Autobiography

My Control Room in 1957:

Between the 2 Wollensak reel-to-reel tape decks was my home made mixing console. There were no audio schools then, so I was pretty much on my own about making stuff work. It took a lot of experimenting. I was given an unused machine shop in Brooklyn Automotive high school to research and develop it. Cutting and drilling the panels, bending them into shape and wiring it up from scratch. The mic hanging from my Atlas boom stand was my first Shure 55s dynamic cardiod mic. The two Wollensak mics that came with the tape recorders were on Atlas stands. Under the console were my audio dictionary and glossary and RCA tube manuals. To the right were my 33rpm LP's, and cataloged in album covers were my 78rpm and 45rpm vinyl record collecton, my conga from my trip to Mexico and my Columbia Hi-Fi Stereo phonograph player. It took 2 summers working as a cashier to earn the money to support my dream.

Letter Of Introduction:

It is difficult to sum up forty-four years of audio engineering experience in a single page. But after often being asked how I got started in the recording business, I started thinking back. Ever since I can remember, while growing up in Manhattan, dabbling with mechanical and electronic components was a part of me. Gilbert Erector and Chemistry Lab sets, electric trains, construction kits, plastic and balsa wood model airplanes with gasoline engines, co2 propelled racing cars, right up to constructing custom skate boards, go-carts and two story clubhouses right on 2nd Avenue and 62nd street. Early piano lessons from 6 years old became my musical foundation, and my Great Aunt Helen's perpetual harmonizing in my ear led to my vocal involvement in my Doo Wop group at 13 years old and then on to my Jazz harmony big band vocal group in my late teens.    Me, on baritone and sometimes 2nd tenor and falsesetto, Johnny Fielder, the best 2nd tenor ever, Alex Sczylagyi on 1st tenor, Bob Constantino on perfect pitch bass, and the inimitable Hal Piest on Lead vocals at the Tuxedo Ballroom at 86th street and 3rd Avenue every Sunday Night. Originally the Melodies with Dan Rivera and Mike Kearney.

Our 1st place trophy awarded to us in the competition of the best 30 doo wop groups from the five boroughs of NY. Held at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House in Manhattan in 1962. Oh! What a night!

I guess the natural progression was to combine my electromechanical and musical talents into constructing my own home recording studio as a base to develop arrangements and record myself and my vocal group.

When I began my career as an engineer, there were no high school or college courses for audio engineering. One knocked on studio reception doors for an interview, and most times never got past a disgruntled voice on an intercom speaker in the halls of the Brill Building. When you did get an interview, you might be asked if you were familiar with an Ampex 300 duplicator deck, or a Neumann M-49, and you would be creative (lie) and say, "Of course, why I practically designed it!" or "That's all I used on my last album!"

Hangin' with Les Paul at the Iridium in New York

But, when I finally got the job working for the guy who built Les Paul and Mary Ford's (see "Les Paul and Mary Ford" below...) home studio in the '40's, Dave Sarser (see "Studio 3" below...), and after fetching 8,000 cups of coffee, mopping the floors and cleaning the toilets, and getting to do mic set-ups and editing 30,000~@#$%^!*> dialogue and music cues, and cutting acetates on Neumann, Scully and Fairchild lathes, and moonlighting recording sessions of my own Doo Wop group for auditions for the gigs we got with WMCA and disk jockey Cousin Brucie, I would eventually get thrown into a session here with the Supremes, and there with Johnny Ray and Benny Goodman, and Ruby and the Romantics.

"Not bad..." I thought, "...for a start!" But the studio I was working in, as cool as it was, I felt needed streamlining. So I stayed better "in tune" with these sessions by automating everything I could think of that might have hindered the flow of the previous session, modifying the console, the talk back, playback, cue systems, echo chambers, mic pre's, deck alignments, the room acoustics, and esthetics. By the time Sarah Vaughan and Leslie Gore showed up, I was a lot closer to "capturing the moment". I still maintained my own studio at home, just so I could be more involved in developing new production techniques, and my own music.

2 track version of A-1 Sound's 3 track Presto, Model 825 introduced in '57.

