Over the years Sear Sound has been in three different locations — 16 or 17 years each in two of the cases. What's motivated you to survive these and more recent changes in the industry, such as the rise of digital recording and home studios?
The idea that we can make it better, but that the rest of the world is fighting me and trying to make it worse. And it is. The music delivery system for the last 19 years [CD technology] has been far worse than the old vinyl discs. I ran a seminar at AES a few years ago. I found an LP and a CD — same material, same master tape, same mastering engineer. I put them on simultaneously and we cross faded back and forth. At the end, I said, how many like this? 150 engineers' hands went up. How many like this? And zero hands went up. It's shooting fish in a barrel. Anytime you A/B even the worst recorded, worst pressed LP and compare it to any CD, there is instantly [a difference], just like with vacuum tube mic pres.
Is it the actual physical process of vinyl? The physical construction of the grooves and the different playback mechanism?
It's wrong. My ears are still analog. In physics, you learn that any resistive device adds noise. Noise being distortion or any unwanted thing. The more conversions, the more devices, the more times it goes from analog to digital and digital to analog, you're making horrendous mistakes. There are clocking errors. There are thousands of resistive devices. It sounds terrible. And there is no question it sounds terrible. Except a whole generation has been told that it sounds great. And unfortunately, that's what the problem is. Digital technology has brought music back into the home. It should stay there.
Explain.
Bad is bad. We always had home tape recorders — I bought my first home tape recorder when I was in the Air Force. I did recordings, but I never was conceited enough to think I was doing professional recordings. That's the big difference. The industry, to quote my friend Russ Hamm, is no longer an industry of professionals. We gave that up about 15 years ago. It's become an amateur thing. It's very good as a music educator — you're always trying to get music back into the home. Now everybody has a nice home studio — the only trouble is they've been told by the salesmen that sell them the equipment that they're doing "professional recording" — and this is the furthest thing from the truth. I would not go to an amateur brain surgeon who had read a book and a few of the medical advertisements and have brain surgery done.
Yeah, that would be bad.
The old system, which no longer exists was, you'd come in as a runner/cleaner, and the assistants would talk to you occasionally and you'd begin to pick up little things. Then an assistant would get sick and they'd put you in a control room with a master engineer and you'd watch for two years. You'd watch what he did, and follow his instructions, and learn the microphones, and learn the setups and learn maintenance. My first job was at Fine Recording. I remember when I was interviewed and [Bob Fine] said, "Where did you get your EE [Electrical Engineering] degree?" and I said, "Sorry — I'm a Chem E." And, you know, everybody's nose went up in the air. But they had seen me in the studio...
Many of the newer engineers today don't come from technical or electrical engineering backgrounds.
But we were. I was a Chem E — and they let it slide.
There is a certain level of sophistication, which goes along with that.
Well, you're supposed to know physics. There's no question about knowing Ohm's Law and the math that goes with it, because we were building our own equipment — and I still am. It's back to my original theme: the industry has become totally ignorant. Nobody knows anything anymore. And the question will come up: Who died and made me god? Why am I spouting?
I think that you have a certain aesthetic to it all, which people admire.
Well, I have the training for it. If I'm putting down home studios, it's an amateur thing. It should be considered that. Amateur means "love of". If you have a love of it, that's fine. But don't kid yourself. It's not comparable to a good professional studio.
There's a certain pride that you have from all of the time you've taken.
First thing is, I worked as a professional musician for 45 years in New York and I supported my family as a tuba player. Four years at Curtis Institute — a stay with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
And you were in the pit at Radio City for a while.
Six years. Four shows a day, six days a week. It's the discipline of engineering and of music — which are identical. The discipline is the same. If I resent what is happening in the industry now, it's because it's instant gratification. Take it out of the box, don't read the manual, plug it in, and fiddle around.
And you really can do that.
It isn't the equipment that makes a recording engineer. It's the engineer. It's your skills. I've been in situations with a couple of SM57s — which is an excellent microphone — I was in a situation where I didn't have a world full of equipment to deal with. If you've got ears and a little bit of time, and your microphone settings... But you have to know what you're going for. You have to have a vast amount of experience, so you can draw on that.
Where do you think someone today can get that experience?
You can't because the studio system died. And it died for economic reasons, because you can't compete with free.
From reading your "What Have They Done to My Art?" series on your website, it would seem that the industry today is being unduly influenced by salesmen, as you would refer to them, saying that CDs and 44.1 are an increase in sonic fidelity, an improvement in sound quality.
