Stan Ricker: Live and Unplugged
True Confessions of a Musical & Mastering Maven

Dave:    Your conducting experience allows you to hear the ensemble balance and the timbral balance of the instruments which is so important in mastering.

Stan:    Consider the sound of a trumpet.  There are times in orchestral music, especially like opera, when you'll get an instruction to have a trumpet played off stage somewhere.  And this is for a very particular reason.  I mean, the trumpet player could say, "Well, geez, I don't wanna pick up my horn and my music and go back there.  You know, how the hell am I gonna see ya, ya know, gonna peek through a crack in the back curtain?"  And, "I'll just play soft."  Well, no.  That isn't the point.  Because when you play softly, you alter the ratio of the fundamental to the harmonics.  This is what mutes do on strings, and this is what wind pressure does and mutes do to brass instruments. 

So it's not the same just to say, "Okay, John, just play soft."  No, that's not the point.  Go back stage.  Go behind three curtains and blow your ass off!  That's what we want.  We want to hear you signaling, "DaDa Dat DaDa," from far away.  Like, "Hey man, you're off, way up there, you're the sentry, and you're blowin' us a signal, and God, the enemy's comin'," you know, but it's from far away.  The harmonics-to-fundamental all sound differently.  This is what I appreciate about that record I was playing for you when we first came into the cutting room, that Opus 3, of that jazz band.  There's a trumpet player standing right in front, with his music, he's not playing hard, he's just mezzo forte.  In music that means, "Hey man, just play.  Just enjoy.  Just play.  Let it swing."  And he's got a good balance between the fundamental of the instrument and the harmonics, and the recording engineer's done a marvelous job of getting that balance, and not only getting it, but getting it to the final product, which in this case was the CD.  Even though it went through convolutions of being an analog and then being a CD and so forth.

Dave:    We're looking at the Opus 3, Test Record 4 ...

Stan:    ... Jan-Eric Persson, Producer and Recording Engineer.  I have just discovered his recording technique and his is a personification of how I hear my music.  I mean, from the same perspective.  I stand here, we've got this equilateral triangle with these loudspeaker systems, and that whole damn band is spread right out from wall to wall, and you can tell where everybody is.  You can close your eyes and you can see 'em.  I find that very exciting to be able to pull off, on a recording.

Stan Starts Down the Slippery Slope to Becoming a Mastering Maven

[When we last left our hero, he was teaching inner city junior high...]

Stan:    At the same time I was looking for other opportunities and I ran into Gerald Riegle at radio station KXTR.  It was in Independence, Missouri.  I used to keep my FM tuner on all night on KXTR and when it came on at six o'clock in the morning it'd wake me up.  One time the station came on in the middle of the night and, believe it or not, it was going from stereo to mono and stereo and back and forth.  They had some stereo that was out of phase and so I called up the radio station and asked what's going on.  I got hold of the chief engineer at the radio station.  His name was Gerald Riegle.  He asked me what I was hearing, what was I listening on, and so forth.  I told him, and we talked.  He said, "Well, you might be just the person I've been looking for quite a while."  And I said, "Why's that?"  He said, "Well, I have this Century Recording franchise in Independence, Missouri.  And I know all this technical stuff, but I couldn't tell an oboe from a bass drum if either one or both of 'em hit me over the head."  (Laughs)  I said, "Yes, I've been involved in music, more or less, most of my life."  So I started working for Gerry full time and I stopped teaching.  It was from there that I did my own Century Records franchise in Lawrence, Kansas [1968-69].  Somewhere around here I still have a little clipboard that says, "Century Records of Kansas, 1322 Brook Street, Lawrence.  Call Stan Ricker for a good time," or something like that.  (Laughs)  So Century Records and Gerald Riegle soon outfitted me with a 354-2 Ampex stereo recorder, theoretically called 'portable'.  Like the Navy, anything they put handles on is, by definition, portable.  We'd just bolt handles on this house, you know, and call it a portable one.  Anyway, it was heavy, heavy, heavy.  I had two MX 10 tube mixers and a mix of M251s, U 47s, and U67s.  They made nice sound, did real nice work.  Gerry Riegle also had some of the original RF powered Sennheiser mics, I think they're MKH 404's or 405's, one set that were omni and a set that were cardioid.  I sure enjoyed the omni pair.

