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Stan Ricker: Live and Unplugged
True Confessions of a Musical & Mastering Maven
During my time aboard the New Jersey we did a midshipman cruise. We went to Annapolis Roads and took the midshipman, class of 1958, on what they call their junior year cruise I was seeing a lot of interesting things in all the things these midshipmen were doing. The radars and the gunnery works, how you aim and train a gun and how it was all done by very crude computers. Seamanship and navigation I found very interesting, as well as enjoying doing my music which was my real job. I got interested enough in what those midshipmen were doing that I applied for an appointment to the Naval Academy. So I went there as a midshipman in the summer of 1956. That was the first part of time at the Naval Academy. Turned out though, I didn't really have my heart in it 'cause I spent more time with the Naval Academy Band listening to them practice. And I should've have been doin' my homework. There was one class I just couldn't fathom. They called it Descriptive Geometry or Mechanical Drawing, where they give you a picture of some square box that looks like a cash register and it's got a whole bunch of stuff hidden inside and you're supposed to draw it from a side view and a top view and front view and show what's hidden inside, and so forth, and I have, even to this day, not very good spatial perception. If I can't fiddle with it with my hands and figure out how it works, I just don't understand it. (Laughs) If I didn't know what I was drawing I was just totally guessing. So I flunked out of the Naval Academy because of my lack of abilities in that area [Feb. 1958]. So I reverted back to enlisted status and finished my enlistment [Aug. 1958] at the New York Navy Band [Brooklyn Navy Yard].
It was during that time in 1957 that I first met Mr. Bert Whyte. The band was involved in early stereo broadcasts with radio station WQXR in New York, when Bert Whyte was Chief Engineer of WQXR. He recorded the band in stereo. I think he used two RCA 44's, but I'm not sure. Two RCA ribbon mics, and recorded them on two synchronized PT-6 Magnecorders, which were mono machines. And I don't know to this day how he kept the damn things synchronized. But we had a giant playback session of this thing over in Queens, I believe it was. It was a Chinese restaurant called the Dragonseed Restaurant, and it was the Dragonseed Hi-Fi Club. And we had in attendance Mr. Saul Marantz, and we had Rudy Bozak, and the head of McIntosh (Mr.McIntosh, I presume). We were using two of the two hundred watt McIntosh amplifiers. We were using four of Rudy Bozak's Concert Grand loudspeaker systems, two per side. And, I think Marantz pre-amps, I don't know. There was a whole bunch of famous people there, and the whole band was there, and our commander, Dr. Donald W. Stauffer. He was our Band Director. He was working on his doctorate in music acoustics at Columbia at the time we were doing this. It was quite the exciting thing to hear stereo playback for the first time ever, in a large environment. This was a multi-hundred type seating restaurant and what they'd done is, the restaurant wasn't open on Sundays, and they cleared out all the tables and made space for us all to come in and listen.
So we had these double Rudy Bozak Concert Grands on each side and the band sat in between. We enjoyed our first taste of stereo. It was quite impressive. The microphones they used were, well, they were okay. They were RCA 44's, ribbon mics. Pair of 'em standing on the stage when we recorded. It was quite interesting. I enjoyed that. When they finally broadcast this thing, that was before FM multiplex and they had FM on one channel and AM on the other channel. So the band barracks was pretty long. It was a typical long military type barracks building, with a lotta windows. And we raised all the windows and we tuned all the FM radios to the FM side, which I guess was left channel, but I don't know that for sure. We set them facing to the parking lot and all the band went outside and stood in the parking lot and we had channel A. So how'd we get channel B? Well, we got a bunch a cars with AM radios and opened the doors and tuned them all to the AM WQXR and heard our first stereo broadcast of ourselves. It was kinda cool!
Dave: That's great. So your love of cars mixed up with your love of audio goes way back.