It's silly. Nineteen years ago at an Audio Engineering Society meeting, they were discussing digital standards. I got up and I ranted and raved. Afterwards a couple of engineers from Sony took me aside and said, "You're right, but hi-fi sales are flat, record sales are flat, and we have to do something to revitalize the industry. So we'll change the technology." I have no argument about that, but as far as it's being better, unfortunately the advertisements came out and said, "This is as close to the master tape as you can get." In 1911, there was a picture of Enrico Caruso standing next to a Morning Glory Horn, RCA. "I couldn't tell it from my own voice." How about that? 1911!
As the technology changes, the public's understanding of what is "real", or what is a close approximation thereof, changes as well.
It's what they're told. RCA, 1911. It's the same goddamned punch line.
I heard you were going to place an ad in Mix, which was really an essay on the shortcomings of digital recording.
No. If they'd publish the article, I'd write it. I did the research. I can sum it up: Cheap parts. You can do it digitally, but you can't do it with cheap parts. If your clock rate isn't rock solid, you're in trouble. The algorithm to fix the missing data also averages — music is not average. In other words, if you have a piece of a sine wave here and another piece here and there is a speck of dust and you have a dropout, it might not be the mathematical average. Chances are in music it isn't. The bandpass, the frequency response — much, much too limited. It will improve as they go up to 192. The follow the dots becomes less follow the dots. There are more dots.
Do you think that the move to 192 kHz will be closer to approaching "good" sound quality? At what point do you think it will approach enough so that the human ear will be incapable of telling the difference from a quality analog recording?
When they put in good clocks. The clocking rate is the main problem now. And you can't have a good clock that's cheap, yet. Someday, they'll work it out. Our studio clock rate is a crystal control in an oven that's kept at constant temperature and is never turned off. That gives us a fairly reliable clock rate. So, until you get that straightened out and until the dots get close enough so that the ear can't hear the difference it's like the old dot matrix printers — you could tell it was an "O" with the little steps up and the little steps down — you could read it as an "O" — but it wasn't very elegant. And what we're lacking in digital is elegance. This isn't vacuum tubes. [Analog recording] is a 100-year-old technology. We've got it down pretty well by now. Digital, what, 20 years old? It's got a long way to go. It ain't right yet. Of course it's getting better — it's a scientific thing. Motivated by money. So it will get better. It has to. It still won't be cheap. Good is never cheap.
How do we teach a new generation of engineers?
With the new technologies now, digital is improving. It's at a point now where it's almost tolerable. I think SACD has a great future. But at the moment it still sounds like — I hate to say it, but which shade of brown do you prefer? Well, it's true. It's bad. It's bad sounding. And that's why MP3 is so acceptable. Which shade of brown do you want?
Before we can even have people appreciate a difference in the fidelity of different technologies, they have to recognize that it's bad in the first place — but they don't have a comparison post to know what's good.
No, they've recognized it. That's why people have stopped buying CDs. Because the musical impact, the subtlety of the music is really in the extreme high harmonics that we can't hear — except they're there. 20 k is a joke. We ride the subways. 14 k. If you've been riding the subways for five years, you're hearing is down to 14 k. So why am I ranting and raving about 50 kilohertz? Because the overtones, the subtlety when a violinist goes from one note to another — it's a change in those overtones. They beat against each other. They produce subharmonics. Maybe 60 dB below signal, but they're there.
Didn't you say in one of your essays that there are many people who can recognize the difference between a sine wave and a triangular or square wave in the upper parts of the frequency spectrum, which means that they would have to be hearing the overtones, which are above 20 kHz?
This is Rupert Neve's [Tape Op #26 & #87] favorite game. He'll play a tone at, say 12 k. A sine wave and then switch it to a square wave. Well, the first harmonic is the third partial above that — an octave and a half above that. That's above what we can "hear." Everybody can hear the difference, though. Well, what are you hearing? You have to be hearing the harmonics.
So somebody at some point took Nyquist's Theorem...
His math was wrong. Double the highest frequency and you're okay. But it's not. That's what the Japanese promoters [of CDs early on wanted the public to believe].
Or is it that people's hearing has become so damaged in a mechanical age that they just don't recognize subtlety?
