's charmingly
call a new telescope's "First Light" (ought we call it
"First Sound"?) The photo is from early 1971, when I still
used my trusty (G-dad itzah) WurliTzer electric piano, which
stood me through college, and composing in the West End
Avenue studio above (last work written on it: "Geodesic
Dance".) That's it far left. When we leased the big Steinway
I gave it to Steve Bone, the fine lead guitarist for
Michaelangelo,
a light rock group Rachel
Elkind produced and
I recorded in '71-'72. He deserved it, and used it later for
years.
Note that the rack
space above the 2-tk Ampex has two openings in it (my VCO
panel plus the Martin Audio unit went in there soon), as
most of the racks were "filled with empty space" for some
time. The 3-M 4-tk had plenty of room in between it and the
Ampex 8-tk (my current place is not so wasteful.) The 8 was
beside the Moog at 90 degrees, as it had been in the first
room, something "familiar"... The 3-M 16-tk was further
right. No swivel studio chairs yet, I see. Tensor lamps
still used, as the ceiling down spots were incomplete. And
the blue & white box on the 4-tk meter bridge contains
the extra 3-M 2-tk head assembly that I used recently in
remastering the 1/4" tapes of the full Clockwork Orange
score. Read more about that in the Recent
News on ESD.
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.
The
Moog Synthesizer
in its prime, March of 1977. This is about the largest it
ever got to be, with four tiers of walnut cabinets stacked
one above another. The base is a rolling cabinet support
that we custom built. Four heavy duty casters allowed easy
access to the rear wiring. It would have looked this way
during the production of the full Switched-On
Brandenburgs,
and the Kubrick film score, The
Shining. The
Synthesizer still looks much the same today as it sits at
the far end of my present studio in The Village. But
nowadays it serves for auxiliary functions, and is no longer
my main
, to say nothing of only
instrument (as the saying goes, "Things change"...)
For
those who have asked for a listing of my custom Moog Synth's
modules, here's a list made by Dominic Milano just a couple
of years after the above photo was taken (no visible major
changes were made after about 1976.)
|
Wendy's
Moog Synthesizer in 1979
Top
tier, from the left:
907
fixed filter bank with modified output section,
acts as spectrum
encoder for
vocoder;
10 pairs of 912 envelope followers and 902 VCAs for
vocoding each of ten channels.
Second-from-top
tier: Polyphonic
oscillator bank; 960 sequencer; 914 fixed filter
bank, acts as spectrum
decoder for
vocoder;
967 interface, 962 sequential switch; coincidence
trigger switch (footswitch-box for it is on floor)
outputs; 912 envelope follower; A-440 reference
tuning oscillator; generic filter and attenuator
module.
Third-from-top
tier: Control
center for polyphonic oscillator bank; 912A
oscillator driver for five main 921 oscillators;
904-B highpass filter; 904-C filter coupler; 904-A
lowpass filter; control voltage panel; three 911
envelope generators; two touch-sensitive envelope
generators; 904-A lowpass filter; 902 VCA.
Bottom,
sloping front tier:
901-A
oscillator driver panel; three 901-B panels with
Minimoog oscillators; 921 single oscillator; five
921-B oscillators; generic filter and mult module;
filter and attenuator module; 904-A lowpass filter;
911 envelope generator; 911-A dual trigger delay;
two 911 envelope generators; 911 switching panel;
three 902 VCAs; filter and attenuator
module.
Lower
section of bottom tier:
Three
control voltage and audio mixer modules; output
trunk lines and aux jacks and power supply
miscellany.
Left
of keyboards: Stereo
master volume control and booster sine-level box,
with a VU meter and a portamento momentary push
on/off switch. On right side of keyboards is the
secondary power supply control
panel.
On
floor: Coincidence
switches; X-Y pedal; volume pedal used for vibrato
amplitude; sustain pedal for polyphonic oscillator
bank.
Note:
the vocoder modules have not been used much since
purchasing a Synton SPX 216 unit in 1985.
The 216 is one of Felix Visser's finest designs,
and made the original Moog modular version sound
dated and none too clear. Read Wendy's
Vocoding comments.