As my engineering career was growing, and 3 track was becoming obsolete, and tubes were turning into transistors, I was encouraged to become more and more involved in constructing 4 to 8 track studios for clients like Luther Dixon, Eddie Singleton, Jeff Barry (The Monkey's) and Bert Berns of Bang Records (Rickey Derringer & The McCoys/Tommy James & the Shondells/The Young Rascals). I even designed and installed telephone patches in Screen Gems and April Blackwood Music so they could audition songs directly over phone lines (as a result of my technical tutoring from inspirational mentors and knowledge givers, Dave Sarser-Studio 3, Grant Ellerbach of Kapp Records, Penn Stevens and Paul Prestipino at the Record Plant and Eric Porterfield of Columbia Records. I won't forget them).

My Studio54 all access pass and Cabaret license for Ondine.

In the latter half of the 60's, when the "Music Revolution" was beginning, the sound systems in Manhattan clubs were not equipped to handle the heightened energy of the acts that were to follow. I wanted to insure that the artists that I was producing and mixing for had more than adequate sound systems to perform with. I was commissioned to install sound systems in the first Discotheques of the '60's, when Discotheques were unique and had magic. Places like Howard Pratt's, Claude Bell's and Geist Ely's discotheques, Le Club, Ondine and The Barge, and Cybil Burton's Arthur's , Il Mio at Del Monaco, Coney Island Pub, Harlowe's and in clubs like Electric Circus and Steve Paul's The Scene, where I was also hired as chief discaire (D.J) and handled the stage managing and sound (what there was of it then) for guys who played there, like Hendrix and The Doors, Joplin, Buffalo Springfield, The Druids of Stonhenge (still going strong today), The Denims, The Losers, The Pilgrims and The Rascals (way before Fillmore East).

My Control Room in 1964:

My first Shure 55s dynamic cardiod mic hanging from my Atlas boom stand had long been sold to my first client/friend Butch Giacomontonio. My first apartment on 89th Street in Manhattan was now the home of my new custom made console which was as close a replica of Dave Sarser's Pultec Blue Console as I could make. The panel was made from a discarded Burrough's Business Machine's computer desktop that I brought to my old high school's machine shop (at Brooklyn Automotive). I cut and folded it, drilled it out and built a plywood cabinet for it. I was eventually able to get the components for console on Courtland Street in downtown Manhattan, famous for old surplus radio parts (cheap). I got the Allen Bradley pots and RCA industrial knobs, 3 position toggle switches and Graybar telephone type pushbutton switches there after much scrounging. I wired it up, added the tube preamplifiers that Dave Sarser paid me with for engineering for him, and additional clones I wired myself. They served as the console's summing amps and program amps and were mounted beneath the panel that I painted a Burrough's Blue, (kinda' like "Pultec Blue"-ish).

(The mic in the foreground was my Electo-Voice 666 dynamic mic).

The audio patch bay was made from an old video patchbay discarded from Metromedia's television studios (Channel 5 TV NY). It had been replaced and was being thrown out, so I took it to the mail room, packed it up and mailed it to myself. I rewired it for audio, attached a piano hinge to one end and built a plywood cabinet around it. I kept the console's homemade mic pre-amps and power supplies that I made inside the patchbay cabinet. I discovered through my friend, Doug Weber, a colleague from Channel 5, my Eico Master Control pre-amplifiers. They had extreme tonal range served as my outboard tube equalizers. They sat on the shelves above the console and supported my Weston VU Meters that I mounted in an aluminum chassis. On the shelf above that was my self built Dyna-Kit power amplifier. And the prototype experimental amplifier chassis used by Fisher to develop their X-101 amplifier. Dave got it for me for $10. It served as the studio playback amp. The shelf just above the console held my Empire Troubador Dynamic belt driven turntable, My Electrovoice shotgun mic, and my 45rpm collection. Above the patchbay cabinet was my American Concertone 505 reel to reel tape recorder that Dave got me from trumpeter Bobby Hackett. It sat on the shelf next to my Eico reel to reel tape recorder. The 4 attenuators for the meters were just beneath the Concertone. My Heathkit oscilloscope and RCA vtvm calibration and test equipment was at the right of the patchbay. The Eico 377 sine and square wave audio generator was atop the Concertone.

When my downstairs neighbors, Ted and Betty moved out of their leased apartment a month early, they left me their keys and a supply of Betty's peach cobbler. I flew my mic cables out the window into their vacant apartment and called Butch's brother, Mickey Gee and the G 3 and had my first very own, full blown, independent, split-level album session in Ted and Betty's place at 252 East 89th Street in Manhattan in 1964.

