I first recounted a version of this tale on my personal blog... but I'm revising it and posting it here, because it is a CLASSIC Tale of the Nineties.
By early 1994, I had done 9 months of good work for my Dad, learning Cobol, and our first release of our software was in the client's hands. Dad took a call from a headhunter friend, and he forwarded the contact on to me. One thing led to another, and I took a programmer job for an outsource code shop. Prior to this, COBOL was something I did with my dad. This was my first chance to take the skill to the street and see if this could be an actual career for me.
As first gigs go, it was pretty low-profile: I was a subcontractor working for a subcontractor, working for a contractor, working for a telephone company in southern Minnesota. I was paid $15/hr, and told to bill 40 hours a week, no matter what I was doing. With 3 subcontracting firms above me, I am guessing that the client must have been paying at least $50/hr for my work, with everyone taking between $5-10/hr off the top.
Still, this was my big entree: I was going to make $30k a year. The recruiter said the gig was for 12 months. I could BANK on that. Of course, I needed to get corporate attire: 3 pairs of slacks, 5 dress shirts, 5 ties, 1 pair of shoes. The old man fitting me for these things commented the pants "look good across the beam" while appraising my tush. Which was a lie, since I was still around 135 lbs and over 6 feet tall. But it takes all kinds.
Also, having lived in the city and having divested myself of my very bad automobiles, I needed some way to get to and from Eden Prairie. So we bought a NEW CAR. A Nissan Altima, Sea Blue, that we named Evenrude. It was a wonderful car.
We were in an office plaza in Eden Prairie, the dress was business formal (shirt, ties, slacks), there were 6 of us in this office. I shared an office with a woman just a little older than I was. In the back were the "mainframe guys" who literally did nothing but play card games on the computer all day. One other guy would stare at lines of code all day. One slept. This was before the world wide web - I can only imagine what THAT would have been like.
For 4 weeks, I was given nothing to do. NOTHING. But bill 40 hours, and say I was doing "Conversion" work. Turns out, this shop was in the SLOW and LABORIOUS process of converting a system from MainFrame to something else... very very very slowly. Bored, I surfed through the code library, trying to make sense of what the system did (boring billing stuff), and see what massive changes were needed. As I said in an earlier post - I'm not so great with reading for reading's sake: I'm goal oriented: What needs doing, and by gum it'll get DONE.
Finally, after 4 weeks, they gave me an assignment: Take this one program, and convert it. It should take 2 weeks, they said. I took this program, and God as my witness, all I could see it needed was ONE LINE of code changed to work properly. So I did it. And my boss said "you're not done, this will take two weeks". Which I took to mean there was something else I needed to do. So i got in there and started to do some additional improvements, I reformatted the output to work on standard printers, I changed some of the input parameters to match PC keyboards better....
And after 2 weeks of puttering, my boss said "it'll take another week". So a week LATER, they sent off the code. And one week AFTER THAT, the top-level contracting firm called up and yelled at me for making all of those changes, what was I STUPID??? So I immediately backed out those changes, just did the one line of code, and shipped it off 10 minutes later.
8 weeks, and only one program modified, and only one LINE of code modified. And I had made almost $5000. And it felt TERRIBLE. I talked to others in the office, and they all said "kid, relax, this is an easy gig - enjoy it! The next one won't be like this and you'll remember this fondly". Really.
The boss called me into his office and said that "the clients wanted me fired, but he talked them into giving me another chance". I said thank you for the opportunity, but I don't think this is right for me. I walked out. Actually I'd like to say I walked out, but I gave two weeks notice, did nothing but show up for 80 more hours, made another grand. Sigh.
It was back to my dad's basement for a few months (and I am forever grateful to him for his employment in that period... since I had a car payment and everything!!!)
Two gigs later, I ran into one of the Mainframe Guys in the shop: He had taken ill and there was some code that NEEDED to get done. I filled in, and the work that was supposed to be 80% done hadn't been started, but that was ok because the two weeks he had said he needed turned out to have been only about 30 minutes of code on my part. I didn't make a big deal out of it... but I did learn some lessons about trusting people: there are a lot of people in this business who are not interested in working very hard, and are not above deception to keep themselves comfortable.
I am not one of those people.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Fall 1992 - TX Treasure
When I think of the vintage gear tsunami I fell into, it's remarkable to think it really "only" lasted 2 years - first toe in the water in 1991, last great deal found in 1993, after which point I started to retire pieces of gear. One great find for me was the TX816.
I believe this beast was actually built in 1985: Eight Yamaha DX7 synthesizers in single rack, with just a few buttons and one angry red 2-digit LED for each. You couldn't program these things from the front panel - they were strictly for playback. But by this time I was using a bit of software from Opcode called "Galaxy" which offered visual editing and library management on my Mac (which in 1992 was STILL my SE - imagine, I actually used the same computer for 5 years), so I could load up my favorite sounds and let it rip, and I could tweak them in the editing software.
The TX816 was sort of legendary for me - while it was heavily used by a lot of very hack-y sounding LA musicians (who used the 8 synths to layer up the most lush fake electric piano patch ever), it was championed by my sequencing hero David Gamson of Scritti Politti. If you listen to Cupid+Psyche, you'll hear all of these little clavinet-synth sounds, all a little different, weaving lines of melody, trading parts, almost like a Bach Invention. That was the power of the TX - you had all this SOUND to work with, but all of the sounds were sort of SMALL, so they could dance around eachother without making the mix a mess.
If you're wondering what this sounded like... try to remember "Things Can Only Get Better" by Howard Jones - that funky bassline with a little clavinet interplay - that was the classic DX sound.
Listening to my tracks from this time period, I hear all 8 of those synths going - some doubling lines, one synth being used just for a triangle sound twice in the track... It was ridiculous luxury to be throwing the sonic power of a full DX7 (when new, a $2500 synth) to that single purpose.
