Justin Ulysses Morse

Roll Music Systems has been slowly bringing out pro audio products since 2003. Starting as a small recording studio in Minneapolis, this company (Justin Ulysses Morse and John Sommer, aka Johnny Smokes) has some unique and excellent gear.

Did you have a background in electronics before Roll Music?

No. I have an art degree and Johnny's an art school dropout. We'd started our company in 1998 as a recording studio and then we started building gear around 2000. I was on rec.audio.pro learning about recording and talking to people. I've always been a geek who had an interest in taking stuff apart. I got some good information from Monte McGuire, Scott Dorsey, Scott Hampton and Dan Kennedy [Great River — Tape Op #50]. Dan lives in the Twin Cities and I've met up with him a few times — he's a good guy.

Was the [RMS 216] Folcrom summing bus your first mass-produced product?

Yeah. Producer Steven Slate called up Dan Kennedy and said, "I like the sound of my Great River preamps. Can you make me a summing box that sounds like that?" Dan said, "No! But Justin makes custom gear. He can probably make something for you." Dan had this idea that you could basically leave off the summing amps; but he also thought there would still be some busses, some aux ends and a monitor section. Basically what he's making now, the MixMaster 20, is what he had in mind for a summing block. But Dan said, "Tell Justin if he wants help with this I'll kick some ideas around with him." So, Steven calls me up and I thought, "The recording studio phone's not ringing so why not? It's a project I can pay the rent with." So, I started thinking about it. If it's going to be passive in the outboard section, why can't it be passive all over the place? I started taking things out and that's what basically became the Folcrom. I built two 16- channel boxes and a couple of 8-channel boxes — big, funny looking things.

Didn't Jon Erickson help with some of that?

Jon saw me talking about this on a web forum. We'd communicated before and he had the idea that these could actually sell. I didn't believe him! I thought there might be a market for 10 of these things! [laughter] He was going to design the chassis, we were all going to be partners and Jon was going to put up the money. We thought we'd do a small run to get the ball rolling and make some money. As we refined it into a more cost-effective product, it actually started to make more sense. Once I started learning about manufacturing I realized that not every chassis has to be made by hand, from scratch. He helped set me up with dealers. We paid him some commissions for that.

But he bowed out of the project as far as being a partner?

Yeah. He was never really a (company) partner. He was more like a collaborator. He was never a part of our company. But since then, he and I have collaborated on a number of other things. We did a mic preamp and compressor for ADK Microphones that never went anywhere.

Right. I remember those.

He was working on the [A Designs] Pacifica. I wasn't involved in that project, but I helped him out a little bit with it. More recently, we've been working on the Pete's Place MK VIII, which is like a slice of a large format console with two 500-series slots per channel and eight channels. Jon and I got to be pretty good friends working together on that stuff. He and I definitely have a similar

approach to designing gear and we get along well.

With the Folcrom, did you feel that your marketing was all an education? You had to tell people what it was! [laughter]

(They might say) "Why would I want to do that?"

"My computer does the mixing!"

To be honest, with the Folcrom I was like, "You're right. You don't need this. If you're here to tell me you don't want to use something with your DAW, that's fine. Other people do." We took it to major dealers whose customers probably would have loved it — but the dealers themselves didn't get it. We obviously found dealers who did get it and whose customers got it. If the dealer doesn't understand what the product is, they're not going to sell it — which is why we haven't spent a ton of time trying to get it into the bigger chains. We have a nice collection of independent dealers. They know that selling a Folcrom is going to lead to that customer buying some more outboard gear!

At least they have to buy a preamp, right? [for the output stage]

And some converters and cables.

What was the next product? Was it the [RMS 755] Super Compressor?

Yes. That project was also started by Steven Slate. He wanted me to build him one of those Gyraf Audio SSL compressor clones [a DIY project found online — ed.]. I was like, "I don't really want to." I started out modifying gear, which is really like looking at someone else's design and you do it your own way. I said I'd design him that kind of compressor, but I'd start from scratch. I built a couple of prototypes. Before I sent him the first one, I passed it around town a little bit. I dropped it off at Alex Oana's place — he had a space at Blackberry Way Studios. I et him play around with it and he called me a half an hour later and said, "Can I buy this?" I said I needed to get it done, but that he could buy the second one! I was relieved that he and Steven both liked it. He and Steven are pretty different, in terms of what kind of music they work on. Steven does the heavy, modern rock stuff and Alex is more pop oriented. I figured if they both liked it that I could probably do something with it.

It was designed to be a mix bus compressor from the get-go?

Yeah, exactly. Steven specifically wanted something to use on the two-bus. I think he owned an SSL 384 and an Alan Smart C2 at the time. He liked them, but had the usual complaints. He didn't like the heavy-handedness on the trigger spots. He wanted smack without the coloration. I thought, "Let's clean it up and see what we get."

Did you start with a whole new circuit idea on that?

