I spoke with Joe about why he opened his studio and why he closed it in 2003. We also spoke of his relationship with the legendary songwriting and production team Gamble and Huff, as well as his approach to recording The O'Jays, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, Lou Rawls, The Jacksons and hundreds of other artists. During this interview his son Mike, a Grammy-awarded engineer, who added his unique perspective, eventually joined us.
"What drove me to open the studio was my working for Cameo-Parkway Records [as chief engineer] — at that time the largest independent label in the world. They dominated the pop charts with Chubby Checker's 'The Twist', Bobby Rydell, The Dovells, The Orlons and Dee Dee Sharp. I believe a lot of the success of Cameo-Parkway came from a TV show that was broadcast from Philadelphia — American Bandstand. Dick Clark [the show's host] was a very likable guy, an easygoing and accessible person. You could hook up with Dick Clark and say, 'Listen to my record.' If he liked it, he'd play it. But I was truly bitten by the bug of the studio business and recording music. I realized I had one of two choices: I could move to L.A., New York or Nashville — which at the time were the only places records came out of — or I could try to open my own studio."
The offices at 250 South Broad Street were the Philadelphia equivalent of the Brill Building in New York. Leon Huff worked as a staff writer for Double Diamond Music. Kenny Gamble worked in a nearby office with Jerry Ross, who had a series of hit records with Jay & the Techniques and later Peaches & Herb. "I had worked with Kenny and Leon separately at Cameo where they were both outside clients, but they met in the hallway of the 250 building. They started to work together and liked the chemistry. Kenny had had some success on his own with The Intruders, and he was in a singing group called Kenny Gamble and The Romeos — that was '64, '65. I recorded Gamble and Huff's first joint productions — The Intruders, Jerry Butler and The Soul Survivors' 'Expressway To Your Heart' — in '66, I believe. Meanwhile, Tommy [Thom] Bell, who was the keyboard player in The Romeos, was starting to [produce] The Delfonics. I made my move in '67 and leased what became Sigma Sound at 212 North 12th Street. The building was originally Rec- O-Art, a mono studio formerly owned by an excellent engineer, Emil Corson."
"I knew if I opened my own place, I was going to have a shot — people were going to come try it, and if I did a good job they would stay. I hocked everything, even my house. After many, many disappointments I found a bank that would 100% finance me. Recently I was going through some old papers and found a chart of income; the first month of business was a paltry sum by today's standards — $13,000. At the time I thought if I made $30,000 for the year I'd be doing well. That's how fast the studio took off. I had three sessions the first day: Thom Bell with The Delfonics, Gamble and Huff cut Ruth McFadden and John Madara and Dave White were doing a record with Chubby Checker. To this day each thinks they were the first session in the studio. But I'll never tell! [laughter] I have to say everything from that point that Kenny and Thom did in Philadelphia, they did at Sigma."
I asked Joe if he could imagine his life without Gamble and Huff. "God knows. Would I have eked out a living? Maybe. I was relatively young. I think I was 27 [when he met G&H]. Who knows? Listen, I feel extremely fortunate. I hope I rose to the occasion. But I always say, 'If it's not on the other side of the glass...' I've heard many well-engineered records that had no song. My first boss in the business [Bernie Lowe, co-founder of Cameo- Parkway] told me, 'The song is the horse on which the artist rides to fame.' And nothing is truer than that. I mean a great songwriter beats all."
I told Joe that as much as I liked Motown, I thought the sound of the Philly records was better. He replied, "I don't think it was better. Back in that time, studios had personalities. The music was acoustically dependent on the environment. If it was recorded in a cinder block room, it sounded like it. I could listen to a record and tell you if it was recorded at Bell Sound, A&R or Regent. I liked Stax and the sounds they were getting. My favorite Motown song is 'Do You Love Me' [by The Contours] because the singer, if you listen near the end, he coughs. Sometimes it was the little thing that went wrong in it. Today you'd never hear something like that in a record. On 'For The Love Of Money' [by The O'Jays], I think at about the third chorus the drummer hits the microphone with his stick — now that drives me crazy. But the energy on The Contours' 'Do You Love Me' knocks me out every time I hear it. Music is a shared emotional experience. The hair on my arms would literally rise when I would record the rhythm section and they would hit a groove in the studio. That doesn't happen with a machine."