Stan: Oh yeah, yeah. Have you ever experienced the thing about going into a drive-in theater when nobody's there and they've got twenty-five hundred of these little loudspeakers standing up on their poles and somebody's playing some music on it good and loud. Have you ever experienced that? It's really ethereal because you have all this multi-layered delay because of the distance you are from each of these rows of loudspeakers. It's really something. It's like you're in an aircraft hangar but there's no building around you. It's really amazing and nobody can experience it now because there aren't any drive-in theaters anymore.
I got out of the Navy and went to Ottawa University in Ottawa, Kansas for two years [Sept. 1958 - Aug. 1960] as a business major, of all things. That was a mistake.
Dave: Hopefully some of what you learned there will stand you in good stead in your new business.
Stan: Well, what I learned is that there were people who really got their jollies from balancing a ledger book. (Laughs) And I said to myself, "Self, there's got to be more to life than getting your jollies balancing a ledger." I enjoyed music and I had done some teaching while I was in the Navy. [This was between the time of leaving the Naval Academy and reporting to Brooklyn] I taught Chemistry to some folks while I was in the Navy; some enlisted folks who were trying to pass the Naval Academy entrance exam. That part of the test flunked more of them than anything else. And I had done well in chemistry, so the Navy had me teaching other people how to pass the exam. So when I went to Ottawa University I thought, "Well man, I enjoy teaching and I enjoy music, so why don't I get out of this stupid business major and go into music education?" So I did and I then transferred to the University of Kansas in 1960 and graduated in the summer of '62 with a Bachelor of Music Education degree. It's just been on-going music and hi-fi and old cars since then.
Stan's First Honking-Big Turntable
Dave: When you were at the University of Kansas you made a pretty interesting turntable.
Stan: Well, I had started that project when I was at the Naval Academy. Then I put it on hold for a while and when I was at the Brooklyn Navy Yard Band I worked more on it. Really didn't get it all together until I got out of the Navy and went to Ottawa University. It worked amazingly well. People would hear rumble and say, "Well, are you sure that wasn't just rumble from your string motor?" Hell no, I'd just take the string off, ya know, and turn the turntable by hand. Well, you could tell real easily, just take a 33 1/3 record on the turntable and spin it up to about 78 or 90 rpm and you could hear hmmmmhmmmmhmmm. You could hear all kinds of recorded low end disturbances on the recording, you see. You knew it was nothing except what was on that particular record. Every record you put on had a different rumble signature. That's a real easy way of finding out what low frequency disturbances are really on the record and what's related to the playback turntable. It doesn't work well with a high mass arm, of course, or a warped record. But if you have a flat record... So I was pleasantly surprised when I found that because I thought that was really cool that I could actually make a turntable that had less rumble than did whatever equipment it was being recorded on. Now, some lathes were obviously much better than others. But the records cut on the old mono Scully lathes appeared to have the most random phase rumble, especially vertical rumble. If you put the playback preamps in mono, combined left/right channel to mono, then most of that stuff would go away. Just as soon as you went stereo there was all kinds of garbage. That's another reason why, if you're playing a mono record on a stereo system you should, in fact, have a mono combining switch. Otherwise, there's a lot of random arm resonances. You look at the oscilloscope and you see it real easily. Certain bass notes will excite arm resonances that are more in one plane than another. And it will depend entirely on the frequency. Like if you've got a J-shaped arm, just straight with a hook on the end, or is it an S-shaped arm? They are all going to vibrate differently in a lateral mode than they do in a vertical mode because there are different modulii of stiffness in the two planes. And if they're just absolutely a straight arm, then they would have basically the same resonances, laterally as well as vertically, but we almost don't have any of those purely just straight arms. That Grace arm in there on the lathe is fairly close to that. It's just kinda like an SME, though. It's just got a "J" down near the end.
Dave: Your turntable was made with a sixty pound flywheel from a diesel engine. Tell our readers about the string. You found an interesting way to handle that.