I found the TX in a second-hand store in St Paul called Encore Music - they typically had used synths I WASN'T interested in, but I made the rounds anyway. There was always a Korg Poly 61, or a Crumar Stratus, or a Roland Juno-6, or a early 1980s E-Piano module of ill repute and sound... but it was always worth looking. And one day, I saw the TX816 sitting there, with a treasure almost as great: 8 20 foot XLR Cables (high quality) with 1/4" adaptors. $800 for the works, and honestly the cabling was worth at least $200 of that. I couldn't say no, and took it home.
Of course, this officially overloaded my mixer, so I needed to get a second 16-channel submixer. And it was a little noisy, so this was what brought the noisegate into my house. So all told, it was at least $1200 of "deal", but it still felt like a deal, considering not 6 years earlier this would have cost in at least $5000. In fact, watching the auction prices, TX816s STILL go for around $800, having peaked up to closer to $1400 by the late 1990s. So while it wasn't a $200 Jupiter 8, it was still a good deal.
The TX wound up leaving the arsenal in one of the earliest rounds of studio pruning in 1995: By that time, I had used it on a few dozen tracks, but had fallen into a familiarity with the sound, every time I dialed it in, I was using it for similar things, and I fell out of love with its reedy thin sound. And having a huge coil of cables running behind everything was getting to feel unreasonably cluttery. I found a good home for it for a bit more than I paid for it.... and it never cost me anything in service costs (which I can't say about my other big treasure I haven't told you about yet).
I believe this beast was actually built in 1985: Eight Yamaha DX7 synthesizers in single rack, with just a few buttons and one angry red 2-digit LED for each. You couldn't program these things from the front panel - they were strictly for playback. But by this time I was using a bit of software from Opcode called "Galaxy" which offered visual editing and library management on my Mac (which in 1992 was STILL my SE - imagine, I actually used the same computer for 5 years), so I could load up my favorite sounds and let it rip, and I could tweak them in the editing software.
The TX816 was sort of legendary for me - while it was heavily used by a lot of very hack-y sounding LA musicians (who used the 8 synths to layer up the most lush fake electric piano patch ever), it was championed by my sequencing hero David Gamson of Scritti Politti. If you listen to Cupid+Psyche, you'll hear all of these little clavinet-synth sounds, all a little different, weaving lines of melody, trading parts, almost like a Bach Invention. That was the power of the TX - you had all this SOUND to work with, but all of the sounds were sort of SMALL, so they could dance around eachother without making the mix a mess.
If you're wondering what this sounded like... try to remember "Things Can Only Get Better" by Howard Jones - that funky bassline with a little clavinet interplay - that was the classic DX sound.
Listening to my tracks from this time period, I hear all 8 of those synths going - some doubling lines, one synth being used just for a triangle sound twice in the track... It was ridiculous luxury to be throwing the sonic power of a full DX7 (when new, a $2500 synth) to that single purpose.
I found the TX in a second-hand store in St Paul called Encore Music - they typically had used synths I WASN'T interested in, but I made the rounds anyway. There was always a Korg Poly 61, or a Crumar Stratus, or a Roland Juno-6, or a early 1980s E-Piano module of ill repute and sound... but it was always worth looking. And one day, I saw the TX816 sitting there, with a treasure almost as great: 8 20 foot XLR Cables (high quality) with 1/4" adaptors. $800 for the works, and honestly the cabling was worth at least $200 of that. I couldn't say no, and took it home.
Of course, this officially overloaded my mixer, so I needed to get a second 16-channel submixer. And it was a little noisy, so this was what brought the noisegate into my house. So all told, it was at least $1200 of "deal", but it still felt like a deal, considering not 6 years earlier this would have cost in at least $5000. In fact, watching the auction prices, TX816s STILL go for around $800, having peaked up to closer to $1400 by the late 1990s. So while it wasn't a $200 Jupiter 8, it was still a good deal.
The TX wound up leaving the arsenal in one of the earliest rounds of studio pruning in 1995: By that time, I had used it on a few dozen tracks, but had fallen into a familiarity with the sound, every time I dialed it in, I was using it for similar things, and I fell out of love with its reedy thin sound. And having a huge coil of cables running behind everything was getting to feel unreasonably cluttery. I found a good home for it for a bit more than I paid for it.... and it never cost me anything in service costs (which I can't say about my other big treasure I haven't told you about yet).
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Fall 1996 - The Cube
After being confirmed as "Master of the Abacus" there was work to be done at ValueRx. Lots of work. Well, actually not that much work. Scratch that. NO work. See, there was still a fully functioning department running in Detroit - the work hadn't actually MOVED to Minneapolis yet. They were staffing up for the EVENTUAL work that was to appear. But they hired a good 2 months too early.
Now to be fair, in 1996 people were starting to worry about a thing called Y2K - where thanks to disk-space saving techniques employed in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a very real possibility that computer systems would think that the year 2000 would be the year 1900. Financial services and insurance industries were particularly concerned - interest and annuity calculations, AR aging, etc. So by 1996, most forward-looking institutions were scooping up people who knew COBOL and putting them to work on rewriting vast acres of code - millions of lines of linear procedural code. And this was before the "object oriented" revolution where you make a widget and call out to it, no, basic date calculations were cut and pasted into these long long long programs.
For the record, I never needed to work on a Y2K project. I did do some minor work to make sure that the freight shipping software I helped build would handle it, but that was it.
Anyway, COBOL guys were going fast, and their prices were going up. So it was smart to build a team in advance... but we who were hired early were a bit mystified. And there was a lot of finger-pointing in the ranks of the transition team as to who was to blame for the delays in bringing the work to Minneapolis... Angry James was in the middle of a lot of those discussions, but Mark and Mike were spared, since they were just carrying out the directions.
So what we had: Office space. Staff. Chairs. What we didn't have: MUCH office space, computers. We were double-cubed, with one computer to share. I was in a cube with a traditional Cobol guy... who really liked playing Solitaire. For my part, I liked surfing the new-fangled WEB. We were in this cube 8 hours a day, and took 30 minute turns at the computer, doing nothing.
