Ever since I was a young kid, I’ve been fascinated by old–especially mid-20th century–technology. Especially aircraft. Since I got to climb around in an abandoned DC-3 at a Florida airstrip in the late 1970s, the sights and smells of sculpted metal, sun-baked plastic and cracked wiring have fascinated me.

What’s this got to do with recording music? To my eyes–and nose–nothing comes closer to that experience than fooling around with old audio gear, especially tape decks. The smell of heated glass vacuum tubes, machine oil, and old fabric insulation is a direct link to that ancient airplane I got to investigate.

I’m of the age that got to experience the end of the analog-only era. (I still say that I’m “taping” a rehearsal when I use a modern digital recorder, for instance.) Nothing is more evocative of the “old way” than a tape deck. Even people who grew up entirely in the digital realm yearn for “that tape sound,” or what it symbolizes.

Lest you become too enamored of “hitting the tape REAL hard,” a telltale phrase that can indicate the presence of an audio blowhard, it’s interesting that many recording and mastering engineers prefer digital formats. In clinical terms, it’s preferable for the output–the recorded music–to match the input.

I can certainly appreciate that on a technical level, but I am always a bit tickled when a piece of antique gear–I’m thinking of the respected Revox G36 tube-powered tape deck in particular–is described, negatively, as being “euphonic.” In other words, the fact that it imparts pleasing qualities to the music is seen as a fault.

Anyways, back to me. A few years back I became interested in the Ampex 600 series of portable tape decks. They are a classic of ’50s American engineering; Alan Lomax did much of his best work with this deck. More recently, John Mellencamp recorded an album on one of these ancient–and mono!–decks. Though I’ll never forgive him for implanting “Hurts So Good” in my memory, I’ll admit I was impressed.

Anyway, over the years I would buy one of these decks whenever I chanced upon one for cheap. I had dreams of recording onto one of them, and I still may one day. But for now, they’ve proven to be more useful as preamps.

Of course, they need work, sometimes a good bit of it. Old parts need to be replaced, unneeded tubes and their associated components removed, and voltages adjusted and regulated accordingly. They’re designed to send a strong signal to tape too, at a much higher level than our purposes require. Removing a gain stage brings the output down to a usable level, and affords the opportunity to insert a master output control so the unit can be “driven” like a guitar amp.

It’s a true joy to work with such old machinery. They were truly rugged and capable machines for their day, built to endure the rigors of recording in harsh conditions. Oh, and as an added bonus, they sound great! They’re versatile and clean enough to be used on lead vocals, or for smashing electric bass through the DI input. Wish I had a few more of them lying around the shop, to be honest….

Back to the airplane: I remember climbing the dusty cargo deck slanting up towards the cockpit, and sunlight slanting through the loading door my father had hoisted me through. The cockpit was clearly the most exciting part of the plane, where the pilots had sat with their banks of switches and controls. But as I approached the door to the cockpit, a sickening thought occurred to me, one I couldn’t shake: That the skeletons of the dead pilots were still in the cockpit, and if I opened the door they’d lurch back to life. Despite my father’s encouragements, I slunk back to the hatch and gratefully climbed back down into my father’s arms.

I’m trying to think of a pithy, alliterative title for this post and can’t. Since I already wrote about my Farfisa, I could make some really weak pun along the lines of “Getting Organ-ized,” but somehow that would remind me of the deeply closeted, deeply unfunny photography teacher at the first high school I attended. But I digress.

As I wrote earlier, I’ve been lugging this piece of junk around for 23 years and counting. But even though it never really worked 100%, I could never let it go. It’s my favorite sounding organ, having been featured in a veritable googleplex of awesome songs in the 1960s, and finding coolness again in the 70s via Elvis Costello and the Attractions and the Damned, among others. Plus, it looks really bad-ass.

This young squire is pretty much my fashion template in high school

I took this image from a site dedicated to a young (high school?) late-60s band called “The Rubber Memory.” Judging from their age and slightly less-than-jawdropping countenances, I’m guessing that their name was an (unsuccesful) attempt to convince anybody that their virginities were now spoken of in past tense.

The shockingly well-dressed lad standing behind the organ had deeper pockets than most, I’m guessing, as a Vox organ (even the budget-ey Jaguar version he’s showing off) was the higher-class and higher-priced alternative to the Farfisa, which was really always somewhat of a joke, except perhaps later on to Brian Eno and Steve Reich. But I digress.