Stan: That's the string drive. The motor was a quarter horsepower EAD (Eastern Air Devices) synchronous motor from an old external rim drive Rek-O-Kut 16-G2 transcription turntable. And it had a big, fat phenolic drum on it to achieve the proper speed of this sixteen inch turntable. So it was pretty close to being the right diameter for driving this sixteen inch flywheel. I really only had to just cut a little beveled groove into this pulley to put the thing right on speed. But you didn't want to pull the motor up very tight against the string. Originally I had used ten pound monofilament fishing line. The only way I could figure out how to tie the ends was to literally tie a square knot in the ends. Of course, every time the knot passed around the small end, the motor end, if you had it very tight you'd get a bump. Later on, I learned how to hold the two ends over a flame and melt them together. 'Course, sixty pounds was pretty good mass loading so you didn't get too much of a bump. I could run the string loose and I'd soak it in a mixture of alcohol that I had dissolved some bass fiddle rosin shavings in. The alcohol would dissolve the rosin and then you could pull the string through it and then let it dry. It would be just kind of tacky. Nowadays you can find this stuff in auto parts stores in spray cans and it's called non-slip belt dressing. And for fan belts that slip you can just spray this stuff on and it's basically the same stuff. The smell will give it away. You smell the alcohol and the rosin and all that stuff. But anyway, that was how I drove it and the motor sat on a mounting plate, a metal mounting plate that was maybe 5-by-7, and the motor hung in rubber bushings on the plate, and I had the plate suspended on two stacks of bricks on the floor. It just turned out to be the right height. The only time I ever got feedback out of this system was when I cranked the whole thing up loud enough that it got into the floor because it was wooden. So I had the turntable in the corner where it would be most firmly supported by the edge of the house and whatever, ya know. That was then and this is now and now I have the use of a marvelous lathe to play records on. (Laughs)
Stan Teaches K-12 and Lives to Tell the Tale
Dave: So at Kansas University you started getting into what you really love and have stuck with it ever since. Then your next step was to start teaching music in Kansas public schools, right?
Stan: Well, I like doing that very much. In the back of my mind is that famous quote from some early, I don't know, Confucius say, or Shakespeare said, or somebody said, "Those who can, do, and those who can't, teach." And those who can't teach, teach teachers. Been there, done that. So if I had stuck with playing my bass after I got out of the Navy, I probably woulda just gone on and been a pro bass player for the rest of my natural life, or unnatural life, as it may be. (Laughs) But I had promised my mother especially that I would go in the Navy for four years only. Then I would get out and I would go to college and I would make something useful of myself. I really wanted to stay in the Navy 'cause I really enjoyed the Navy music program. I enjoyed it very much. A lot of the guys around that time, especially between 1956 and 1958, were getting out of the Navy music program and signing on with the Air Force band program. The Air Force was new at this time. In 1956 they first established the Air Force Band and the Air Force Academy out in Colorado Springs, Colorado. So they had to staff a fifty or sixty piece Air Force band and so there were vacancies up the ying-yang around all the other Air Force bands around the country and around the world. It was a really great time to change services and become an Air Force band musician. Nowadays the Air Force Band has more visibility than any other military band organization. They just keep it right on going.
Dave: So you didn't do that. You taught instrumental and vocal music in Kansas public schools for six years [1962-68], I believe. Kindergarten through twelve, which sounds like a real challenge.