For the engineer, capturing the "shared emotional experience" is obviously at the top of the job description. But Tarsia wasn't simply an engineer; he ran a business in a highly competitive industry. Perhaps it was the spirit of the times — Joe seemed caught in a Cold War-era arms race for audio superiority. "I turned over equipment very quickly. We opened in '68 as an 8-track studio and within a year and a half it was 16-track. Then we jumped right to 24-track — I guess by '72, '73 definitely. Within a year to 18 months, I replaced the first console. We built an Electrodyne console; the original was only 16 inputs. I listen to some of those records and they sound better to me than the records I made with all those bells and whistles. After we built that Electrodyne, MCI came out with a stock console. Before that there were no stock console companies. Electrodyne and Quad Eight built consoles for the film business. The film industry was the driver of the advancement in audio. The independent studio was a new phenomenon that started in the '50s in New York at Bell Sound, Regent and places like that. A studio had opened up in New Jersey and they were sort of mimicking us, but going one step better. I panicked and we turned around and built a 30-input/24 output Electrodyne console, which was gigantic for its time. We built it down the street in an old paint factory we had rented. We put it on dollies, rolled it along and had a crane bring it in the second floor window. It was gigantic. In those days, everything was big and heavy."
"In 1976, being a big fish in a little pond in Philadelphia, I thought I'd see what it was like to be a small fish in a big pond if we opened a studio in New York. I had enough momentum going. Ultimately, between Philadelphia and New York, Sigma had eleven money- producing rooms. I called them studios! We had a tape copying facility as well as rooms built for advertising — radio and TV production."
"I went to a shoot-out in Chicago at Universal Recording where they previewed major tape machines: Studer, Otari, MCI, Ampex. They had a Boesendorfer piano; everybody A/B'd it on tape. I said, 'The Otari sounds pretty damn good and it's a lot cheaper than the Studer.' It's a good machine — good value. I bought six of them for $30,000 each. All of a sudden in New York I noticed producers would come in and say, 'Do you have a Studer tape machine?' Now I'm being dictated as to what equipment I had to have in my studio? So I had to sell these Otari machines that I liked very much and buy the Studer for $50,000 each. I paid an extra $20,000 for a nameplate in my opinion. If I didn't, my New York clients would go to a studio down the street. I would advise anybody: go into the publishing business — the service business keeps you poor."
"Another major change to the studio business was the independent engineer. I had a staff of engineers — they knew the rooms. You have to know, 'Where's the best place for the drums?' and the anomalies in the equipment and so forth. They claimed I trained them. I think they learned through osmosis — they always started as assistants, so they were at my back. It's all about relationships. I believe that you could be the best engineer in the world, but if you're not able to get the customer's confidence you're a washout. I've seen guys who knew how to work every knob but just didn't know how to relate or give a sense of confidence to the producer. It was a big disadvantage when the independent engineer came along. The independent engineer stood between you, the client and the producer. When anything went wrong it was never his fault — it was the studio owner'sfault. That was around '75. In '76 it started to take hold."
"I took out an ad once in Billboard Magazine. Many studios were touting their expertise, 'We've got this and that equipment.' Mine was a full-page ad that read, 'Sigma Sound Studios — Clean Restrooms!' I told my guys, 'People will treat a place the way they find it. If we keep it nice they'll treat it nice.' So when my assistants and engineers walked through the lobby and there were half-filled coffee cups sitting there, they were expected to take them away and to empty the ashtrays. Not that they were housekeepers, but we kept our place clean. Joe Renzetti [Cameo-Parkway session guitarist] came over when we were patching up the old studio. He said, 'My father just retired from the Post Office. Give him a place to hang out and he'll fix it up for you.' I tell you, there was never a ding. He was so orderly. We painted all our drum pedals with Day-Glo paint simply to prevent them from going into somebody's trap case and walking out of the studio. It happened at Cameo-Parkway — I'll leave the drummer nameless. He came in with a beautiful set of drum cases and left with a maple set of Rogers drums. [laughter] Joe's father was truly an artist — he would take something that was painted 20 years ago and match the paint perfectly. All of our equipment was marked as to which studio it belonged in. I was taken aback by the loose way in which other owners kept their places when I visited some studios. I had just redone the studio in '82 and the drummer in Average White Band, I forget his name, said 'It's too clean in here. I want to piss on the floor.' He was just kidding, but a lot of guys were used to grunge. That wasn't my style. I liked it clean and neat. I considered what I did technical. I tried to be as creative as possible, but that's where the name came from. The Greek alphabet is associated with science and education. I wanted to convey that technically correct atmosphere. I thought Sigma was the way to go."