After a few weeks, we at least got copies of the source code to start reviewing... and by 6 weeks in, the first Detroit Transplants started arriving, and bringing with them actual WORK. But I'm going to level with you, those first 6 weeks were very surreal, because I was paid 40 hours a week to really do nothing. In a different way from the telephone billing system scam in 1993 - that was 6 weeks with no hope. This was just 6 weeks of idleness with the expectation that things would be getting CRAY-ZAY soon enough.
My cubemate, being a very traditional coder, was beyond thrilled when the source code came available, and would enter trance-like states of staring at screens and screens of code, taking meticulous notes. Being who I was, I could review code for maybe 20 minutes before glazing over: Tell me what you need the code to DO, and I'll make it DO it. But "learn the code?" Ugh.
So I started my now-classic method of "when you're bored, find a meeting and sit in on it". And I participated. And before I knew it, they asked me to be the team lead for the Reporting team, because I liked to get to the heart of the problem and solve issues, not just talk about it. Which was awkward for the ACTUAL team leader, who had relocated from Detroit, and was very very used to being the "Skip" of the team, guru of knowledge, and giver of long timeframes for fixing things. When I jumped in and by the next morning had the solution to the problem she said would take 3 weeks to resolve, I was not making a friend.
But I was young - like a puppy dog. Not even 30 years old - I had not yet settled into the comfort of a job you can keep doing for 20 years. (and for the record, I have still not settled into that). I didn't KNOW I was stepping on toes, I honestly thought they'd be thrilled that I found the solution. HA.
Fortunately, the people in charge who had decided to make the move from Detroit were all relatively new to the organization, and weren't fixed in their ways. They saw me not only as Master of the Abacus, but as "someone who gets things done". This reputation would serve me well in early 1997... But let's stay in 1996 for just a moment longer.
In late 1996, near the holidays, the CEO of the company paid us a visit: By this time, the Detroit people had moved in: Over 40 IT people had uprooted their families and decided to move to Minneapolis for their career. Prior to this, ValueRx had offices in Minneapolis, Detroit, Connecticut, and Arizona. This move was to centralize all operations, and allow the company to be more lean and agile.
The CEO popped in and called an impromptu meeting in our lunchroom: 40 people, some from Detroit, some from Arizona, some new employees, some contractors, all crunched into a stinky-microwave lunchroom, while one floor down a much more comfortable conference room sat, unused, because nobody thought to plan this out. The guy (his name is lost to the ages for me, and I refuse to google him) started a half-hearted "thanks for coming together, gang" speech... and a few minutes in, his cellphone rang. He reached to his belt clip and unhooked his then-awesome StarTac flipphone, and took the call. Standing in the middle of a ring of people. He simply pretended we weren't there. For 5 minutes. It was the most rude thing - he didn't excuse himself, he didn't ask the person to call back. In that moment, we just didn't exist to him.
He snapped the phone closed, finished his little speech and asked if we had any questions for him. Someone from Detroit asked him when the corporate offices in Connecticut were moving to Minneapolis, since all of the other divisions already had. His answer:
"We're going to keep that office open - it's just a few of us out there, and my wife likes our neighborhood, and the kids are in a good school, so we're staying out there. We can manage remotely."
After a pep talk about sacrifice for the company, and thanks for relocating. It was incredible. He then scurried off to a meeting, leaving us all in stunned silence.
I think 4 people quit that day, and many more of the people who were planning to relocate decided NOT to do so. Heck, these were COBOL people, and as I mentioned, it was 1996 - there was plenty of work for COBOL people then. In fact, I think that was about the point at which the local people in Minneapolis got a whole lot more work, as the transplants and the stay-behinds all found lucrative work elsewhere.
I will also note that within 3 months, there was a new CEO as well.
Now to be fair, in 1996 people were starting to worry about a thing called Y2K - where thanks to disk-space saving techniques employed in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a very real possibility that computer systems would think that the year 2000 would be the year 1900. Financial services and insurance industries were particularly concerned - interest and annuity calculations, AR aging, etc. So by 1996, most forward-looking institutions were scooping up people who knew COBOL and putting them to work on rewriting vast acres of code - millions of lines of linear procedural code. And this was before the "object oriented" revolution where you make a widget and call out to it, no, basic date calculations were cut and pasted into these long long long programs.
For the record, I never needed to work on a Y2K project. I did do some minor work to make sure that the freight shipping software I helped build would handle it, but that was it.
Anyway, COBOL guys were going fast, and their prices were going up. So it was smart to build a team in advance... but we who were hired early were a bit mystified. And there was a lot of finger-pointing in the ranks of the transition team as to who was to blame for the delays in bringing the work to Minneapolis... Angry James was in the middle of a lot of those discussions, but Mark and Mike were spared, since they were just carrying out the directions.
So what we had: Office space. Staff. Chairs. What we didn't have: MUCH office space, computers. We were double-cubed, with one computer to share. I was in a cube with a traditional Cobol guy... who really liked playing Solitaire. For my part, I liked surfing the new-fangled WEB. We were in this cube 8 hours a day, and took 30 minute turns at the computer, doing nothing.
After a few weeks, we at least got copies of the source code to start reviewing... and by 6 weeks in, the first Detroit Transplants started arriving, and bringing with them actual WORK. But I'm going to level with you, those first 6 weeks were very surreal, because I was paid 40 hours a week to really do nothing. In a different way from the telephone billing system scam in 1993 - that was 6 weeks with no hope. This was just 6 weeks of idleness with the expectation that things would be getting CRAY-ZAY soon enough.
My cubemate, being a very traditional coder, was beyond thrilled when the source code came available, and would enter trance-like states of staring at screens and screens of code, taking meticulous notes. Being who I was, I could review code for maybe 20 minutes before glazing over: Tell me what you need the code to DO, and I'll make it DO it. But "learn the code?" Ugh.
So I started my now-classic method of "when you're bored, find a meeting and sit in on it". And I participated. And before I knew it, they asked me to be the team lead for the Reporting team, because I liked to get to the heart of the problem and solve issues, not just talk about it. Which was awkward for the ACTUAL team leader, who had relocated from Detroit, and was very very used to being the "Skip" of the team, guru of knowledge, and giver of long timeframes for fixing things. When I jumped in and by the next morning had the solution to the problem she said would take 3 weeks to resolve, I was not making a friend.