Like the Farfisa, the Vox featured early germanium-based transistors, which as they age tend to drift pretty radically, especially with fluctuations in temperature. After the standard electronic rebuilding, the organ was sounding pretty good, or as good as these things EVER sounded. But “B flat” was just not working. On the oscillator card, the note would make it to the first divider and just stop.

Unlike the Farfisa, the Vox’s oscillators feature sealed “pods” which contain resistors and capacitors. They’re unmarked and fragile, and it’s hard to determine if they’re truly working or not. Even after swapping out pods, transistors and resistors, I just couldn’t make the note work. I was depressed.

Those red rectangles at the bottom right are the "pods" I'm referring to....

Fortunately, some kind souls at the Yahoo Combo Organ Forum were able to help me out with a truly weird (and therefore infinitely satisfying) concept: Grafting a binary counter IC–in other words, a computer chip designed decades after the Vox organ–into the card to take the place of those troublesome transistors and R/C networks.

Essentially, this made the organ bionic, to completely misuse the term. The tone the organ produces is exactly the same, but the simple math of dividing the tone (lowering the pitch) for each lower octave is handled by a small, simple (and stable) computerized part. GENIUS!!!!

Next up: The Hammond!

As my kid grows older, I find I have a little more time to muck about with longstanding repair projects. I’ve been trundling around a Vox Super Continental for 23 years now, though “B flat” never worked properly (nor did it for its previous owners, Shawn Swagerty and Heather Gonsior).

And I have literally no idea where my Farfisa Compact came from…was it Tim Green’s? I’ve had that for decades too, though its sounded worse and worse over time.

In any event, the Corin Tucker Band has had more and more need for these instruments–or at least I’ve convinced the other band members that they do!–so it seemed like a good opportunity to get them working again.

Yes, these future tooljobs used a Farfisa too!

Working on solid-state circuits is intimidating, at least for me. Tubes can be mysterious too, but there’s something a little more comprehensible about them. The Farfisa has a tube preamp section, which was rebuilt along with the power supply in the standard way with new electrolytics, tubes, diodes, power resistors and a thorough cleaning.

So far, so good. I lugged the organ–which is NOT light!–back to rehearsal. It sounded great, or at least as great as these pieces of junk can. But after the organ was allowed to warm up a few minutes, several of the notes would go wonky. My bandmate Mike Clark asked what was wrong, and my only answer was that it was a piece of crap that had been made in Italy 45 years ago!

Side note: My friend Steve Perrone likes to point out that these instruments were likely built by elderly Italians in a converted accordian factory (yes, Italy had a thriving accordian industry!). As he put it so well: “They gave the best years of their lives for rock and roll”….

Back to the problem: It turns out that this particular organ (like the Vox) uses germanium-based transistors on each of the oscillator cards (the section of the organ’s circuitry that actually produces a given pitch). These early transistors are particularly sensitive to changes in temperature, so after current–even relatively low current–flowed through them and heated them slightly, they would do all sorts of unpredictable things, like warble, produce grinding sounds, and so on. I do think that some of the charm of old electronic instruments is their unpredictability, but enough was enough, particularly during a recording session in which one crucial note–again, a B flat!–went way off base.

You can still find these old transistors, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be any more reliable than the originals. Fortunately, there’s a modern replacement–to wit, the BCL 214L–that will suffice. from then on, it was a matter of tracking down the bad notes and rebuilding their oscillator cards with modern components. Some of them took a bit more detective work than others, because the note would sound fine down to a certain octave, then go haywire. That’s because these organs use divider circuits, in which an oscillator produces a given pitch (in Hertz), which is then divided in half to produce the same pitch an octave lower. It took a number of tries, but finally the Farfisa was back in action.

Hello world! It’s my new website!

On the one hand, it’s a nice-looking placeholder for my little basement business, giving you Dear Reader an idea of what it is I (and, perhaps, you) can do at the studio.

On the other hand, it’s a treat to go back through the last seven-odd years and recognize all the insanely talented artists who have passed through the space. If nothing else seems to matter in this goofy world, at least there’s some great music out there…. Visit the “RECORDING” and “COMPOSITION” pages to hear some of what I’m talking about.

I’m especially excited to expand the compositional part of the work over the last year or so. It was a pleasant shock to recognize that writing music for specific jobs connected with some very distant part of my childhood brain, like finding a key for a lock you had forgotten existed. Much more to come in the years to come….

Anyway, thanks so much for visiting and for your curiousity! In the weeks to come I’ll be posting more specifics about the projects I’m working on, both recordings and the technical grunt work required to keep all the ancient crap here alive.

Much love,

Seth