They had smaller diaphragms than the Neumanns, which have large diaphragms.  Gerry was in charge of recording the five manual Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ that was located in a building called the Auditorium. It's the world headquarters of the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints.  You have LDS which are Mormons, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  Then there is a part that broke off called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  And the reorganized home is in Independence, Missouri, in a large oval- shaped building.  Seats 3,000 or 3,500.  Had this 109 rank Aeolian Skinner organ at one end of it.  So Gerry put me in charge of recording this thing which was, "Yeah, whoopee!"  (Laughs) There's a picture of it in the house.  Let me get it, I'll bring it out.  It's just hanging on the wall.

Stan:    The interesting thing was that the church had a lot of acoustical work done by [name deleted through fear of legal eagles], everybody knows of them, right? 

Dave:    My best friend in high school used to work for them.

Stan:    Yeah, well, they were as famous for screwing things up as they were for making good things. They were famous for putting these large wire-lath and plaster acoustical clouds in places.  In this building, I mean, there are thirty-two foot pipes.  So it gives you an idea of the size.  There's the chairs [pointing at the picture], so it gives you an idea of the size of the instrument. This is the choir-seating. The choir couldn't hear themselves because the organ blew them away.  So [deleted] came and hung seven of these concrete clouds over the choir so they could hear one another, and it did help.  They were hung by a bunch of cables and you could walk around up there on top of the clouds, so we hung microphones down.  I soon found that of all the Neumann mics, I liked the KM 56 the best.  It had a 5/8" diaphragm, a nickel diaphragm.  It was real clean and clear on the top end, you could really hear the articulation, the chiff of the pipe, each pipe when it first speaks.  You didn't hear that with the likes of the U 67's and things like that.  The U 67 is designed as an announcer's mic to be used about one foot away from the talker.  So they're being misused when they're used as distance mics.  They have no top end to speak of in that application.  So I worked with Gerry Riegle recording that instrument for more than a year.  The organist, his name was John Obetz, and I believe he's still there.  I think this group of folks, this RLDS gang, I think they have built a new building.  And they put in a new Casavant organ, which I didn't know about until I heard a broadcast on NPR called, "Pipe Dreams."  I heard an interview with John Obetz and he was demo-ing some of the new voices on the new Casavant organ and I thought, I've gotta go see him and see if some time I couldn't make a recording of him.  I don't know if he's done a recording for anybody yet, but I'd have to think he has.  Anyway, that was quite a fantastic instrument to work with and I really enjoyed it.  What was interesting was the low frequency pipes here, (pointing to the 32-foot pipes in the photo) if you're standing here, you're approximately half way between this end and that end, and there's some real interesting phasing anomalies that go on between either if you're standing half way along the length of an open pipe.  They speak like this, you see.  The compression and rarefaction happens mostly in the middle, so you've got output.  In other words, it's like two woofers in phase.  Both go out positive and they both come in negative.  So you get some really good acoustic humps right there in the middle.

Dave:    You're standing right at a node, but this thing looks like it could blow the choir right through the back wall of the auditorium if you really let loose. 

