Bob Heil : Behind The Gear with Heil Sound

When the name Heil started popping up around recording studios in conjunction with an interesting take on large diaphragm dynamic microphones a few years back, it was not a new name to those with a sense of history. As the proponent of the Heil Talk Box (remember Frampton Comes Alive?), many guitarists should already have known Bob Heil's name. His vision of putting together some of the first seriously designed and properly powered large PA systems in the early '70s for bands like The Who and The Grateful Dead made a huge impact of the rock touring world. But Bob's interest in transducers, his long-time friendship with fellow HAM-operator Joe Walsh and a desire to always do something new have once again brought him to the attention of the live and recording end of the music world.

Who is Bob Heil and where did he come from?

I started in 1955 as the pipe organist at the Fox Theater in St. Louis. I was fortunate to learn how to voice and tune that pipe organ as a teenager. That's where I learned to listen — listening is a real art. I played for twelve years professionally in restaurants, theaters and concert halls — theater organ, not church organ. I started a little music shop in late '66 — Ye Olde Music Shop. Through HAM radio I was learning how to build and design at the same time all this was happening. My music shop career started out with Hammond organs. I was renting them to groups because none of the traditional Steinway piano dealers would do that. I'd be into these groups and find out, "Wow, their PA is terrible!" They're using little columns and playing twenty-thousand seat halls. That's what started Heil Sound. I built this monster PA out of some old speakers that they threw out at the Fox Theater — A4 Altecs. Big stuff — nobody was doing that. I got a call from the Fox one day for this group that didn't have a PA. Well, the group was The Grateful Dead and their gear had been confiscated in New Orleans the night before! That was when Owsley [Stanley] got busted for being out of the state — the police took him and his PA. The band didn't know what had happened. The theater called me, handed the phone to [Jerry] Garcia and he said, "What do you got, man?" I told him I had Macintosh amps, all A4 Altecs and multi-cell horns. That was big-time for 1971. Nobody was doing that. They took us on tour. I realized from that experience that there was a need to package gear.

John Baccigaluppi said he just saw an old Heil console come through his studio.

We started building them around 1969 through to about 1980.

Who designed those?

Me. We built everything in-house. We built the circuit boards. We stuffed the circuit boards. We tested each one. They're all modular. The reason I did that — what if you're a group out in the field and channel six dies? What are you going to do? "I've got to send the board back." Just unplug channel six and send it to me. You're still working. You're down one channel but you're not down ten channels. Pretty ingenious for 1971.

How many of those consoles were there?

Oh, thousands. They're on eBay all the time.

So other sound companies or bands could purchase systems from you?

We were the first company back then to build a package PA. You could come to Heil Sound in 1972 and leave the facility with a complete system: snakes, road cases, everything — even a modular mixer. I remember that that we helped put the system together for Showco — their first system. I was working with SUNN [Musical Equipment Company] at the time. I was their largest dealer and I designed the SUNN Coliseum for them, but I was also building our own business with Heil Sound. That went on until 1980. The road work was getting tired and the music dealers weren't paying their bills. I got into building microphones for the HAM radio industry. That's my first love. We build hundreds of thousands of mics a year and it's really fun because we're the only ones. Shure left. Electro-Voice left. Astatic left. They all got out because it's a small market. We brought quality to HAM radio. Joe Walsh, an avid ham radio operator, has been my friend all these years and one day he said, "You know Bob, I want to use this Gold line [which is our HAM mic] on the stage." I said, "It's not good enough." He said, "It's better than a [Shure] SM58." I said, "No, Joe, I don't think so." I was at his house and went downstairs to his little studio and he proved it to me. So I had to start listening all over again, and we started building mics for this market. I want something new. We're bringing new technology, new materials.

I know your background as a design engineer. Do you work with someone who knows how to fabricate parts?

Yeah. I'm definitely not a schooled engineer, but I do all of the designs. I build the prototypes for field-testing.

What's the process for that?

I can build a microphone out of other pieces and parts. I know what I want because I have a station lab of different diaphragms, magnet assemblies and so on. I put mics together roughly in my lab. That's where I do all this. I listen on a 4410 JBL speaker. Over the years I have met some incredible engineers in the UK, Japan and Malaysia — some of our better parts are coming from Malaysia. The Chinese — they make the whole microphone and they just stamp your name on it. No, no, no. I have one friend who's a tooling engineer — he builds my handles. I recently met up with a suspension engineer who designs parts in sorbothane rubber. If you look at my stuff it's all different from other companies. I want that. I show the engineers what I want and we go back and forth until we get something that works great.