But I was young - like a puppy dog. Not even 30 years old - I had not yet settled into the comfort of a job you can keep doing for 20 years. (and for the record, I have still not settled into that). I didn't KNOW I was stepping on toes, I honestly thought they'd be thrilled that I found the solution. HA.
Fortunately, the people in charge who had decided to make the move from Detroit were all relatively new to the organization, and weren't fixed in their ways. They saw me not only as Master of the Abacus, but as "someone who gets things done". This reputation would serve me well in early 1997... But let's stay in 1996 for just a moment longer.
In late 1996, near the holidays, the CEO of the company paid us a visit: By this time, the Detroit people had moved in: Over 40 IT people had uprooted their families and decided to move to Minneapolis for their career. Prior to this, ValueRx had offices in Minneapolis, Detroit, Connecticut, and Arizona. This move was to centralize all operations, and allow the company to be more lean and agile.
The CEO popped in and called an impromptu meeting in our lunchroom: 40 people, some from Detroit, some from Arizona, some new employees, some contractors, all crunched into a stinky-microwave lunchroom, while one floor down a much more comfortable conference room sat, unused, because nobody thought to plan this out. The guy (his name is lost to the ages for me, and I refuse to google him) started a half-hearted "thanks for coming together, gang" speech... and a few minutes in, his cellphone rang. He reached to his belt clip and unhooked his then-awesome StarTac flipphone, and took the call. Standing in the middle of a ring of people. He simply pretended we weren't there. For 5 minutes. It was the most rude thing - he didn't excuse himself, he didn't ask the person to call back. In that moment, we just didn't exist to him.
He snapped the phone closed, finished his little speech and asked if we had any questions for him. Someone from Detroit asked him when the corporate offices in Connecticut were moving to Minneapolis, since all of the other divisions already had. His answer:
"We're going to keep that office open - it's just a few of us out there, and my wife likes our neighborhood, and the kids are in a good school, so we're staying out there. We can manage remotely."
After a pep talk about sacrifice for the company, and thanks for relocating. It was incredible. He then scurried off to a meeting, leaving us all in stunned silence.
I think 4 people quit that day, and many more of the people who were planning to relocate decided NOT to do so. Heck, these were COBOL people, and as I mentioned, it was 1996 - there was plenty of work for COBOL people then. In fact, I think that was about the point at which the local people in Minneapolis got a whole lot more work, as the transplants and the stay-behinds all found lucrative work elsewhere.
I will also note that within 3 months, there was a new CEO as well.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Spring 1991 - Vintage
From 1984-1990, I prided myself on having pretty cool new gear: My first synth was a Yamaha DX9, which was the nouveau of the nouveau (even if it sounded like a reedy kalimba with zero power... I ran that thing thing through a chorus, and then later a flanger just to get some meat on the sound...). From there, I was buying new gear at a healthy rate, but in a strange pocket: Never the best, never the worst: I was a straight up midrange playa. And even from the beginning, I had sequencers and drum machines rather than tape machines and good mixers. Somehow that whole "program it for live" thing was in my DNA from the very beginning.
If you were paying attention in the 1980s, the second half of the decade was a horrible one for synthesizers: Yes there were some great machines, but what we were losing were knobs and sliders: Synths were becoming pre-set machines that you could edit if you wanted to search through menus and squint at a 2x40 lcd. You sure as heck weren't going to whip up a new sound in the middle of a gig. I felt pretty strongly about this: I even wrote a letter to Keyboard Magazine that got printed, and it was "letter of the month" lamenting the lack of feel in the new synths...
It wasn't all bad - you had synths with 16 or 32 voices that sounded better than the Fairlights that made us all drool in 1984 - some even had the same waveforms, so you could sort of live your Fairlight dreams, just without the light pen. And I was buying these synths, selling them off after 9-12 months, and going for the next one. I kept Torps Music in Minneapolis going for a while... at least until one day when the keyboard salesguy hollered "hey, it's the money guy". I walked out and never returned.
Anyway, by 1990-1991, I was getting bored of the whole new-box-does-everything mode, and was looking for a thrill. At the time, I was writing a LOT of music, by the way - usually 1-2 new songs a week. The period from 1990-1992 was insanely fertile: over 200 songs. The point is, I was chewing through gear, but it was being USED - I can still listen to any track and tell you exactly what was making what sound. I loved my gear. BUT the state of new music gear in 1991 was pitiful: Roland was recycling the D50 sound engine yet again, Korg had new versions of the M1... Even yamaha with their commitment to strange sounds in FM was only releasing "sample player" instruments.
And sounds on the records... people weren't even trying anymore: they'd buy the new synth, dial up the presets, and record the song. So if you bought that new synth, you either had to use the same sounds (easy), or commit to programming your own signature sound... and did I mention that you'd be doing that with the small display, 4 buttons, 1 slider, and a single dial? Yeah, not very fun.
But in 1990/1991, something magical happened: People started selling off their old gear to get these new machines. Now I understand a guy who is in a YES cover band needing to have a synth that 1) he can carry, 2) stays in tune, and 3) is capable of sounding like more than the synth at the end of ELP "Lucky Man". These are working people, and they were making choices.
And in the process, they were selling the synthesizers that I dreamed about in the early 1980s. My first true vintage purchase was a Roland Jupiter 8. MINT condition. For two hundred dollars. It didn't have a midi interface (I added that myself for another $150), so I could see why the seller wanted to upgrade. But this synth.... it was incredible. This is the synth that percolated behind Duran Duran RIo. Most of Howard Jones "Human Lib" was on this synth. This is a desert island synth, sitting perfect in any mix.
My next purchase was a midi'ed LinnDrum. This classic drum machine from 1983 was limited from a 1991 perspective (16 sounds, as opposed to the 100 drum sounds in 8 meg of ROM in the new Roland R8), but this was the sound of almost every synthpop record from 1983-1986. The drums were in Heaven 17, Human League, even Dead or Alive. And it was covered in buttons and sliders - it was ridiculously easy to use, and it sounded great.
