Interesting thing to do at AES

[Brad Lunde]

I thought I'd let you guys know that we have finally put the finishing touches on something TA and our manuf have been working on for a while.

After AES on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 7pm we are doing "How to place a Mic" Seminars at Hyde Street Studios downtown. Thursday is guitars with William Whitman, Friday is vocals with Al Schmitt, Saturday is drums with Barry Rudolph. These guys can really explain their approach to micing and I think there's be a ton of info to glean from their talks. They are doing it for free, so it all free to you. Plus I've let them all know ahead of time that this is NOT a disguised "buy this mic" talk. This must be the real deal.

Dirk Brauner got Al to do vocals, Geoff Daking got William Whitman (The Fixx, Cindi Lauper) to do guitars, David Bock got Hyde Street for us (also volunteering their space), David M. from Mercury Recording Equipment is even going to supply a van to shuttle people from the convention center over to Hyde Street (he's launching Mercury at AES and will have all his stuff set up for demo in Studio D at Hyde Street). I think most of our manufacturers will be hanging there from 7-9 each night so it should be a fun hang. Friday night Hyde Street is having a party after Al, at around 8pm to ????.

Hyde Street is one of the few remaining big room studios in SF and has TONS of history. This should be fun! You can come to our booth at AES to get an invite and find out more.

Hope you can come!

BTW, here's a free pass to AES :
http://www.aes.org/events/117/vip.cfm?338

Brad

[Jules]

Neat!

[oudplayer]

You definitely should check out Hyde St. Studios - a piece of San Francisco history. Hope to see you all there - I used to work in there a bit...

[James Lugo]

I'm down, see ya there Brad!

[Jules]

Was Blue Oyster Cults "Dont fear the reaper done there?"

http://www.hydestreet.com/history.html

[Lindell]

Yummy, I wish I could make it.... Sounds like three awesome nights...

[James Lugo]

No I think it was done on Saturday Night Live..."more cowbell". lol
Bruce Dickinson produced it or was it Christopher Walkin?

[Bob Olhsson]

Hyde Street was originally built as the Wally Heider San Francisco studio. The first really big hit act to break out of Heider's San Francisco was Credence Clearwater Revival. Crosby Stills Nash and Young recorded a great deal there both as a group and separately. Virtually all of San Francisco's psychedelic groups recorded at Heider's and most of the leading stars of the late '60s recorded at least several songs in one of the rooms.

Wally Heider was an old friend of my mentor, Cal Harris who had interned at United-Western Recorders where Wally had been the manager of remote recording. As it became more and more obvious that Motown had outgrown Detroit, I started looking really hard at where I wanted to move in order to continue working in the recording industry. Thanks to an introduction from Cal, Don Gooch, one of our Detroit engineers, was working at Heider's in San Francisco. It was probably the best equipped studio I had ever been in and was a regular haunt of Glynn Johns and numerous other industry notables from all over the world. At the time, late 1971, it was looking like most of the recording industry was going to be living and working in San Francisco. Heider's was the leading facility in town and I jumped at the chance to work there and live in San Francisco.

Unfortunately the San Francisco scene many of us were expecting never materialized. I wound up leaving Heider's after a few weeks because the combination of the hours and the drug scene had made me realize I'd had more than enough of the bleeding edge.

Filmways, Wally's backer, fired him after his five year contract was up and the studio's status rapidly declined because Filmways wouldn't spend the money to keep Wally Heider's on the bleeding edge. Eventually it was closed and all of the gear was auctioned off. The present group of owners acquired the empty building, brought their own studio gear in and sublet space to others over the years including Sandy Perlman.

I just read the official "history." The first room was actually studio C and studio A was the last built. It's utterly ironic that C was considered the magical room yet it ended up being used for storage.

[Xestenz]

Originally posted by Jules
Was Blue Oyster Cults "Dont fear the reaper done there?"

http://www.hydestreet.com/history.html

Yeah, Jules, I think it was. My old band 'The End' recorded there a couple of times, and everytime we worked in Studio D we heard someone mentioning that Blue Oyster had recorded '(Don't Fear...)' through that console. It kind of became a running joke with us.

Very cool studio, and I love to go back and listen to those old recordings we did there. Great vibe. Wish I could be there for the seminars -- sounds like a great time.

Regards,

David