Later in the `60's...

(twenty albums, five studios i.e., Studio 3, Talentmasters, IncredibleSounds, Le Studio, Jaysina, A-1 Sound, Regent, Kapp, and eight years of engineering later), while producing two groups for United Artists (Dream Spectrum) and Epic Records (Phil Galdston's CISUM) at CBS, V.P. John McClure set up an interview for me when a staff engineer position opened at Columbia Records. CBS did hire me with a certain enthusiasm that I won't forget. They asked me to splice (razor blade edit) some tape recorded music together. My g-zillions of prior editing experiences paid off in a big way.

making the "first released" Dolby Album in history! (See "References" below...)

Room 409 at CBS NYC, 1969. So you make their records for them, why not? You want to help Bobby Vinton make a hit record, don't you?...and Johnny Winter (and...Live) and Edgar Winter (Free Ride), and George Harrison /Peter Asher, and like that. And with everything you and Columbia Records, with their sophisticated technology, can offer, in order that they may compete in the world marketplace, you do it!

Meanwhile Gregg Allman (Laid Back), Mott the Hoople (live at the Uris Theatre), Lou Reed (Berlin), Martin Mull and ZZ Top's (Fandango) managers started calling and wanted me to engineer their albums. That was when I discovered the Record Plant Recording Studios. A new wave of recording environments. Here's an engineer's dream: super talented artists, plus technological sophistication in studios, neatly tying a home environment to state-of-the-art electronics. And then they even put one in a truck(!)...which one would be glad to manage and engineer out of, for three or four years. So I did just that.

Record Plant crew with me and Frank Hubach (to my right front) and Gregg Calby (behind my left) at Kennedy Convention Center load-in dock to record President Nixon's Innaugural Ball.

Around 1975, I was approached by a New York nightclub entrepreneur, Jimmy Pullis, (aka JP, who I had first met outside Ondine hawking Timothy Leary albums under both arms). He agrees that it's a great idea for me to install a hi-tech sound stage in his club, audition and book "candidates" for record labels. So I took it another step and designed his club, "JP's" and later a place called "TRAXX" as a night club with a recording studio environment with a great monitoring and lighting system, and some video which turns out to be a fantastic place for Bonnie Raitt, Phoebe Snow, James and Carly, Dave Mason, Dickie Betts, Manhattan Transfer, Stevie Goodman and Billy Joel to jam (to mention a few). So I made a little history... and then I ended up going out on the road with these guys, all over the world, mixing in 24,000 seat convention centers.

Then, independent jingle composer, Edd Kalehoff came into the picture and asked if I was interested in co-producing jingles. What engineer doesn't crave string and horn dates, tons of background singers, choruses, synths, midi sequencers, all locked to video, recording 20 to 50 piece orchestras daily? Or starting at nine in the morning with a piano road map and click track, then overdubbing the rhythm section, harp, tympani, percussion, background and lead vocals, voice-overs, and by six you've mixed ten 30 second spots to be aired nationally on the Super Bowl the next day and get residuals five days a week for five years? As well as managing his 24 track recording facility. You'd probably amuse his offer and go for it. I graciously accepted Edd's offer. Finally, a great job, with income! I also got to produce some bands there. Then...

In 1983, having two kids, who tend to rewrite the script for you, I moved to Westchester N.Y. and built a studio in my house... and my own clientele to match. And for eight years I worked with New York-based composer/musician/producer types, producing jingles, albums, t.v. themes, composing on computer based midi sequencers locked to the tape transport for the analog stuff, and it's going great. By the '90's my wife got homesick for Illinois, so we moved near her home town of Winnetka, to Wilmette with the boys.

In 1993, I bought a renovated building that used to house the Jung Institute. I constructed Reeves Audio Recording in it. It's in the southeast end of Evanston, just north of Rogers Park. It's now an all digital 64 track Pro Tools 5.2 Total Recall hard disc recording facility, and AVID Express DV hard disc video recording and editing has been added with lots of automation to keep the music flowing. Now I'm even making music videos. I am still loving the creating of music and occasionally even get to sing some doo-wop.

Yours truly, Jim Reeves, Audio Engineer/Audio Consultant/Producer/Composer/Musician/Singer/Maintenance Engineer/AKA-Recording Product Helper

P.S. My kids (among other things) are musicians/engineers/film producers and have their own studio now, too!

and 2004...

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