When I think of the gear I added in that 2 year period, it is almost insane, and yet my total outlay was under $3000, which was a lot less than the flagship Kurzweil K2000 supersynth was selling for. I added a Simmons SDS7 brain for $75, and a trigger-to-midi interface for another $50 (the thick Ksssshhhhh drum sounds of synthpop). I bought an Oberheim OBXa for $350 (The Time, Prince, Thompson Twins, and more).
Two treasures: A Rhodes Chroma for $200. This was the last ARP synth, and had a strange fragile sound - used as the lead synth on Rockit by Herbie Hancock, and also used by The Fixx. It wound up the lead on a lot of my tracks. And a MemoryMoog for $550, once owned by local rock legends The Suburbs (I saw that synth on stage many times) - I named it "Dr Voltage" for its huge sound... but truth be told it was insanely unstable and couldn't be relied upon to sound the same from hour to hour... I used the Doctor very sparingly in my compositions.
There were things I passed up. I didn't buy the Oberheim 4 Voice for $300, because it was too huge. I didn't buy any of the minimoogs because they didn't have MIDI, and I wanted/needed to be able to sequence these things (remember - I was a trigger-it-live guy, not a tape guy.) I never bought a TB303 Bassline - even with the acid factor, it just sounded wonky.
So my studio by late 1991 was a full half of the bedroom, creeping toward the ceiling on some seriously overloaded Ultimate Support stands. And I sat there with my Mac SE (still!) running Performer (Still!) running all of these synths into a cheap Tascam line mixer (though the noisier ones got routed through a noise gate), and printing my compositions directly to DAT - never printing the individual tracks.
I'd leave the gear up and on until the song was done. I'd set the verse up on a loop, and bring in synths, twirling the knobs and setting the sliders to find the perfect sound... it was very "of the moment" and I never saved the sounds back - that sound was for that song, and that was it. Print it, move on.
I had no shortage of musical ideas - they were flying out of my head faster than I could keep up anyway, so I never really thought about posterity or replications... I was thinking that if I ever really needed to do a song again, I'd probably do it BETTER then next time. That's what I told myself, but in truth, the few times I did try to do a remake, the sound was different enough that I considered it a new song entirely....
There were a few more treasures that made their way into the studio in 1992, but that will be another post. But Spring 1991, the arrival of the vintage... it was an amazing time, and I made some great music with those machines. What happened to them? Yeah, that's another post again.
If you were paying attention in the 1980s, the second half of the decade was a horrible one for synthesizers: Yes there were some great machines, but what we were losing were knobs and sliders: Synths were becoming pre-set machines that you could edit if you wanted to search through menus and squint at a 2x40 lcd. You sure as heck weren't going to whip up a new sound in the middle of a gig. I felt pretty strongly about this: I even wrote a letter to Keyboard Magazine that got printed, and it was "letter of the month" lamenting the lack of feel in the new synths...
It wasn't all bad - you had synths with 16 or 32 voices that sounded better than the Fairlights that made us all drool in 1984 - some even had the same waveforms, so you could sort of live your Fairlight dreams, just without the light pen. And I was buying these synths, selling them off after 9-12 months, and going for the next one. I kept Torps Music in Minneapolis going for a while... at least until one day when the keyboard salesguy hollered "hey, it's the money guy". I walked out and never returned.
Anyway, by 1990-1991, I was getting bored of the whole new-box-does-everything mode, and was looking for a thrill. At the time, I was writing a LOT of music, by the way - usually 1-2 new songs a week. The period from 1990-1992 was insanely fertile: over 200 songs. The point is, I was chewing through gear, but it was being USED - I can still listen to any track and tell you exactly what was making what sound. I loved my gear. BUT the state of new music gear in 1991 was pitiful: Roland was recycling the D50 sound engine yet again, Korg had new versions of the M1... Even yamaha with their commitment to strange sounds in FM was only releasing "sample player" instruments.
And sounds on the records... people weren't even trying anymore: they'd buy the new synth, dial up the presets, and record the song. So if you bought that new synth, you either had to use the same sounds (easy), or commit to programming your own signature sound... and did I mention that you'd be doing that with the small display, 4 buttons, 1 slider, and a single dial? Yeah, not very fun.
But in 1990/1991, something magical happened: People started selling off their old gear to get these new machines. Now I understand a guy who is in a YES cover band needing to have a synth that 1) he can carry, 2) stays in tune, and 3) is capable of sounding like more than the synth at the end of ELP "Lucky Man". These are working people, and they were making choices.
And in the process, they were selling the synthesizers that I dreamed about in the early 1980s. My first true vintage purchase was a Roland Jupiter 8. MINT condition. For two hundred dollars. It didn't have a midi interface (I added that myself for another $150), so I could see why the seller wanted to upgrade. But this synth.... it was incredible. This is the synth that percolated behind Duran Duran RIo. Most of Howard Jones "Human Lib" was on this synth. This is a desert island synth, sitting perfect in any mix.
My next purchase was a midi'ed LinnDrum. This classic drum machine from 1983 was limited from a 1991 perspective (16 sounds, as opposed to the 100 drum sounds in 8 meg of ROM in the new Roland R8), but this was the sound of almost every synthpop record from 1983-1986. The drums were in Heaven 17, Human League, even Dead or Alive. And it was covered in buttons and sliders - it was ridiculously easy to use, and it sounded great.
When I think of the gear I added in that 2 year period, it is almost insane, and yet my total outlay was under $3000, which was a lot less than the flagship Kurzweil K2000 supersynth was selling for. I added a Simmons SDS7 brain for $75, and a trigger-to-midi interface for another $50 (the thick Ksssshhhhh drum sounds of synthpop). I bought an Oberheim OBXa for $350 (The Time, Prince, Thompson Twins, and more).