Yeah. I kind of figured that I'd use a THAT VCA[integrated circuit]. I looked at every compressor I could find that had a THAT VCA. You know, Symetrix stuff at the low end, which is actually a really nice design. I looked at all kinds of different compressor

circuits and then processed that in my head. Then I started drawing out what I thought I'd want to have in there. Part of it is leaving out stuff that isn't really needed for the two-bus. I've always hated gates. I thought I wouldn't have to screw around with another I/O if I had the sidechain built in. The thing you probably want to do with a sidechain on a mix-bus compressor is the high pass filter, so let's just build that in there. Those other compressors have this many attack and time-release choices, so let's give 'em a little faster one and a little slower one too, plus one more ratio.

One thing I thought was interesting is that you're skipping transformers on the Super Compressor's I/O.

I love transformers. I think they're really useful and they do some things that are really hard to do without transformers, especially on mic preamps. But for the specific job that this compressor is doing, I thought the transformer would get in the way. The electronically balanced in and out circuitry is a little more stripped down. Typically you find a lot of protection circuitry on the I/O of electronically balanced circuits and I left a lot of that out, figuring probably the op amps are not going to blow up if the unit got hooked up correctly. Of course I was wrong about that... I get a fair amount of phone calls from people who hooked them up wrong.

A handful of years later the [RMS 5A7] Tubule, the 500-series tube mic pre, came out.

I guess it did take a little while.

It's hard to introduce new products.

I think we got lucky with the Folcrom and it was successful pretty much right away — and we had no idea what we were doing! So the Super Compressor came out and it was well received, but it didn't necessarily sell huge numbers like the Folcrom did. Partly because the Folcrom had the advantage — what makes it so versatile is also what makes it inexpensive without compromising the quality.

And no one else is building one.

Right. We were kicking around ideas for other products, but we kind of realized we had to work on our sales ability. We had to learn how to run a business and sell stuff. Right around the time the compressor was being built was when we realized we couldn't do the recording studio anymore. It was taking up time and money — it was also distracting us. We started doing tradeshows, which are always a pain in the ass, but we got to make a lot of connections and do a lot of networking.

I think it's good to be seen at those types of events.

Totally. It reminds people who you are. So, anyway, we decided our next product would be the Tubule. What if we put a vacuum tube with a real power supply in a 500- series module? That took a long time — it's hard to do! I said from the get go that if we're gonna do this, it has to fit in one slot. It has to be compliant with the rules for that slot, which primarily means power consumption. It has to be a 500-series module, not just something that looks like a 500-series module but isn't really. You know you've got to produce heater supply that is a higher current than what you're allowed to use from a lower voltage. You need a high voltage plate supply that's high voltage but lower current, so there's another fancy circuit and that takes a while.

So there are two different voltage converters in there, right?

Yep. There's one for the heater and one for the plate, and they're going opposite directions. It was a decent amount of engineering work, not only to build the circuit, but one that does it efficiently enough to not go over the power consumption requirements. It's also got to have a small enough footprint so you can fit it in the module. And you still need an audio circuit that sounds good and does something people want done.

Right!

I thought the big design challenge was going to be the power stuff. I got that done without too much difficulty. Then I started working on the audio circuit. I thought I'd just slap a tube in there! There's an RCA BC-2B, which is a one-tube mic preamp with transformers in and out. I said, "If they could do that 60 years ago, I can do it now." But that's a mic preamp with a fixed 34 decibels of gain. That's not cool!

That's not enough these days.

It's fun to work with limitations in the studio, but it's not fun to sell someone on those limitations! I knew we needed more gain, but we also needed gain control. But the problem is, I was designing it with a new old stock 12AY7 — a good, expensive tube. But you're not going to ship a new product with that in there. Some companies do, but they wouldn't be RoHS compliant [Restriction of Hazardous Substances — in the EU] so you couldn't legally ship them to Europe. I wanted to use new production tubes. I started messing around with Electro-Harmonix tubes like 12AY7s — a standard mic preamp tube. The problem is, the specifications for that tube on the old stock stuff was the minimum amount of juice that the tube can do. Less than that and you're supposed to throw it away and get a new one. Whereas on the new stuff, that specification is the target approximate. That's what you're going to get. So, I was designing the circuit with a tube that was way better than I could actually buy in mass quantities.

Oops!

Right. So, this tube is being asked to produce a lot of gain and it also has to be the output driver. I didn't want to have any op amps for the output. I had to reassess things. Luckily I found a tube that's used in old Ampeg amps and is still produced. The 12DW7, which is basically half a 12AX7 and half a 12AU7 in one package together. It's perfect. So, the first half is a 12AX7 you use for voltage gain and it makes your signal taller. The second stage is the output driver that can drive the output transformer into a decent load without losing all your signal level and distorting. It works really well. We've taken a few revisions to make it as refined as we wanted, and now we finally have a bunch ready to sell.

What do you see with the future of Roll music?

We have two product ideas that we've been kicking around, but we're still discussing if we can sell them. I feel like we're starting to develop a niche. We just barely remember the days when a studio had a bunch of gear and a budget. You could spend hours experimenting with analog gear and coming up with new sounds. Now, you have the box in your house and no budget and you're still trying to make a good sounding record. The Folcrom kind of bridges that gap between those two worlds of recording. How can we help someone in a small studio in a modern recording reality capture the things that people like about records that were made when things were easier? At the same time, I'm not interested in bringing retro sound to the modern recording world. I don't want to make a reproduction of something from the days of yore.