No. They don't recognize subtlety because they haven't heard it. Haven't been exposed to subtlety. They're no longer listening to live music. You've got your guitar amplifiers and house PA systems and god knows how the signal is being mangled. 5.1 is the same thing. In the theaters, if you don't sit where the mixer sat — if you sit in the upper right rear — all you get is the sound effects. You can't hear the dialogue. It was a way for Dolby to promote their system and to get the theater owners to buy new equipment and to re-outfit their theatres, but if you think about 5.1 and the demonstrations... I go to any demonstration I can possibly go to, of any new technology. I'm not saying I close the door. I'm not a luddite. I went to a demonstration of a new manufacturer's console, and the guy was telling us how in the computer you can move the tracks around, you can type it in and boy, everything is moving. Great. Terrific. At the end, I said, 'Could you play something that was done on this?' So he played something, and I was rolling around on the floor clutching my pearls. I went up to him and asked him, 'Didn't you guys listen to this?' He said, 'I'm a computer engineer — what do you want from me? I don't know music.' So it's for selling stuff. It has nothing to do with what it sounds like. Because the people who are designing it are no longer people who know what it should sound like. There are people out there who know the difference. A good engineer is curious. You start out with the assumption: I don't know shit — and I'm going to ask everybody I can. It's a good sign of intelligence [that] you check your ego at the door. In a recording studio, that's essential. I tell all of my employees, "Leave your ego at the door." This is a service industry. We're giving service to a client. We do it the best we can. We antagonize the client as little as possible. We don't try and teach them. Speak when spoken to. Don't give advice unless you're asked for it — and nobody cares what your musical opinion is. Never get between the engineer and the producer — EVER! Fortunately, we have a ton of engineers and producers who come in, and they will ask questions. A good engineer knows how to cover his ass. But a better engineer knows how to cover his ass and protect the studio. It isn't "the studio's fault." Many engineers will say, "It was a bad mic cable and that's why the track sounds lousy." Well, why didn't you hear it when you started out? A poor workman blames his tools. It's nice to have very good tools. Which brings us into: What is "major studio quality"? The problem is not that the home studios have gotten so good — it's that the major studios have gotten so bad. It's economics. We've lost the structure.
The caliber of professional equipment has gone down, and home and professional studios have begun to match each other in quality — achieving a sort of equilibrium, then, in some cases?
No — bad is bad. Good technology, experienced engineers, good ears, musicality — the tools are unimportant.
But how do you find these things in an industry today that is focused on recording as a commodity?
Well, unfortunately, the industry doesn't look at it enough as a commodity. Because the economics of the industry suck. And because of the home studio competing with the professional studio, prices have come down. The house engineer went away. Once the house engineer was lost, it was the beginning of the end.
And there is no more structure to train future engineers with the sort of discipline to which you refer?
You don't have engineers who know the rooms intimately anymore. People tend to run undertime [at Sear Sound]. My people know the rooms, know the microphones. They get things set up before anybody shows up — and it sounds appreciably okay. Because they know the rooms.
I'm curious as to how you transitioned your career from being a tuba designer, to a player/music copyist, to a film composer and then into the world of recording studios. When and how did that happen?
When I was 12, I built my first crystal radio. I was always building hi-fi amplifiers — I had a background in electronics and the physics and math from chemical engineering. It's all the same. The Laws of Physics, thank god, don't change. They're not political. So I fell into it. [Bob] Moog and I got together. He was a graduate student at Columbia taking his Masters and I was working on my PhD at Columbia — which I never finished — in musicology. I began building a Theremin. I needed some parts that he had, so that was the first time that I contacted him. He was working o his PhD in crystallography at that point at Cornell. H was a frustrated pianist. We got along very well.
Why Theremins?
I was curious about the Theremin because it is the oldest electronic instrument — 1919. Leon Theremin I had the pleasure of meeting — fascinating old man. Anyway, i was all because of Radio City Music Hall. I played four shows a day, and a movie went on in between. That gave me two hours to kill. You could either eat, play poker (there was a perpetual poker game), you could chase the 16, 17 year-old Rockettes or you could do something productive with yourself. So I built Theremin — that's how I met Moog. Then I decided I' better practice and learn how to really play it. It's very difficult instrument. I began jobbing around doing studio work and recording. I became the only Thereminist in New York who owned a Theremin and could read music. So I had the whole thing to myself Anyway, Moog and I maintained the friendship and we went through some terrible adventures together. We had common interests in music, and in electronic music. I was at a New York State School Music Association Convention somewhere up in the Catskills and I was showing my tubas. I said to Bob, "Why don't you come up and put a Theremin and some literature on my table?" We got into a discussion about whatever happened to the synthesizer that was built by RCA in 1958 [the Mark II, housed at Columbia- Princeton's Electronic Music Center]. We began discussing it and of course, with modern technology, with transistors, it wouldn't have to take up half a room. Also I said to Bob the main disadvantage of that synthesizer, the RCA, was that you had to take it to a programmer who would punch paper tape — you had to program everything into that, like a piano roll. I said, musicians will never accept this. Gotta have a keyboard. And the synthesizer was born.
The Modular Moog Synthesizer [see article this issue].
If you look, by the way — I checked under Moog. He has his original shipping lists. I'm Number One.
For a Modular Moog. So you actually got the first commercially produced Moog synthesizer.