Two treasures: A Rhodes Chroma for $200. This was the last ARP synth, and had a strange fragile sound - used as the lead synth on Rockit by Herbie Hancock, and also used by The Fixx. It wound up the lead on a lot of my tracks. And a MemoryMoog for $550, once owned by local rock legends The Suburbs (I saw that synth on stage many times) - I named it "Dr Voltage" for its huge sound... but truth be told it was insanely unstable and couldn't be relied upon to sound the same from hour to hour... I used the Doctor very sparingly in my compositions.
There were things I passed up. I didn't buy the Oberheim 4 Voice for $300, because it was too huge. I didn't buy any of the minimoogs because they didn't have MIDI, and I wanted/needed to be able to sequence these things (remember - I was a trigger-it-live guy, not a tape guy.) I never bought a TB303 Bassline - even with the acid factor, it just sounded wonky.
So my studio by late 1991 was a full half of the bedroom, creeping toward the ceiling on some seriously overloaded Ultimate Support stands. And I sat there with my Mac SE (still!) running Performer (Still!) running all of these synths into a cheap Tascam line mixer (though the noisier ones got routed through a noise gate), and printing my compositions directly to DAT - never printing the individual tracks.
I'd leave the gear up and on until the song was done. I'd set the verse up on a loop, and bring in synths, twirling the knobs and setting the sliders to find the perfect sound... it was very "of the moment" and I never saved the sounds back - that sound was for that song, and that was it. Print it, move on.
I had no shortage of musical ideas - they were flying out of my head faster than I could keep up anyway, so I never really thought about posterity or replications... I was thinking that if I ever really needed to do a song again, I'd probably do it BETTER then next time. That's what I told myself, but in truth, the few times I did try to do a remake, the sound was different enough that I considered it a new song entirely....
There were a few more treasures that made their way into the studio in 1992, but that will be another post. But Spring 1991, the arrival of the vintage... it was an amazing time, and I made some great music with those machines. What happened to them? Yeah, that's another post again.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Fall 1996 - Master of the Abacus
I was finishing up a project at a large life insurance company when I was called by a former co-worker, Mark Loesch, who had left just 3 months earlier on some "special project". Turns out he had been tapped by another former co-worker Mike (who had left just months before I had started, but we all could say we worked at the same place) to help with an ambitious project: A large Prescriptions Benefits Management company, ValueRx, was moving its corporate headquarters from Suburban Detroit to the Twin Cities, and Mike and Mark were helping make it happen... and they needed more help.
Now, I was 29, they were 30 and 31. We were young turks. The fact that Mark had gone from a straight up Programmer to some sort of "project manager" in just a few months was mind blowing to me... so naturally I needed to be a part of this. I arranged for an interview, and of course had some coaching sessions with Mark over martinis. During one of those sessions, we were riffing about things I could to do blow the interview. The obvious "remove the pants" gags were explored, the "pretend to speak only German" gag, but the one that had us laughing the most was the "profess expertise in something completely irrelevant". Interviewing for a DBA position and very seriously presenting as a qualification your entry into the State Fair Crop Art competition, for example. Or professing knowledge of the Abacus.
I walked in wearing a suit and met with Mike, Mark, and James, their boss. James was a bit like Ian McShane in Deadwood - affable but a bit moody, and as I later discovered, very prone to profane outbursts and yelling fits. But in the interview, it was all good. They were DESPERATE to start building a team locally and if Mark was vouching for me, then I was good. The interview was casual and free roaming. And at the end, I turned to Mike and James and said "Gentlemen, there's one more thing I think you should know. I am a MASTER of the ABACUS." They both looked blankly at me, then at Mark, who couldn't believe I had actually done it. I held the character for a moment longer, raising my eyebrows and looking at each meaningfully, before Mark and I collapsed in hysterics.
At that moment, I probably could have lost the gig, but it just felt right. That afternoon, they called and said I was in, and how did I want to join? I was interested in staying a consultant: My experience with Ameridata made me shy about moving away from an hourly compensation model, and in the intervening year, I'd done pretty well as a contractor. So the employment offer was waved off, and they said "in the interest of making it easier for our accountants, we're partnering with just one consulting firm, so call them up".
What followed was a tough call: Now, in 1996, the contractor market in the Twin Cities was pretty loose. Most firms were run by a guy who was contracting himself, and folded a few people under his wing. It was typical to get a 1099 in for 5%-10% of a skim off the top. For a W2 hourly employee, 20% was typical, sometimes 30%. I understand (now more than ever) that there are costs, and that there is value to working through a firm. But having gone through 3 contracting companies and 1 FTE position in the previous 3 years, I felt I had a good feel for what reasonable was.
So when they said they take 40% W2, I laughed and said "nice try. I got the gig, I've already got it. All I'm asking you to do is process the invoices". "Yeah, but what about the next gig? We need to create a long term relationship here" Like HELL - my next gig will be with the next people who find me the WORK - I need you to bill this, and if you didn't have a lock on this client this call would already be OVER, you JERK!
And that's how I met Jay at Safenet. And despite our shouting match, we did get friendly eventually. But he never budged from 40%, and I did cave in, because even with the 40% take, it was still a 20% raise for me. And once that gig was over, I indeed did NOT work with them again.
Back to the Abacus: From that day on, I had something of a reputation with the management at ValueRx - I was the guy who cracked the absurd joke at the interview - that spoke to some insane confidence, so I must be good. That worked to my advantage (and I did do good work there).... but I think it spooked James a little, because the guy almost never spoke to me after that, and mere months later he quit abruptly and went on a vacation to the black hills with a high powered rifle to do target practice on prairie dogs. He was not a stable man.
But it did create an instant bond with Mike, and the three of us, Mike, Mark, and Jim carved quite a niche for ourselves at ValueRx. More on that to come.