BTW: the word is spelled and pronounced as a
Vocal Coder, which CODES speech information,
not the often heard incorrect "vocorder"
(with an extra "R",) obviously from someone hung-up
on the vocal chords of the larynx...
|
Current
Lower Broadway Studio,
late 1986. Wendy Carlos poses in the studio for publicity
photos for Beauty
in the Beast,
about to be released. This is just as computers and MIDI
were about to alter this spacious look, adding extra racks
and work stations to the area. The Moog Synthesizer and
Ampex 8-track have both just been moved past the far left,
and two Synergy synthesizers dominate the working space.
On a small stool (the
same one shown in the '71 photo, in fact) near the 3M
4-track, were a few control devices, like a one octave mini
keyboard for changing the tuning home key on the Synergies,
a Moog 904 Lo-pass filter, and a VU meter box with volume
control. The Mac Plus to the right was accelerated a year
later with a Levco board, and the HP computer equipment and
Roland SBX sync box were relocated. Behind to the right,
note the GDS master synth & computer terminal, used for
building sound cartridges played on the Synergies. The
island photo on the wall is of Bora Bora.
(For a
small QuickTime movie of this studio in late April 1996,
click
here.
You
might also wish to study several of its single frames for
details.)
The
Broadway Studio,
beginning to get filled-up. This B&W image is a good
view of where I do most of the work on my music, audio, and
computer projects (like maintaining our web site.) The
original was taken for promotion of the S-O
Bach 2000 album
released on Telarc in 1992, and is therefore slightly dated.
The only really noticeable changes you would seen here
tonight are: the Mac monitors are different: a 20" Sony
Trinitron where the Z21 Grayscale monitor (the big one on
the far right) sat, and to its right, a 17" version.
On the pedestal just
left of the Z21 currently I have placed a Sony
NTSC/PAL/SECAM 12" monitor, for viewing films to be scored
in sync. The keyboards are still the same, as are the
controller devices. A few module additions were made in the
racks, nothing you'd spot in this shot. Most of the newer
synths since '92 sit at the other end of the room, where I
can more easily do voice/program editing and construction
than this dense location would permit. That's why it hasn't
changed as much as it might.
 Well
before any of the
above equipment was assembled into an organized studio, I
realized that more than two channel stereo would be very
useful. Of course I had read that Varese's
Poem
Electronique, among
other early electronic works, had been played over many
channel surround systems. The challenge was to build some
kind of reasonable tape machine with several tracks, four of
them at first, for what became known as "quad" a dozen years
later. In the late '50's, there were not many choices if you
had little money. I built my own. This is what it looked
like, in a recent shot.
The components were
made by Viking,
a then popular Minneapolis company for ambitious audiophiles
on a small budget. They made both assembled tape recorders,
and the individual devices from which you could make your
own custom machine. A few years earlier I had put together a
simpler two-track recorder from one of the first Viking tape
decks. This time I ordered one with two sets of
quarter-track heads, as there were no readily available
four-track heads at the time, and four of their newest
(tube) electronics. One head set was in the normal position,
the second was mounted higher up, to follow the second pair
of tracks. This "staggered" arrangement was unique to this
particular machine. But since it played back mostly its own
tapes, the staggering didn't really matter, and it worked
fine. It took a few tricks to make it record well, like the
synchronizing of the four bias oscillators.
I found the old machine
some years ago in my parent's basement, and brought it here
to clean and restore. You can see that the homemade
vinyl-covered wooden case still looks fine after a few
repairs. The handle broke off at some point, and I would
need a new one to move it around easily (did I say,
"easily"? -- it weights just over 45 lbs.!). For the moment
its main use is only for copying old master tapes to
digital, and for that it works surprisingly well. I've got
several "surround sound" recordings I made with it while in
college. These still sound pretty amazing: a glee-club or
small orchestra all around you. But surround sound (at long
last it now looks like it may become popular) is a different
topic for another time.
|
(Top
of the Page)
Back to the Wendy Carlos Home Page