I helped build the first one.
So this was the first ever Moog Modular Synthesizer?
Still up, still running, still used.
It's amazing, the condition of the keyboard. This is all original, right?
His father was a cabinetmaker. That's why there's such nice woodwork on all of his stuff.
You've kept it in such pristine condition.
Why wouldn't it be? It was used about three weeks ago. One of the groups came in and they wanted a whip- snap [Walter makes a noise here].
Amazing. Now this is not a pitch bend, but a ribbon controller.
Ribbon controller. There's an interesting story about where that came from. In the '60s, when we were selling Theremins, the Beach Boys came around to my studio. They said they wanted to buy a Theremin. I said okay. I got up and I played it. I was in practice back then. They said "Great, now we're going to try it." They got out there and of course nothing came out. You have to practice three or four years. They said "We're guitarists. We can't use this thing." So I wrote to Moog. In those days you didn't telephone; it was too expensive. I wrote to Moog and I said, hey — here's their problem. They want something like a fretboard. So he came back and he had this board with a variable resistor ribbon on it. The Beach boys came in. I plugged it into the Theremin. I showed them. I remember taking a yellow grease pencil and [writing in the notes, dividing them with lines up and down the ribbon controller]. A, line. A#, line. B. And they were doing fine. Bob called it "The Stringer." They used it extensively on the road. But it was not a true Theremin. They cheated a bit. So when [Bob Moog and I] began building [Moog Modular Synthesizers], we incorporated it as a linear controller. I use it in conjunction with the keyboard to give myself a variable vibrato.
Kind of like the modulation wheel on a MiniMoog?
Well, I'd modulate the filter, or I'd modulate the amplifier to get an amplitude vibrato rather than a pitch vibrato, which is closer to real life.
I still listen to Switched on Bach [Wendy Carlos, 1968].
The music comes through.
There's a certain musicality of this instrument.
No — of the artist. It's an instrument. You either make music on it or you don't. It has nothing to do with the tools.
Kind of like someone can sing in tune, but they are not necessarily making music? They can play piano, but they're not necessarily making music?
Or you can record at home and not be an engineer. It's fine to play for your relatives, but it lacks. Occasionally, if you really intuitively work very well at home.
Let's talk for a minute about The Copper Plated Integrated Circuit, your album [1969]. What was that all about?
Command wanted me to do a series for them with Dick Hyman, Richard Hayman — and they wanted an album from me too. I liked working with Dick Hyman — there's a consummate professional. A guy who really was prepared. Then there was Richard Hayman, who was a great arranger and did some nice work — and Marty Gold. Good professional musicians and arrangers, who knew their stuff. It was a joy to work with these people because it made me think. It made me work at my best. Those are the things I like most about being in the music business. The things I liked least were sitting in the pit at Sound of Music, doing eight "services" a week. It's a factory job. I didn't like doing commercials. I did them very well, but it was a totally unmusical experience.
So this album was basically a compendium of electronic music?
Electronic music was very new at the time. This was a new sound. It was all done on the Modular Moog. It had a few live tracks here and there.
Sear Sound is the oldest independently operated studio in New York.
I think we're the oldest studio in New York. RCA and Columbia don't have studios anymore. They're the only ones that were older than I am.
I would imagine there is a certain quality control here based on your own personal philosophy and credo.
We train our people. They are forced to read volumes and volumes of technical papers.
I learned how to clean a toilet very well during my internship at Quad [Recording Studios].
That's one of the first things I ask. A very good engineer who has since graduated, got his [first] job here. He was going to school at Berklee and for the summer he wanted an internship. We don't have interns. I pay everybody. I can't scream at them unless I am paying them. He said, "I know how to clean a bathroom." He was one of the first assistants trained here. I have a little book on housekeeping that I ask my people to read — about the toilet, how to put the food away at the end of the night, how to wash dishes properly, how to make coffee properly. That was part of the training. We are in the service industry. You want to keep your clients very happy. First thing any assistant learns here is documentation. You get fired here if you don't mark down everything. Documentation begins before the session. I've got worksheets for every single module. You can write down whatever you want.
That kind of an organization, that kind of an attention to detail, is very important.
It's professional. It's how we always did it.
In a February 2003 Mix article, you spoke of how you were ready to put your studio up for sale after 38 years of continuous operation. What turned it around?
We had a client who booked the studio for a year because he liked the vibe. He came to buy it and said, "Why buy a cow when milk is so cheap?" So he rented it for a year.
Are you at liberty to say who that is yet, or are you still keeping quiet?
No, he wanted confidentiality. His contract was up, and immediately [we] booked that room.
So that was like a gift.
I still get discouraged every once in a while.
