Where did you first start recording?
At Ohio University. I was in there for broadcast school. I think I always wanted to be in recording, but, at that time, radio was the closest I could get to it. I liked radio; I liked playing records, and I thought it'd be fun to make them too. At Ohio University we had a good station that was all-student operated, AM and FM. We had to create programs, and I did a show called "Campus Jazz." Obviously it featured students who were jazz musicians, or thought they were. The show was set in a nightclub kind of atmosphere, but we would prerecord all the music ahead of time and then package it all together in a show. So that meant that I had to do a lot of recording at the station, as well as on location where the show was happening. So that was really the start. That, and also at the radio station that I first started at in Wooster, Ohio. They had a beautiful, big studio because it was built in the days of when you would have a lot of musical groups come in, so they had a studio that could accommodate that. Of course, we only had about three microphones. I did some recording there too, so that's really where it started.
You grew up in Wooster?
Yeah, I grew up there, then went down to Athens at Ohio University, and after I graduated I started a semester of graduate school. Of course the Vietnam War was going on at that time, and I knew as soon as I stopped my education process that I'd probably be drafted. That's what eventually happened. I went on to start my masters and then I decided, "I'd really like to get out of school now." I came to Youngstown to work at a radio station. I was interested in seeing what was going on in the recording scene when I got here. There was a studio here, which, at that time, was called WAM Recording. I had an old Presto recording lathe that I had picked up, and I called the guy that owned the studio, Bill Warner, and I said, "Are you interested in a lathe, or any equipment?" He said, "Well, bring it down. Let me see what you've got." I brought it down, he saw what I had, but he decided he was going to hire me instead of buying the equipment. That was kind of nice. I thought I knew everything at the time. I didn't, but I knew enough to know that there was enough good talent in this area that I should be able to do some recording with the bands, as well as everything that was going on. So I ended up working for him. Later it became United Audio and United Media, but that was sort of the ground work for Peppermint.
Did they close around the time that you opened here?
No, actually they went off on their own and stayed open for a while. They were doing more voice, educational, and instructional type work, and we definitely went off into the musical world here.
Is that where you met Del Sinchak?
Yes. I met Del at WAM. Interestingly enough, Del, and another fellow by the name of Ed Dusi who had a music store, Dusi Music Center, in Youngstown, started WAM. It was on the Southside, down on Ellenwood Ave. They originally called it Words and Music, which they later shortened to WAM. They did recording, but they also did some work, as in, "Send us your lyric and we'll put music to it," which is where the name comes from. Del got more involved with Dusi Music and sold the studio to Bill Warner, who I started working for. But I met Del because he not only had WAM Recording Studio, but also the WAM record label. It was doing custom recordings, some religious recordings, and polka bands too.
I've got an Eddie Vallus record that has Del credited as the engineer.
Sure. And that would have been done at WAM. So Del kept his interest in making recordings, but out of the studio arena. He kept the label alive, and that's where I first met him, doing engineering for him for some of his recordings. He went on to do the Dusi Music scene, and was very successful in that. Eventually that closed down, and he came to me and said, "You need a marketing director?" I said, "Yeah, tell me what you've got in mind." So he started working for me. That would have been in the late '80s, and we've been working together ever since. We actually probably started back in '67 – I suppose those were the first sessions.
So in '71 you started here?
Right.
Did you build this place out? You said it was a TV studio before.
The building was for a TV studio. When we first saw it a doctor had offices in the top part of the building; it's sort of split level. This was completely open down here. They had a couple different things going on in here from time to time, but it was empty when we found it. So we had some offices upstairs, as well as this big empty studio, and we just started building from there. Bill Warner and United Audio was in here first, for about a year, and then Peppermint started in '71. Some of the construction work was done with Bill, at that time.
And you built this console, right?