Stan:    Well, at the other end of the auditorium, on the second level, up here (pointing to photo), this large wall goes all the way around.  At the back it was cut out and there was another smaller organ console back there with some ranks of what they call trumpet en chamade, otherwise known as state trumpets.  They're long pipes that look like the kind of trumpets that the guy plays at the race track, which is just an unwound bugle.  But these state trumpets are very bright and piercing and they work on a very high wind pressure.  When we were doing recordings we never could use that part of the organ because the wind supply for it was so noisy.  So I went back there with Gerry one day and we opened the door and walked into the wind supply room.  There was this big turbine on the floor and the output of the turbine just went up; see you're in a small room.  Here's the turbine sitting on the floor.  And sitting above this is a ceiling, which is the floor of the  room above, and that's where the wind chests are for the state trumpets.  So what would happen is all the noise from the turbine would go right up there into the wind chest and out into the auditorium.  You'd hear this, Wheeee, ya know, just like some turbine jet engines.  You'd hear this high pitched squealing and it was really terrible.  And I said, "Well, have you contacted the Aeolian-Skinner guy, find out what they'd charge to build a baffle box to cut out that noise?"  And he said, "Yeah, we had them out here last year and they wanted something like $9,000 to build a baffle box."  I said, "I think it can be done cheaper than that."  He said, "For how much?"  I said, "Maybe about a hundred bucks."  (Laughs)  He was a very, very proper fellow, Gerry Riegle.  He never cursed.  But as close as he ever got to cursing was then and he said something to the polite effect of, "You gotta be shittin' me!"  (Laughs)  He just couldn't believe it.  "How would you do this?”  I mean his eyes were as big as saucers.  I said, “Well, okay, we take the output from this turbine, and what we're gonna do is have it go up into a box about yay so big by yay so big (hand gesturing), and then we’ll  cut some two inch holes in this box and then we're gonna go to the auto parts store and buy nine Walker glass-pack mufflers.  So we've got three holes by three holes and we have these nine mufflers and we're gonna put 'em in there and then we'll build another collection box at the other end for the muffler output and then the wind can go on up into the wind chest”.  Anyway, we did it and got something like a 38 dB reduction of the high frequency noise coming out the other end.  And it didn't impede the air flow at all, ‘cause they were straight through.  Just glass pack mufflers in parallel.  Somewhere around here I have a picture of that, except I think we wound up using six mufflers instead of nine.  They were very happy with it.  That's one of my first experiences in the actual application of what the military now calls in today's terms, off-the-shelf technology.  And that's exactly what that is.  I love to solve problems by cross-multiplying technologies that already exist.  You see, you don't have to go out and invent something.  There's a lot of stuff that’s already been invented.  But it's finding new uses for things that already exist that to me is the great challenge.

Dave:    That's yet another example of cross fertilization between love of automobiles, love of music and sound effect.  I'm surprised there's not a Recaro seat hooked up to your lathe.  (Laughs) 

Stan:    That was an interesting time in my life, working in that RLDS auditorium.  They had a whole recording department because they sent tapes around the world for doing radio broadcasts.  They were simply called, "Music and the Spoken Word."  I learned about making tape duplications.  I also learned a lot from Gerry about the care and feeding of analog tape recorders.  I learned that by making tape duplications backwards, they came out cleaner because of the improvement in recorded transient response.  When you strike a cymbal or something like that, it's easier to build it up and then cut it off than it is to start from max and come down.  So we duplicated all our tapes at one-to-one speed backwards, on Ampex AG-350s.  And they came out very well, indeed.  It turns out later that quality-oriented people in the know did this.

Dave:    I'm surprised you didn't do the Beatles box backward.  (Both laugh.)

Stan:    Something I've always wanted to do is take something like Ravel's Bolero, which starts so quietly and then just builds into this orchestral orgasm at the end, I've always wanted to do an inside-out twelve inch 45 rpm of that.  So as the dynamics increase, so does the scanning velocity, so that by the time you got to the end you were scanning it about forty inches a second.  You could deal with all these crashing frequencies and dynamics and, you know, all the stuff that happens.  That's the typically perfect example of a record to do an inside out recording on.  Now I've gotta figure out some way to run this lathe backwards.  The interesting thing is that it would theoretically be possible on this lathe because the Compudisk motor is a servo motor that drives the feed screw.  And it's a Gilmer belt which is what we use in automobiles for timing belts, where it's got to be belt drive but you can't have any slippage between rotating parts; it's a toothed belt.  So the motor that drives the feed screw is coupled to the feed screw by a belt and a little gear on the motor and a large cog wheel on the center line of the feed screw.  So if I can figure a way of twisting the belt half a twist I could, in fact, run this thing backwards.  Now (laughs) what are audiophiles gonna say?

Dave:    A standard that records at two thirds speed, half speed, minus half speed, minus two thirds speed, the complete spectrum.

Stan:    Yeah, start from the inside out.  That's a challenge. 

A Light Bulb Beams Brightly in Stan's Head

Dave:    So at some point right here in your life you came to join the Audio Engineering Society.