Stan: Mmmhmmm. It's a real challenge to come from high school concert band to go and do first grade music. Actually, kindergarten music was the most interesting. I can remember going to the kindergarten class after high school girls' triple trio. Triple trios were a fun thing in the midwest. You had a pretty high level of musicianship there. Then the bell would ring and everybody would pack up and go and I'd pack up my stuff and I'd go down the hall to kindergarten and go in there and I'd say, "Okay, let's sing 'My Jet Black Pony'." "Well, Mr. Ricker, what page is that on?" I'd say, "Well, that's on page twenty-six and that's a two and a six, and the two comes first." (Laughs) You had to be ready, just like that, shift gears and work on the level the kids were at so that you could help 'em go farther. But you had to go to where they were in order to bring 'em along. You can't stand up and say, "Well, you know, if you don't know what a twenty-six is come on, kid, get outta my class." (Laughs) You just can't do that. I mean, because it isn't fair to the kids. You have to get to where their learning level is, their intelligence level. So, I can remember enough of these youngster tunes on the piano. Just enough so that I could play accompaniments on the piano, boom-chicka-boom-chick, boom-chicka-boom-chick. Just enough, couldn't play any melody, just play the chords. It was like strumming a guitar except I was strumming a piano, you see. And we had a fine time singing these songs and whatnot. The kids always seemed to get a lot out of it. I can remember teaching beginning band. Beginning bands usually start in the fifth grade. I remember when I was teaching in Hope, Kansas, which is just fifteen miles south of where Chad Kassem has his Acoustic Sounds in Salina. So I remember teaching fifth grade beginning band and had one young lady, Kayla Gantenbein. Kayla wanted to play the alto sax, and she eventually became extremely good at it. But in the beginning she sounded like an unmuffled chain saw, and her dad would not let her practice in the house. Even in the dead of winter she had to go out in the barn to practice. I felt so very sorry for her, yet I was amazed at the level of determination of all these Kansas kids. This was a small farming community. Basically, they were saying, "By God, I want to do this, no matter what it takes." And I thought that was neat. Those students taught me a lot about perseverance.
Dave: Yeah, it's great to be in a classroom full of people who want to be there.
Stan: Oh, they wanted to be there. They really dug it and they'd say, "Oh, man, what're we gonna do today?" That was the excitement of teaching.
Dave: That's a wonderful feeling. I've done my share of teaching and I've usually been fortunate enough to be teaching people who really wanted to be there and usually were paying to be there.
Stan: Yeah, yeah, that's a double duty.
Dave: Yeah, that's awfully enjoyable when you can find students like that.
Stan: These kids would go home and just practice their brains out. It was every day. We had band every day. We had beginning band every day. We had intermediate band every day, and we had high school band every day. They were fifty-five minute classes so you could get a lot done. So I really enjoyed teaching very much. But all the time I was playing a bass fiddle in a band out of Emporia, Kansas, called "The Counts." The no-accounts and the charge-accounts, whatever. (Laughs) It was led by a nice gentleman, Bob Lenigan. Anyway, that was when I could play my bass fiddle, play a gig every weekend, make forty bucks which would buy all my lunch and all my gas money and all my expenses on the car. So for years and years I never had to take any of that kind of expense out of my paycheck, so to speak.
So I enjoyed teaching a whole lot but I wanted to do more with my life. I was perfectly willing to do more with my life just through teaching, but then I thought, "I need to expand my horizons past the small towns of Kansas," even though it was as great an experience for me, I'm sure, as it was for the kids. I mean we won superior ratings at state music contests. You had to have prepared music, sight-reading and marching band. And the only way to do marching band accurately was to memorize everything. You have to really internalize the music you're playing. You have to know it by heart, thoroughly, so that you don't have to worry about reading notes, you're just playin' your horn, but you're paying attention to where you're going. And you're using your peripheral vision to keep your ranks and files straight, you see. You see these bands marching down the street and they've got these folders of music in front of 'em. God bless 'em, but they're not gonna get anywhere because they're having to concentrate too much. I mean they're focused right here, eight inches from their face, on that sheet of music. How can they concentrate on what's going on around them? How can they stay straight? It's not really possible to do it that well, at least in my opinion. But I wanted to do more and the pay in Kansas was abysmal. I took a job in Kansas City at an inner city junior high [1966-68]. I did one year there and that ended it because I didn't want to be that much of a policeman. Gangs were not yet happening, just mucho civil disobedience between the students and teachers.
The Experience of Live Music (Up Close and Personal)
[Submitted for your approval is an interesting diversion, after which we will tell you how Stan escaped from inner city junior high...]