Now, I was 29, they were 30 and 31. We were young turks. The fact that Mark had gone from a straight up Programmer to some sort of "project manager" in just a few months was mind blowing to me... so naturally I needed to be a part of this. I arranged for an interview, and of course had some coaching sessions with Mark over martinis. During one of those sessions, we were riffing about things I could to do blow the interview. The obvious "remove the pants" gags were explored, the "pretend to speak only German" gag, but the one that had us laughing the most was the "profess expertise in something completely irrelevant". Interviewing for a DBA position and very seriously presenting as a qualification your entry into the State Fair Crop Art competition, for example. Or professing knowledge of the Abacus.
I walked in wearing a suit and met with Mike, Mark, and James, their boss. James was a bit like Ian McShane in Deadwood - affable but a bit moody, and as I later discovered, very prone to profane outbursts and yelling fits. But in the interview, it was all good. They were DESPERATE to start building a team locally and if Mark was vouching for me, then I was good. The interview was casual and free roaming. And at the end, I turned to Mike and James and said "Gentlemen, there's one more thing I think you should know. I am a MASTER of the ABACUS." They both looked blankly at me, then at Mark, who couldn't believe I had actually done it. I held the character for a moment longer, raising my eyebrows and looking at each meaningfully, before Mark and I collapsed in hysterics.
At that moment, I probably could have lost the gig, but it just felt right. That afternoon, they called and said I was in, and how did I want to join? I was interested in staying a consultant: My experience with Ameridata made me shy about moving away from an hourly compensation model, and in the intervening year, I'd done pretty well as a contractor. So the employment offer was waved off, and they said "in the interest of making it easier for our accountants, we're partnering with just one consulting firm, so call them up".
What followed was a tough call: Now, in 1996, the contractor market in the Twin Cities was pretty loose. Most firms were run by a guy who was contracting himself, and folded a few people under his wing. It was typical to get a 1099 in for 5%-10% of a skim off the top. For a W2 hourly employee, 20% was typical, sometimes 30%. I understand (now more than ever) that there are costs, and that there is value to working through a firm. But having gone through 3 contracting companies and 1 FTE position in the previous 3 years, I felt I had a good feel for what reasonable was.
So when they said they take 40% W2, I laughed and said "nice try. I got the gig, I've already got it. All I'm asking you to do is process the invoices". "Yeah, but what about the next gig? We need to create a long term relationship here" Like HELL - my next gig will be with the next people who find me the WORK - I need you to bill this, and if you didn't have a lock on this client this call would already be OVER, you JERK!
And that's how I met Jay at Safenet. And despite our shouting match, we did get friendly eventually. But he never budged from 40%, and I did cave in, because even with the 40% take, it was still a 20% raise for me. And once that gig was over, I indeed did NOT work with them again.
Back to the Abacus: From that day on, I had something of a reputation with the management at ValueRx - I was the guy who cracked the absurd joke at the interview - that spoke to some insane confidence, so I must be good. That worked to my advantage (and I did do good work there).... but I think it spooked James a little, because the guy almost never spoke to me after that, and mere months later he quit abruptly and went on a vacation to the black hills with a high powered rifle to do target practice on prairie dogs. He was not a stable man.
But it did create an instant bond with Mike, and the three of us, Mike, Mark, and Jim carved quite a niche for ourselves at ValueRx. More on that to come.
Forgot to mention...
Linearity is for chumps. The stories will jump around in time, and I'll intersperse different subjects.
I'll tag these posts with keywords so you can find the whole story, however, and will link across when appropriate to a referenced but already blogged event.
Now back to the stories.
I'll tag these posts with keywords so you can find the whole story, however, and will link across when appropriate to a referenced but already blogged event.
Now back to the stories.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Winter 1989 - Performing Live
In 1984-85, I played keyboards in a live band. By 1986-87, I started doing studio work, which de-emphasized the live playing element. My revelatory moment was in the summer of 1987 when I worked with my friend Al in his 8-track basement studio: The two of us were sequencing synths using MOTU Performer, and laying down tracks to SMPTE Time Code. I was stacking 3-4 synths on a line, and it was amazing. We actually sounded a bit like Stock Aiken Waterman with our song "DYMF".
I bought my own copy of Performer, got a Midi Time Piece, and hooked it up via Serial Port to my Mac SE (not SE/30, just SE). This was my workhorse computer: My Mac256 made it through freshman year, but by the end of that year, the amount of disk switching necessary to finish a 20 page paper was intolerable. I started sophomore year in 1987 with a Mac SE, with the whopping 20 meg hard drive. This became my music machine.
I bought Performer AND Composer, which was the MOTU Notation software, which I used in my music theory classes to notate my assignments, which would have gobsmacked and amazed my teacher, if only he hadn't introduced me to Composer in the first place. We were geeks together, Carleton Macy and I, swapping Mac tips. But that's not this story.
By my Senior year 1989-1990, my Mac SE had been upgraded to 4 whole megs of RAM, and a 170 MEG hard drive. My home studio had grown to include a sampler (Akai S950), a good synth or two (Roland Juno 106, Roland JX8P, Yamaha TX81Z, and the cream of the crop, the Roland D50 Synth), plus two drum machines - a Yamaha RX5 and an Alesis HR16B. I had a 4 track, but I was proud of the fact that with this setup I could actually run everything LIVE from my sequencer. Somehow this seemed very important, that the sounds be triggered "live" by the computer.
It was all the more important to me because my friend and rival Paul Sebastien had brazenly made the switch to the Tape Show when performing Live. Paul, like me, was a great arranger and studio nerd, but unlike me, he was also a fan of printing things to tape and moving on. His studio was always cleaner than mine - just 1-2 good synths, with a good mixing board and tape machine. He multitracked, he bounced, he acted like a real studio guy. And by 1989 he had arranged with some friends to create a "scene" - his friends opened an 18-up club above another nightclub, and Paul ran the house band, called "Smilehouse".
Smilehouse had a great sound, lots of production gloss, and a full lineup of smiling musicians, all of whom (save Paul) were faking their instruments while Paul's beautiful mix was playing on a tape deck back at the sound board.
I'm going to level with you: given the rear view mirror of 20 years, I can't imagine what the difference would be between a guy pressing play on a tape, versus pressing play on a sequencer which was then triggering the synths. But it meant something to me.