Yes. Well... it was built by a guy by the name of Gaston Nichols, for somebody down in Florida. I found it through a company that sold equipment at the time, Mace Corporation, down in Birmingham, Alabama. He had started the work on the console for a place, I think it was called Papa Don Schroeder's studio, in Florida. He said, "I built this because the guy likes to literally dance on the control board." It's pretty solid! At that point it was a 12-channel board. We arranged to acquire it, and, step by step, we eventually took it up to a 24-channel board. It's handmade, in the sense that we all took pieces that we liked and put them together. Like, we would use the Universal Audio 1008 preamps, and they were coupled with an equalizer that worked in the feedback circuit. He had designed some custom booster amps, line amps, and so forth. Eventually it just evolved. I replaced the equalizers with APIs and a variety of things like that, because, at one time, that was the thing, "Well, how much EQ do you have on your board?" I'd say, "Enough!" [laughs]
Is that the old EQ section? [on the ground, next to the couch]
Those are the old EQs. The reason they're sitting there is because, conveniently, they fit in this spot, same as the APIs do. But I took them out because there wasn't room for them. I had them stored upstairs, and then Henry Hirsch [Tape Op #56], who was working with Lenny Kravitz at the time, called me because he wanted to come down to the studio, as he heard that we had a lot of vintage equipment here. I was telling him what I had, and he said, "Could you wire in a few of those EQ's, just so that I can hear it?" He rented the studio for a day; we set up drums, guitars, and all that sort of gear. But part of the request was to put in those old EQs. I think they're [Universal Audio] 508 [envelopmental equalizers]. They work in the feedback circuit of the tube preamps, so the sound doesn't actually pass through them as an equalizer. What they do is tailor the frequency response of the preamp. So that's why they're sitting there. What I've always wanted to do is actually put them back in, because it's one less thing that the sound goes through on the way to the recorder. Then I could have the APIs as an option, switched in or out, which may be handy for mixdown. But the recordings we did in the early '70s were all through that UA EQ, and the only limitation was that when we'd get to the mixes we didn't have much in the way of frequencies that we could get at. But, then again, any engineer knows that the mix starts at the mic, so you should have it right by then. Right? [laughs] Henry wanted to trade me his Trident, I think, for this board. He had rebuilt the power supply in the Trident and wanted to know if I'd trade. I'm thinking, "Wait a minute. Here's this guy who's got all the access to anything in the world, so the smart thing is to keep it, right?" But he would always call me, "Hey Gary, what was the model number on that Scully?" Because he recorded on the 288, then took the tracks back up to New York. And, "What was the model of those speakers?" Or, "What's the model of those preamps in the board?" He's a good guy. He's got a studio now...
Yeah, isn't it upstate?
Yeah, in a church. You know, he found some of those same preamps in New York. Not being from the old school, he said, "What happened? We had them up and they were running, and the next day they're not making any sound at all?" I said, "Did you leave them on?" He said, "Yeah, we left them on." I said, "Did you terminate them?" He said, "What do you mean?" On the output, they're designed to work into a 600 ohm load – faders are generally 600 ohm in the old style. "So they probably just went into oscillation and you burnt out the transformers." And he said, "Oh, that's not good, huh?" [laughs] That's terrible, as a matter of fact. He had my studio scheduled for Lenny.
You said the reason they didn't end up doing it was because they didn't want to be in Ohio in March, or something?
Henry kept saying, "Can you get the studio really warm, because he likes it warm!" I said, "We'll do whatever we have too." But I would rather go to the Bahamas, or wherever they went, anyway!
From recording here, I noticed everything is super simple. It's a very pure signal path. Obviously you've got a bunch of great mics and a sweet sounding board, but there's not much in the way of outboard gear. It's EQ's and compressors. It's great!
Thanks. The signal path is always as short as we can make it. You don't see a lot of meters moving on the board, because I'm taking the direct outs of the channels. It's just coming through the mic preamp, through the EQ, or not, and through a little booster amp and right to the track. And that's why it was really great when those 508s were in the board, because you didn't have all that extra circuitry to go through. And, if you can get the sound right, it's pretty magical. If I ever get enough downtime, I'd like to put those back in.
Yeah, that'd be cool to have those and then have the APIs as outboard.
