Malcolm Toft [Tape Op #26] has a career spanning over 50 years in the professional audio industry. He started at CBS Studios in London and went on to work at the iconic Trident Studios. There he began as an audio engineer, then moved to studio manager, working on records by The Beatles, David Bowie, T. Rex, James Taylor, Joe Cocker, and many others. As a designer, he founded Trident Audio and was responsible for the design of many of their iconic consoles, including the A Range, B Range, Series 80, and TSM. He eventually became the co-founder of Trident Audio Developments. Toft went on to form another console company, Malcolm Toft Associates, which eventually led to Toft Audio Designs and the founding of Ocean Audio. Currently he manufactures a range of professional audio products under his own name. In 2009, he was awarded a visiting professorship by Leeds College of Music, and The University of West London awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Science. I have always been an avid Trident console user, so it was pleasure to sit down with Malcolm and discuss his career in the audio industry.
What were your audio influences growing up in England, and how did you come to choose music audio design as a career?
The light that came into my life was rock 'n' roll – when I first heard Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry. My dad would buy these 78 records, and we listened to them on our mum and dad's gramophones. The radio would have a little 7-inch by 4-inch elliptical speaker and that's how we'd listen to all these records. No bass end and no top end! All just in the middle frequencies. That's all we ever heard at home; we didn't hear the full spectrum of music, which we take for granted so much these days. When I went into the studio with my band and we did demo recordings, we had to plug into the wall; we couldn't use our amplifiers. The engineer gave us back our sound through headphones. I heard broad spectrum audio for the first time because they had 12-inch speakers with tweeters. This changed my life to hear music properly; the bass and treble. And I knew that day that this was going to be my career. I knew I wanted to be involved in the recording of sound, because it was fantastic to be in control and capture it. That's where I set my sights. I was living at home, and I built a studio in my front room out of preamplifiers – I've always been interested in how things went together. Every week, with my week's wage, I'd I buy an Italian hi-fi preamplifier. I built a cabinet, put six preamplifiers into the cabinet, and connected them all together. I couldn't understand why there was no output. When I turned the volume up on one preamp it affected the volume on the other. So, I put my best resistors in there to separate them. My dad had a tape recorder, so I did some recording at home. I ended up recording some bands in my front room. I learned how to splice tape a little bit. When I left school, I managed to get myself a job in the studio when I was 17 years old and was paid £5 a week. I went to Tony Pike’s studio to work, which was in his house. He had a 6-channel mixer; it had little pots on it. There was no talkback or foldback [monitors]. There was just EQ, treble and bass, six master level controls, and mic preamps and that fed into a mono tape recorder. The only reverb we had was a Hammond spring unit hanging from the ceiling to isolate it. We had no compressors. The thing was, I learned a tremendous amount. Tony was a drummer, and he had high standards. He taught me about microphone placement and about different microphones. We only had one condenser microphone, because, back in those days, condenser microphones were very expensive. Most of our other mics were AKG D19s. They were the precursor to the Shure SM57s, which we couldn't get in the UK. He taught me how to train my ears, because we didn't have solo buttons back then. I trained my ears to pick out the bass during the recording, or during the mix. I’d pick out the guitar, and isolate it in my head. We take this for granted so much these days, but without the technology, that's how we worked. We recorded the band to mono, so we'd record the guitar, bass, and drums in mono onto one tape machine. Then we played that back and added the vocals onto another tape machine.
After your experience with Tony Pike, where did you go to further your engineering career?
A couple of years later I was about 19, and I got a job at CBS Studios in London. I ended up running their Studio 2. However, the break came in 1960. I was working at CBS and one of the guys said to me, "There's a new studio opening in London, and they’ve got the first 8-track recorder in Europe." CBS Studios only had a 4-track recorder. We thought that was amazing – eight tracks on one tape! Wow, that's...