So my response was a fake band called "The Acid Police" and there was a prank involved that I'll go into at a different time, but it was a joke that grew into an actual semi-popular band at my college. We got gigs, we sold tapes, we had fans. And when we performed, we performed "live".
And by live I mean: Keyboard stack in front with the Juno and D50 on it. Keyboard stand on the right (my left) with two slabs of wood on it: On the lower slab was the two drum machines and the keyboard and mouse. On the upper slab was a rack case with the mixer, TX81Z, and Roland Delay, next to a second rack case with the sampler and on top of it all was perched my Mac SE. So between songs, I switched floppies, loaded songs, opened files, switched presets, and updated the mix.
Though I wasn't "Playing", I sure as hell was BUSY up there. I also usually left myself at least one line to actually PLAY on stage as well, while Mike and Erik ran around. Oh, Erik was my Andy Fletcher - he had a non-plugged in Keyboard (the JX) and faked, because he was actually just my roommate. Mike Mattison, now of Scrapomatic and the Derek Trucks Band was my amazing singer.
But as we played, I was always up on a riser, with my gear... and as I danced, the riser would rock, and the equipment rack would sway back and forth, the top arc over a foot of travel. I'd have to stop and grab my computer several times per song. Plus there were always mix issues, so I worked that mixer a lot.... and more than once the wrong patches were loaded, leading to a song restart... and about half of the stage banter was "is it done loading yet, Jim?"
Setup and breakdown was always horrible - because I had to make sure everything was plugged in properly, all midi cables were routed properly, all power was good, no ground loops.... Plus, that stuff was HEAVY.
We did I think 4 gigs like this, before I started to realize that in the final analysis, both the Acid Police and Smilehouse were sending a single stereo signal to the PA system. But Paul got to relax and i sweat bullets with every show.
In winter 1989, I got a DAT recorder... at first to capture my compositions... but by Winter of 1990, I was starting to use that DAT.... for playback. Yes, I started doing Tape Shows.
I bought my own copy of Performer, got a Midi Time Piece, and hooked it up via Serial Port to my Mac SE (not SE/30, just SE). This was my workhorse computer: My Mac256 made it through freshman year, but by the end of that year, the amount of disk switching necessary to finish a 20 page paper was intolerable. I started sophomore year in 1987 with a Mac SE, with the whopping 20 meg hard drive. This became my music machine.
I bought Performer AND Composer, which was the MOTU Notation software, which I used in my music theory classes to notate my assignments, which would have gobsmacked and amazed my teacher, if only he hadn't introduced me to Composer in the first place. We were geeks together, Carleton Macy and I, swapping Mac tips. But that's not this story.
By my Senior year 1989-1990, my Mac SE had been upgraded to 4 whole megs of RAM, and a 170 MEG hard drive. My home studio had grown to include a sampler (Akai S950), a good synth or two (Roland Juno 106, Roland JX8P, Yamaha TX81Z, and the cream of the crop, the Roland D50 Synth), plus two drum machines - a Yamaha RX5 and an Alesis HR16B. I had a 4 track, but I was proud of the fact that with this setup I could actually run everything LIVE from my sequencer. Somehow this seemed very important, that the sounds be triggered "live" by the computer.
It was all the more important to me because my friend and rival Paul Sebastien had brazenly made the switch to the Tape Show when performing Live. Paul, like me, was a great arranger and studio nerd, but unlike me, he was also a fan of printing things to tape and moving on. His studio was always cleaner than mine - just 1-2 good synths, with a good mixing board and tape machine. He multitracked, he bounced, he acted like a real studio guy. And by 1989 he had arranged with some friends to create a "scene" - his friends opened an 18-up club above another nightclub, and Paul ran the house band, called "Smilehouse".
Smilehouse had a great sound, lots of production gloss, and a full lineup of smiling musicians, all of whom (save Paul) were faking their instruments while Paul's beautiful mix was playing on a tape deck back at the sound board.
I'm going to level with you: given the rear view mirror of 20 years, I can't imagine what the difference would be between a guy pressing play on a tape, versus pressing play on a sequencer which was then triggering the synths. But it meant something to me.
So my response was a fake band called "The Acid Police" and there was a prank involved that I'll go into at a different time, but it was a joke that grew into an actual semi-popular band at my college. We got gigs, we sold tapes, we had fans. And when we performed, we performed "live".
And by live I mean: Keyboard stack in front with the Juno and D50 on it. Keyboard stand on the right (my left) with two slabs of wood on it: On the lower slab was the two drum machines and the keyboard and mouse. On the upper slab was a rack case with the mixer, TX81Z, and Roland Delay, next to a second rack case with the sampler and on top of it all was perched my Mac SE. So between songs, I switched floppies, loaded songs, opened files, switched presets, and updated the mix.
Though I wasn't "Playing", I sure as hell was BUSY up there. I also usually left myself at least one line to actually PLAY on stage as well, while Mike and Erik ran around. Oh, Erik was my Andy Fletcher - he had a non-plugged in Keyboard (the JX) and faked, because he was actually just my roommate. Mike Mattison, now of Scrapomatic and the Derek Trucks Band was my amazing singer.
But as we played, I was always up on a riser, with my gear... and as I danced, the riser would rock, and the equipment rack would sway back and forth, the top arc over a foot of travel. I'd have to stop and grab my computer several times per song. Plus there were always mix issues, so I worked that mixer a lot.... and more than once the wrong patches were loaded, leading to a song restart... and about half of the stage banter was "is it done loading yet, Jim?"
Setup and breakdown was always horrible - because I had to make sure everything was plugged in properly, all midi cables were routed properly, all power was good, no ground loops.... Plus, that stuff was HEAVY.
We did I think 4 gigs like this, before I started to realize that in the final analysis, both the Acid Police and Smilehouse were sending a single stereo signal to the PA system. But Paul got to relax and i sweat bullets with every show.
In winter 1989, I got a DAT recorder... at first to capture my compositions... but by Winter of 1990, I was starting to use that DAT.... for playback. Yes, I started doing Tape Shows.
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