Right, then, at that point, you'd only be running through the 1008s. But I've only got 16-channels of the 508s. Ah, that's enough. What I should do is outboard the 508s, then have a switch to bypass the APIs completely, because when they're off the signal is still going through the op amps. That's really what I've wanted to do. The 1008 preamps that are in there also have a socket, besides the tubes, they were designed to also have an LDR [Light Dependent Resistor]. It was right at the first stage of the amplifier, and the idea was that you should be able to remote control that with a little pot on the board – you could adjust the brightness of the lamp on the LDR and that would work as a gain control for the first stage. I've never seen one hooked up that way, although it's possible. I guess it was a problem with the consistency of the LDRs at the time, so you couldn't get from one channel to another with the same performance. But I thought it was a good idea.
When you got the desk from Birmingham, did you already have the rest of the gear at that time?
Yeah, there was a lot of gear. Actually the mics followed around the time when Peppermint started and separated from United Audio. We didn't buy their business, but we bought assets, and I was in the position to know what assets I wanted. So we bought most of the equipment, including the Telefunken microphones and all. Along the line I've just sort of picked up gear. Actually Del bought those (the Telefunken 251s) back when he started WAM. He and another fellow bought four of them. He kept two and the other guy kept two. So they've followed him around.
When you guys started, were you using the 8-track 280 Scully?
When we first began, we were operating on 4-track Ampex for a while, and then we tracked down the board. Then [we got] the Scully, but the Scully that we opened up with was a 12-track on 1-inch tape. That was quite a thing. I actually just saw a picture of Jimi Hendrix posed in front of a 12-track Scully, just like we had. At the time I was looking for a couple of them, because the 16-tracks might have been out, but the 12 seemed to be in the price range. It was more than 8, less than 16, and also the tape, which was cheaper because it was 1-inch. It worked good. We did all of the Blue Ash albums on the 1-inch, as well as Left End and a lot of the early things. That was in '71. In '74 we got the 16-track machine. That came from Tyler, Texas. I was just talking about this. We went down there in the station wagon and drug the thing back to Youngstown. That was the machine that John Fred and his Playboy Band recorded "Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)" on.
Right, I was looking at that old flyer you had for the studio and saw that was the 12-track, not the 16.
Right. It was in a different cabinet. It was a beautiful machine.
You opened this place and covered it in psychedelic shag.
Oh, yeah!
The studio is known for polka as well as a variety of ethnic music, but that picture seems like you wanted this to be the hippest studio in town.
Well, it probably was, at the time. [laughs] There was a fellow who was working with me named Norm Taylor. He was my partner in the business. He was the money guy, and I was the engineering guy. I was focused on making sure the equipment was going to be good, that it worked, and whatnot. He was more involved with surrounding himself with people who were thinking, "Maybe we can do this," and how it should look. So I can't take credit for all of that, but I remember thinking, "Wow! We just created the world's biggest Twister game out there in the studio, with all that shag carpeting and the circles." It was fine, we enjoyed it. And we still have remnants of it out there on that choir stand. It's the hangout stand now.
Was Del bringing in polka bands? What was the clientele back then? I guess it was kind of all over the place.
It was all over the place. Of course we had some polka bands, and there were a lot of bands in the area too, like Blue Ash and Left End, who eventually ended up on Polydor. There were a lot of bar bands too, and they were all good; a lot of good musicians. And there was other ethnic music as well. We were doing Greek bands, as well as some gospel and religious work, probably some high school bands that we'd go out and record too. We were doing quite a diverse amount of material. I enjoyed the polkas, but I was really more into the rock and pop projects. I was really interested in honing myself on doing pop recording. The thing that actually was a benefit in the polka field was that I would take the same techniques that we were doing with the rock bands and apply them to the recording techniques with the polka bands. You know, most of them were used to recording with one microphone in a room, or two for stereo. Then, all of a sudden, they would bring the drums in and I'd have a microphone on the top and bottom of the snare, and the toms all mic'd, and the front head off the kick drum too. I was trying to take the approach that we would take to contemporary music and apply it to the ethnic music. I think that's one thing that helped form the sound that people recognized us for. But we were doing all types of bands. It was amazing. And I was doing most of the engineering. There was one other guy that worked here too, but I was doing a lot of it. They were amazed. They'd say, "I don't understand how one minute you're doing a Greek band, and the next you're doing a rock band, and the next you're doing a Slovenian polka." It's all music, right? And you know when it sounds right, and when it doesn't sound right. You should know that if you're sitting behind this board.