How did you come to the idea of a large diaphragm dynamic mic and how are you getting around some of the physics problems that people have encountered in the past in trying to design these?

I was sitting in Joe Walsh's house one day. He said, "You know Bob, the bigger things are the better they sound. You need to build me a big microphone." So, as a joke, I started working on big diaphragms. One of my friends that used to work at one of the major mic companies — he was an R&D [research and development] engineer and he got fired from there because they don't do R&D anymore — I called him and asked, "What is your experience with large diaphragms?" He said, "They don't ever work." I asked, "Why?" He said, "Because the transient response is going to be awful." The answer being because, like big wings, you can't move it. Joe and I figured out how to 'tame' the monster and make it work.

You're trying to move this mass with air pressure.

Everybody's doing neodymium [magnets], right? We discovered when playing around with the HAM radio microphone line that if you mix iron and boron with neodymium that it's even stronger. So, we got a very strong magnet.

So you could work with less movement of the diaphragm?

Yeah, but we got this big diaphragm. How do we calm that? How do we tame that? I went ahead and built it and he [the R&D engineer] was right. He said, "You're going to have problems with transients." Well, I did. It just wasn't working right, but I went ahead and built it in one of my handles and I'm sitting in Joe's basement — I said, "Here's your large microphone." "Oh, this is cool! What's wrong with it?" I said, "It's a big problem. No transients." "Why?" I said, "Because you've got this great, big, floppy diaphragm." He says to me, "Well, just make it like a condenser." I said, "You can't do that Joe. It can't be that thin all the way through." He said, "Why don't you just tape them together?" and he walked out of the room. I'm thinking, "Hmmm." If you look at our diaphragm, the outer edge is real thin and we fuse it in the middle to larger and thicker mass...

So it tapers out on the edge? You reduce the mass and the weight of it.

Yeah, and that's how we got around it and it works! If you listen to the PR35 or the PR30 it's amazing. I'm so happy that we can bring new technology to this field. Why can't the big boys figure this out? Because they don't do R&D anymore. They don't care. The bean counters care about how many you buy. They think they're so far ahead of everybody else — nobody else is going to do anything new. Wrong! Here we are.

I think a lot of companies aren't doing much R&D.

Right. As I often say, I want to come ride in your pickup truck. I want to see what you're doing and what you need.

As far as feedback goes and who's buying and using these — what do you think the ratio is between live and recording studio usage?

That's hard for me to say. You have broadcast thrown in there, too. We have over a thousand radio and TV stations using the PR 40.

Do you have a collection of some of your old gear?

No, most of the stuff is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

How did the Heil Talk Box come about?

We could go through the history of the talk box, which I've done several times, but it started with Alvino Rey in 1939. He had an old Talking Actuator microphone on his throat and he'd put his guitar amplifier through it and modulate both. Pete Drake, who was a steel guitar player, took an eight-inch speaker and a funnel and he [had a hit with] "Forever" in 1964. Pete let Joe Walsh use that in the studio to record "Rocky Mountain Way." We had been working The James Gang's front of house. Joe [Walsh] decided he was going to do [his solo album] Barnstorm. I met up with his road crew and we were putting his gear together for a Barnstorm tour. He said, "How are we going to do this voice thing?" He let me hear a tape of it. I said, "I don't know." He went out to my plant and we picked up a 250 watt 2482 JBL driver. I built the proper high-pass and low-pass filters for it. I got the surgical hose and thus the Talk Box was born. What's really funny is we didn't have any kind of box for it, so Joe put it in a paper sack with a rubber band around it — it looked like a wine bottle sitting there. That's what we did for years.

When did the Talk Box become available commercially?

Shortly after that. I felt like, "I could do this better." We built fifty of them to see what would happen. They sold immediately. I don't know how many of those things we built — tens of thousands.

How much were they selling for in those days?

A hundred and fifty bucks — which is what they sell for today. It had rises and falls. Joe used it and then along came Peter Frampton's girlfriend at the time, Penny. She called me one day and said, "I need a Christmas present for Peter." I said, "Okay, watch for a UPS box." So, I sent her a Talk Box for Christmas [1974] for Peter Frampton. You know what the rest of that story is... r

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