I know you started out doing hardware long before there were any plug-ins. What is your background?
My first job was a summer job working at a military contractor in New Jersey, which exposed me to exactly what I didn't want to do — working with a bunch of people bored out of their skulls designing God-awful defense systems. I graduated college with an engineering degree and went through the magazines — Guitar Player, Keyboard — and made a list and sent a resume out to all of those guys and ended up at Eventide. This was about 1984- 1985. By this time they had already designed the first Harmonizer and the first digital delay. My first job that had to do with audio there was to try to do an emulation of an AMS non-linear reverb algorithm from the RMX 16... that was kind of cool.
A lot of people really dig the old AMS stuff.
I just bought an old RMX 16 on eBay and one of the 1580s too, which are pretty cool.
Do you buy the old gear to try to emulate various pieces in your plug-ins?
We're not really making a conscious effort to emulate anything, but we do want to have some of the flavor of the older gear and try to introduce kind of "analogness" to things. As I started to work on EchoBoy we ran into this whole world of old delay effects. You know, everybody has their own personal favorites. So I just made it a mission to try to get one of everything. I'm not quite there yet.
Ha, that's an expensive mission! You must have quite an arsenal building up.
I would talk to so many people and you'd hear things about what makes certain things sound great. On mic pres and EQs some people think it's the tranny [transformer] that gives it the sound. Sometimes it's hard to exactly hear this, so I wanted to have these in my hands to check it out. I'll hook it up to an analyzer and run sweeps and distortion and spectrum analysis, and then I start looking at schematics. For example, with the [Neve] 1073 I went back to my engineering roots and worked out all of the equations for the EQ parts and generated these giant, God-awfully ugly equations. Then I generated the theoretical way it is supposed to sound, and then I did a lot of listening. Some of these old schematics are really badly written. It's kind of like a mystery for me, trying to suss out what's going on with this stuff.
How long did you work at Eventide?
