First up, a snapshot of my studio inside City Sparks Studios, circa 1988. Located near Hallmark Cards on McGee, it was my first large room build, a combination of analog synthesizers along with some of the emerging digital technology. Going around the room we see a Serge Modular, a Mini Moog Model D perched over a Prophet, and a Lyricon wind driver to the side. On the next stand over (mid-picture) is an Oberheim Xpander atop a Roland Jupiter 6. I think the keyboard on the roll-around was an Ensoniq EPS. A Roland SPK-80 allowed me to stripe analog tape (usually an Otari 8-track) with SMPTE time code and lock my MIDI studio to the tape transport. To the right there is an Emu Sp-12 atop an Akai S900 sampler. The Mac seen in both pictures is an SE, which superseded my earlier Mac 512K (‘Fat Mac’).
In the time between the top picture and a feature I received in Recording Engineer/Producer in April of 1990, digital audio advanced to the point of being able to record ‘CD quality’ audio to a hard drive. Sitting below my Mac SE here is a hard drive and backup system (tape drive) consisting of a massive 150 Megabytes, a truly monster system for the time. A few months before I installed early recording software and hardware dubbed ‘Sound Tools’, and I was learning the ropes (in a little over a year after this article, Pro Tools I would be introduced, and I was among those first in line).
At this point I had 3 hardware samplers; an Akai S900, an Ensoniq EPS, and an Emu SP12 (a rack unit, a keyboard, and a drum machine respectively). With the Digidesign program Sound Designer I could import and export edited sounds to all three samplers over thick, cumbersome SCSI cables.
At my left here is a KAT mallet controller and the EPS sampling keyboard. In the rack to the left of the computer, top-to-bottom, is (either a Tascam CD burner or a DAT recorder), the Akai S900, Lexicon PCM-70, and Yamaha REV5. The monitor speakers are Yamaha NS-10s. Above the computer is a Kawai K5 digital additive synthesizer, below the computer keyboard you see a J.L.Cooper MSB+ MIDI interface, and maybe to the right of the computer barely seen is Apple’s first CD peripheral, capable of burning redbook CDs with Digidesign’s MasterList software. Studio photos by Nick Vedros.
The current day studio seen here (some 9 personal studios later) contains many of the originals seen in the 1988 version: The Serge modular, Oberheim Expander, MiniMoog, Lyricon, PCM-70 all going strong. The mallet controller was updated to a newer model, and I had the Prophet 5 cut down and rack mounted, as the keyboard was failing. My organ in the earlier studio was a 1956 Hammond C3 with a model 122 Leslie. The Leslie is still with me (refurbed), but different organs run through it.
