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 impossible! Around March 1968, I got a ticket to the opening party for Trident Studios. At that time, there were very few independent studios in London. They were all owned either by CBS, Pye, or Decca – all the major record labels had studios. I went to the opening of Trident Studios, and they happened to be looking for an engineer. There were hundreds of people there – it was on four floors. I ended up in the control room, with this desk that looked like the Starship Enterprise. It had eight group faders on it and eight meters. I had never seen a desk with eight meters on it. This was amazing! I ended up talking to one of the guys there and met Barry Sheffield, the owner of the studio. Barry came up and said, "Where are you guys from?" I said, "I'm from CBS Studios." He asked, "What do you do?" I said, "I'm an engineer there." And he asked, "Is anyone looking for a job?" I put my hand up jokingly, thought nothing more of it, and went home after about an hour. Three days later, I got a phone call at CBS – it was Barry Sheffield, and he said, "We're serious about that job." I thought, "You're kidding me." I went to Trident Studios after work one evening; they sat me in front of the desk and gave me a tape to mix. I did the mix, went home, and a few days later I got a letter offering me a job at Trident Studios. I still have that letter to this day! The job as engineer paid £1000 a year. In those days £20 a week was a lot of money. I was earning just under £20 at CBS, so this was a step forward. It also included very good overtime rate – double time.
How did that change your career, and who did you work with at the studio?
I joined Trident Studios the very first day it opened, as an engineer. The staff was me, Barry Sheffield, and a maintenance guy named Ron Goodwin: We were the only three there. I was the first engineer they ever employed. My first session was with one of the guys from The Animals; Alan Price. Two months later, this guy named Tony Visconti [ Tape Op #29] was assigned to the studio. I was given Tony to work with, and Tony had just come over from America. He was cutting his teeth. I'd only been there for three months, but we hit it off well and I became Tony's engineer for the next three years. We did T.Rex and David Bowie. Tony and I are still very good friends, and Tony credits me with teaching him everything he knows about engineering. He said, in a video interview, that without me his career wouldn't have taken off. How about that? [ laughter] It is amazing. By July of 1968, we were recording "Hey Jude" by The Beatles. The Beatles were pretty fed up with Abbey Road [EMI Studios] because Abbey Road had bought an 8-track, but they wouldn't put it into service. Their engineers took a year to check it out. The Beatles had done Sgt. Pepper's [ Lonely Hearts Club Band], and they were pissed off because they had to run two 4-track machines together. It was difficult. So, when they heard we had an 8-track machine, they thought they'd come and try us out. The thing about Trident was the atmosphere was completely different from Abbey Road. Abbey Road was very structured. The engineers wore white coats. You had to get a docket to get a microphone. The cafeteria closed at 5 p.m. It was very bureaucratic at Abbey Road. It was only when The Beatles came along that they swept that all away, because they had to keep The Beatles happy. At Trident, we were a completely different kettle of fish. You could get a toasted sandwich at 3 a.m., because we had a guy, Jerry, who would live upstairs in the kitchen and made tea and toast. There was no ceremony. You could get a microphone whenever you wanted. It was more like an American studio. That was the vision of Norman Sheffield [Barry's brother] when they opened the studio: To run it like an American studio. None of this bureaucratic English stuff, because we were very stiff upper lip in those days. It was all about class. If you spoke with an upper-class accent, you got on. It was very much like that in the '50s and '60s, right up into the '80s, really. It was very class-structured in England. But Trident was not like that because we were just a bunch of people interested in music. The Beatles loved it. I absolutely loved it. They did "Dear Prudence," "Honey Pie," and a lot at Trident. Elton John came in with Gus Dudgeon and we did the Elton John album. Then Gus brought in David Bowie, and we did "Space Oddity." We did "Walk on the Wild Side" with Lou Reed. I recorded James Taylor's first album [ James Taylor], with Peter Asher [#137] producing. We made so much iconic music at Trident Studios. The first desk we had was a Sound Techniques eight-channel console. I never particularly liked the EQ in it. I was always fighting the EQ a little bit, but it was a good desk and ahead of its time. This is how I got into desk making, because we then went to 16-track. They supplied us with a new desk, and the 8-track went up to a room that we made into a remix room. The Sheffields realized that we were tying up valuable studio space just mixing. That second Sound Techniques desk was really a bit of a turkey. Mechanically, the modules were not very good. There wasn't a proper bus – they were all hardwired and the connectors were held up with some curtain rail underneath. The 16-track replay was on solenoids that were pushed by micro switches. Ultimately, it failed, and we would lose tracks when trying to replay. It wasn't a good desk.
When did you start building your own consoles?
