Feb. 16, 1974: Trackmaster Audio
What grew up to become one of
Feb. 16, 1974
A Trio That Puts Layers of Voices on Record
ALAN BAUMGARDNER catches his falling lock of hair with a well-practiced backhand and
rubs his palms against his pants. No luck. That olive drab adhesive for the
wood paneling sticks just as tight to hands as it does to the walls.
“We’re fixing this up as a waiting area for groups,” Alan
says with a glance around the half-renovated front office of his recording
studio.
It’s called Trackmaster Audio. An eight-track facility
nestled in a cove on the second floor of the massive Larkin Warehouse on
“We want to make it a comfortable room,” Alan continues, “a
place people will feel at home in. Hey, Kim, that brick’s falling out.”
Kim Ferullo, the diminutive creative sales director, nudges
the wayward plastic stick-on brick back in line to wait for dark mortar stripes
from Jim Rusert, the burly studio manager. It’s a three-man outfit. Everybody
works.
“We all mix,” Jim grins, “and we all engineer and we all
clean up … sometimes.”
The office is pretty much the last step in putting
Trackmaster together. The large, irregularly-shaped studio, carved out of what
once were four office cubicles, has been running for more than a year. And the
eight-track control board went into service in May.
“We were operational in December 1972,” Alan relates,
“doing two-track stuff. I think the experience we gained in having to do six
months of two-track things was invaluable.
“We got to concentrate on the real thing that happens in a
recording studio – setting mikes and getting something onto the recorder. Then
when you get to eight-track, it’s a piece of cake. Two-track live recording, I
think that’s a forgotten art.”
In the control room, Alan rolls a couple of those two-track
tapes that became records.
First is “The Love Sick Polka” by Happy Richie and the
Royalites. Loud, lively and amazingly well-balanced.
“No matter what you think of it,” Alan notes, “it sounds
like a record.”
The second is “Lonely Laredo Pine” by June Wyckoff, who
lives down the street from Alan in Williamsville.
“Ten years from now,” he says, “I think I’ll be able to
look back at this and appreciate it as a basic, simple production.”
* * *
THE FIRST
tapes to get the eight-track treatment were commercials ordered by an ad agency
for auto dealer Dan Creed.
That big guy in the background on the hoedown caper is Jim.
And that “people get ready” chorus? It isn’t a gaggle of salesmen at all. It’s
Alan and a couple other voices, overdubbed into a multitude.
Waves, the Phil Hudson-Ken Kaufman rock group that’s soon
to become the newest incarnation of the Road, landed a record company bid for
their single, “Feelin’ the Sunshine,” on the strength of their demo tapes from
Trackmaster. The final version, however, was recorded in
“There were just so many things on that record,” Jim says.
“Layers and layers of voices. When we heard that, we realized we needed a
16-track. And we’d only had our eight-track for three weeks.”
Recording
techniques weren’t the only things the studio crew sharpened. Rick Sargent, a
young record producer recently gone into artist management locally, gets a
demonstration when he pops in and Jim rolls him some spliced tapes, defying him
to hear the splices.
“No, you missed that one too,” Jim grins victoriously. “It
was back at the banjo.”
* * *
IN THE WORKS
these days are tapes for an album by deejay Don Berns, a collection of worthy
but neglected recent songs. The working title is “Ben Steele & Bear Hans.”
Recording star Harry Chapin dropped in to put on some
harmony. Albert Hammond is expected in too. And a couple major record companies
are said to be “very interested.”
For Alan, who’s 23, owning his own studio is a logical
progression in his lifelong passion for recording.
“The first time I can recall operating a tape recorder was
when I did a tape of Moose Skowron, the baseball player, in 1958. The recorder
was a big monster with a square microphone you could use to threaten anybody
who didn’t want to talk with you.”
* * *
ALAN WAS
graduated from MIT in 1972 with a degree in electrical engineering and what he
calls an “expertise in acoustics,” gathered from working on the campus radio
station and from setting up studios in his parents’ garage and basement.
Trackmaster was conceived while he was still at MIT.
“He wanted to make sure he had a job when he got outta
college,” Jim said.
“Well,” Alan muses, “in a way it’s not that far out. I KNEW
recording, you know? And I think it has to be combined with the idea of a
service facility. We’re running a recording studio for a recording studio’s
sake.”
Staffing just sort of fell together. Jim and Kim hit on
mutual gripes about the Buffalo Sabres (both hold season tickets) in a Bailey
Avenue tavern where Jim’s brother tends bar. Kim, who knew Alan from
The two are musicians as well. Jim, who plays guitar and
banjo, backed country singer Wilson (Wild Bill) Currie for three years. Kim
once played bass guitar with a rock band called Arthur.
“Alan put up the money,” Kim says, “so he got to be the
honcho.”
“Jim learned the board quicker,” Alan adds, “so he’s the
studio manager.”
“And I’m a good salesman,” Kim puts in. “The last person
who asked me about that, I sold him my hat.”
* * * * *
IN THE PHOTO:
At the eight-track board in Trackmaster Audio, from left, Alan Baumgardner, Jim
Rusert and Kim Ferullo.
* * * * *
FOOTNOTE:
Trackmaster didn’t stay in the Larkin Warehouse. In 1976, it moved to a 19th
century convent complex at the corner of Franklin and North streets in
Robby Takac of the Goo Goo Dolls began working as a Trackmaster
intern in 1984 and recorded early Goos tracks in the room, as well as many
other indie bands like Mark Freeland’s Electroman, the Pinheads, the Steam
Donkeys, Snapcase and Them Jazzbeards. The
studio fell into disrepair in the late 1990s, however.
Robby
and bandmate John Rzeznik acquired the place in 2002 and got it fixed up enough
so Ian Gillan of Deep Purple could come in to record his “Gillan’s Inn” album.
That inspired Robby and John to want to do their “Something for the Rest of Us”
album there. So they brought in the guy who originally designed it, renowned
studio architect John Storyk, to redesign it in 2007 to give it “a fresh, live
acoustic feel,” as Storyk says on his website. They opened it up to the public
in 2009 and Robby became the proprietor. Now called GCR Audio (Robby has a
label called Good Charamel Records), it continues to be a terrific studio.
Alan Baumgardner and Kim Ferullo set themselves up in another
studio half a block down
Comments
Post a Comment