Stan:    Well, I was still working with Gerry Riegle, in 1967, and he said, "Hey, there's an AES convention in New York.  I'm goin', do you wanna go?"  And I said, "Yeah, yeah.  I'd love to."  I had long ago reached the point in my life where if it [any record] was mastered by George Piros, I bought it.  I didn't care what the music was, I just bought it, 'cause George did the best sounding stuff I'd heard.  And of course, if it said "recorded by C. Robert Fine and mastered by George Piros" that was two reasons to buy it.  Yeah, I wanted to go and besides, Gerry had told me, "Yeah, they're gonna have some computerized lathes there."  I said to myself, "What's to computerize about a lathe?"  I didn't know.  I remember going to the Gotham booth.  Of course, Gotham was the importer of the Neumann lathe and all the Neumann gear like the VMS 66 which this lathe is [at Stan Ricker Mastering in Ridgecrest].  The whole system was something like $227,000, and that was in 1967.  It was one expensive Mother J, I kid you not. So only the rich and famous could afford such a thing.  Anyway, I saw one of those things and salivated.  And yes, I had to go meet George and find his lathe which was on the top floor of the North American Hotel.  That was where Bob Fine had his studios.  Big old ballrooms were his recording rooms.  He did things for Tempo Records, like Erbie Green and Twenty-One Trombones. He did all the Command Records recordings there [other than the on-location jobs like the Brahms 4  Symphonies with William Steinberg and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra].  All that stuff was done in these big, spacious recording rooms.  You just walked in and talked and they just had great sound.  “This is a great room, let's do something in it”.  Marble pillars around here and there.  Then when I met George I spent two days hanging out at his mastering room, just soakin' up everything I could get.  And what he used for monitors, and people will laugh nowadays, but I still have a pair of these out here in a box, a pair of Altec 604C coaxials.

Dave:    I know people who would not laugh at that.

Stan:    I learned my mastering with those things.  I never had something that good when I was actually doing live recording.  But when I got into mastering most everybody had 604's.  George had a pair of 604's sitting on top of a pair of Rudy Bozak Concert Grands for the bottom, that's where he got the bottom half to listen to, you see.  It made quite a satisfactory playback system.  It didn't surprise me at all.  He said, "You probably think this is quite a kludge?"  I said, "Not at all.  Bottom line is that it sounds great."  A lot of people tend to forget, or maybe some of today's audiophiles don't even know, that virtually all this stuff was used for the classic RCA Red Seals.  The Mercury Living Presence, they were all monitored on these Altec 604's.  Almost without exception it was the standard gizmo to listen to.  I mean, it was an efficient loudspeaker, it had a gross distortion that everybody was totally used to and just kinda tuned out, and you had to drive it hard over 10K.  In order to make it talk much over 10K, 10 - 12K, you just had to really know there was something there on the tape because it wasn't gonna manufacture any false tizzy top end at all.

Dave:    You want standardization among those monitors, because as recording engineers go from to location to location, if they're using the monitors they're used to and their ears know how to compensate for the deficiencies of those monitors, then everything's okay.  But if every studio is using something different, then it's trouble.

Stan:    If you have a migrating engineer, he's just bound to be in trouble over things like that, unless as smart engineers do, and as we do at CES, we have records we take around from place to place because we know what they sound like.  Having listened to them on a lot of systems over the years, you get a fairly good hang of what's really on the record or CD, or whatever.  But the 604's, in their standard gray hammertone utility enclosures, were just everywhere.  And most of the time they were driven by two amplifiers, often Altec tube amplifiers, but the guys wanting the really good sounding stuff, they used the sixty watt McIntosh, tube amplifiers.  That made a really good combination with the Altec.  The Altec was a 16 ohm system.  It's a three inch voice coil [woofer], and it can't take a lot of power because the voice coil and voice coil former are old technology, they're paper.  So you can't drive 'em very hard or you're gonna have a fire.  They're hellaciously efficient and the Westrex cutterhead came from that same concept in that it has a very, very efficient high conversion efficiency.  It's got big magnets on it.  I mean the magnets on a Westrex cutterhead would do justice to a good ten or twelve inch woofer, to say nothing of a high powered tweeter.  So the tube amplifiers that were in use then, the 70 watt tube amplifiers, were quite good enough for those Westrex cutterheads.  But you can't take a 70 or 100 watt tube amplifier and drive a low efficiency Neumann cutterhead and get satisfactory results.  It just must be solid state to get the current up and get the damping, the low frequency damping that's so important to today's accurate cutting.

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