"Fortunately, I always worked in the same rooms. The original studio one at Sigma was the room I liked to work in the best. I knew what I could get out of it. I mixed all the way into the '80s. I would do whatever was on the books, but Gamble and Huff were always my first call. It was a given. [During sessions] I got it to the point where they would come in and tell me what to change. Sometimes it would be close — not to say they didn't always have creative control — but they knew I could take it 99% of the way. Usually they would come in and request that I raise the piano or raise the bass. Kenny loved the piano, Leon loved the bass."
"I always took the bass both ways [direct and mic] and mixed them depending upon how hard the guy pulls, you know, the technique. I used to call them 'tinklers' — the guys that would play all the notes but didn't pull the strings and wouldn't give you any gut. I like to hear a little bit of twang. Sometimes I had to create that, so I would take it both ways. I put together a DI box at Cameo-Parkway — most bass players liked it, it became my de facto standard for recording bass." Check out the new Sigma Sound DI box that recently went into production (see the URL at the end of this article). It's based on this original DI unit.
"I didn't do much limiting, but the bass and the bass drum were the instruments I always put a limiter on — to keep them in the dynamic range where it would fit on a record. I tried many; Paul Allison's [Allison Research] little Gain Brain worked the best. Depending on how a bass player played, he could melt the needle with one pull and hardly be heard on the next. I've seen people slam limiters and make every note the same; that wasn't my style."
"The most difficult part of recording, I always found, was satisfying the musicians in the room with the cue mix. Talk about challenges! Getting a sound with a string section or recording a bass, a saxophone — I can do that. But when it comes to satisfying a group of musicians with one single cue feed, no one is happy. Eventually technology caught up with that problem. We had a device, a series of eight channel mixers, where we could adjust the levels to the desired mix for each musician. We called it the 'More Me' box. You know, 'I can't hear the drums!' and he's the drummer! It was hell."
"Very few producers transcend the ages. The one guy that I admire, who goes back to the big bands and is still relevant today, is Quincy Jones. Most people get stuck on what they liked in high school and never move away. I haven't either, but at least I know it. Some people still say the big bands are coming back. That's wishful thinking — the world moves on. When we were making 'Don't Let The Green Grass Fool You' by Wilson Pickett and 'If You Don't Know Me By Now' [by Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes] very few 'white' stations played that kind of music. Kenny had to fight to get his music to cross the boundaries and it finally did. Today that music, the same music that met so much resistance, is used for radio and TV commercials. The theme song for The Apprentice is 'For The Love Of Money'. Coors uses 'Love Train'. [both by The O'Jays] Their publishing company has done extremely well. It's hard to believe somebody will get married in 20 years and say, 'Let's play our favorite song by Eminem.'
"We're in a home studio [Mike Tarsia's place] and some of the stuff that comes out of here knocks me out. The quality is radio-ready. But one thing I don't like, a detriment, is synthesized horns and strings. Nothing compares to feeling the emotional experience of musicians playing together. I was never a country music fan, but I listen to more of it today because it's cats playing, you know? It's one of the few genres that's still 90% musicians."
"When I started in '68, I knew what to do and I left the old-timers in the dust. By 2003, I found myself in the same situation but I was left in the dust. [laughter] I was never a real businessman — I did it because I loved it. If I had been smart, I would have sold it years ago. In the '60s and '70s we were booked up six months in advance. By the beginning of the '80s the number of 24-track studios was increasing; the CD and dual cassette decks had come out. I could see a drop in my business but I still loved it. I didn't want to leave."
check out the Sigma DI Box at sigmasoundstudios.com
