You must have a background in reading music from playing trombone growing up?
When I was a kid, I played for years in our school's concert band and knew how to sight read, but I can’t do that anymore. With the bands at Morrisound, my biggest contribution was trying to keep everyone in tune, as well as making sure we used new strings and drums heads, and the drums were on time and free from stick clicks, etc. I never told a band how to write parts or anything. I was influenced by punk rock and turned off by the pompous attitude of bigger bands like Kiss and Queen at the time. I used to do live sound, and I went to a studio with a friend’s band and thought it was amazing. There wasn’t a drunk guy yelling at me to turn the guitar up, and the rooms didn’t sound like shit because it was a controlled environment. The engineer didn’t want to have anything to do with us because of our style, so I made a deal with the band to do a 7-inch where I agreed to split the costs with them. I went around to the local studios in Tampa, most of which did jingles. And this is where I’m nothing without the guys at Morrisound [Recording]: Jim and Tom Morris, and Rick Miller. I was just a young guy in awe of them and how good all the bands sounded coming out of the studio. Even in their original location, they really had it going on. There was a little shoebox-sized 8-track studio with a 1/2-inch, 8-track Otari machine that Rick Miller used to start tracking Obituary’s Slowly We Rot. [It was finished at the “new” Morrisound on 56th Street.] I had recorded a couple of punk bands and worked nights as an assistant engineer, from ‘83 onwards. Jim and Rick were both electrical engineers, and Tom had a master’s degree in chemical engineering and had done quite well. They had encouraged me to get an electrical engineering degree, so I went to USF to acquire that while working nights.
I read that the second Morrisound location [on 56th Street] had sound panels that could be adjusted for classical sessions versus drier rock or jazz recordings.
Tom was a genius because he built the studio from the ground up. The A Room was very large, with these sound-absorbing panels. Those panels were plywood on one side, with high-end acoustic insulation on the other. They were about 2 ft. by 6 ft. and 5 inches deep, placed strategically along the walls. You could open them up to deaden the room, or you could close them to make it more live. Classical pianist Robert Helps would come to record with those guys – you could fit a larger orchestral ensemble in there – and there were isolation booths as well. Their other remarkable innovation was to come up with a design for 8-channel headphone mixers, and there were about ten of them around the room. Each musician could have their own mix. Nowadays this is all taken for granted, but in 1983 it was a big deal. They also had a friend, Rick Mabry – a mathematics professor – and he was working on locking up the 24-track machine to video and doing lots of mad scientist stuff for them. He was brilliant. These guys were super fucking smart. Back in the day, all of the music for Busch Gardens amusement park shows were recorded at Morrisound, and all of these guys were bad-ass jazz session musicians.
How did the shift towards heavy metal happen at Morrisound?
Dan Johnson signed Avatar/Savatage to his label, Par Records, and they recorded their first two records [The Dungeons Are Calling and Sirens] with him at Morrisound. He also signed and recorded Crimson Glory. He put heavy metal on the map at the studio, and I started assisting him on Agent Steel’s Unstoppable Force and Whiplash’s Insult to Injury. He was the producer, and Jim and Tom were the engineers. Dan also mixed the No More Color album from Coroner, which I engineered. The studio was one of the first to get a TC Electronic 2290 delay sampler, which enabled them to get that big drum sound and manipulate it. The biggest problem with metal was making it sound good when it was fast. Take a rock drumbeat, “Boom, smack, boom, smack.” Anybody can make that sound good. If you can’t, you’re not a very good engineer. When it gets faster, it’s hard to get that definition. So, we would use Cakewalk software with MIDI and noise gates to trigger drums, which, in Tampa at the time, was quite advanced. Jim was also recording bands like Nasty Savage, and the production sounded great with their techniques, so it grew and grew.
You put these techniques to use engineering Death’s Leprosy with Dan Johnson producing. The book also speaks to you having a good rapport with bands early on.