Dave: Maybe you can tell our readers what you were saying earlier about reviewers. (Laughs)
Stan: Well, I don't see how they can evaluate the sonics of something like a loudspeaker system. Obviously, that's what you have to evaluate cause that's where the sound comes out, other than headphones. But what I really don't know is how they can evaluate things to such tiny detail if they don't have the experience of listening to live music, first-hand and often. Because you have to refresh your memory. It's easy to say, "Oh, man, this sounds just like I was there." But when was the last time you were there? Live is so much better than even the best microphone feed. That's what I was saying earlier about some people who have not really experienced, for instance, a symphony orchestra, and chorus, or an orchestra, a chorus, an organ, a concert band, a string quartette; any of these things not only first hand, but up close and intimate. Not back there in the hall somewhere. But up where it's happening, where the music making is occurring. You’ll find out how dynamic it is! I mean, it's so exciting that you could put a rock up there it would come to life with a good orchestra. Music making like that is an exciting event. I mean, I'm assuming we're talking about good music making which doesn’t mean, "good music vs. rock 'n roll." I mean the goodness as in the level of expertise of interpretation and performance.
Dave: I've heard times when a full choir lets loose that things kind of sound aharmonic or distorted in real life. You want to know that it can sound that way and not confuse that with system distortion.
Stan: Yes it does. And it comes out and sounds rough. You get all these high level voices, high level in strength of output. Stand in front of something like the Los Angeles Master Chorale or the Robert Shaw Chorale and you get all kinds of intermodulation noise in your ears and say, "Man, isn't this music great?" But if you listen and pay attention to what you're hearing, you can hear a lot of these”beat- frequency” things going on that are just, wow, they're just random, sometimes they add up to tremendously powerful stuff. Peaks. You know, the peak to average ratio in some kinds of music is higher than others. Choral music, and any particular music, at any particular time doesn't have a real wide peak to average ratio. Choral music, by its nature, is bandwidth limited but within that bandwidth it's very intense. Whereas, with a symphony orchestra or a ten octave pipe organ, or well adjusted concert band, you've got quite a bit more bandwidth to deal with.
Dave: As a conductor and a musician you've been right up there, close up, in your face.
Stan: Yeah, and it's really exciting to be there. I've always had this great distaste, this kind of gut wrenching, when people talk about "concert hall realism." I say, "Who the hell wants to be in the concert hall? I want to be on the stage where the music's happening." I mean this was happening to me in fifth and sixth grades and things like that, man. I want to be up there where it's goin' on. How do you do that? What's happening? How do you make this thing work? Why do up-bows sound different from down-bows on the strings? We get into the absolute polarity of the sound of instruments.
Dave: You were saying that this experience is what makes you so good at mastering.
Stan: Maybe it's not. What makes me think I'm good? Or what fakes out others?
Dave: But that's inconsistent with the title of this article. (Laughs)
Stan: I don't see how, I know a lot of people have done it, but I do not, for the life of me, understand how a recording engineer can produce a really top flight recording if he doesn't have some really first hand experience about music LIVE, in your face, so to speak. What is good balance between bass, mid-range and treble, which covers a large area. For instance, a concert band has a very weird energy distribution. A concert band, no matter how good, doesn't have much low end. It doesn't even have much tenor or baritone. The octave above the basses, octave and a half. And it's got a lot of energy clustered around trombone, trumpets and clarinets. It's all very much clustered around the central part of a piano keyboard. [Frequency and loudness]
Now if the bass drum is tuned intelligently, it has to be tuned lower than the lowest note of whatever tubas and string basses you may have so that it doesn't muddy the bass line. That's really important. In speaker systems you wouldn't have a subwoofer whose frequency response at the top end was crowding over an octave into what the low end of your main array was doing. Your subwoofer better stay in the subbasement, see. And each instrument has its own well-defined bandwidth. As soon as you start crossing these things up, that's the art of orchestration. That's the difference between really intelligent composing and orchestration. Composers are a whole different breed from orchestrators. For instance, take Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." I mean , Mussorgsky composed it for piano and a lot of people don't realize that it's damn near impossible to play. The work really didn't come into its forte until Ravel orchestrated the damn thing, and all the tonal colors of the orchestra made it really what it is today.
Dave: Definitely. So, one thing that makes you so good at what you do is your background as a musician and conductor. And another is obviously that you absolutely love what you're doing.
Stan: Oh, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I really dig it!
Dave: Stan, I certainly share your love of low frequencies. During the night before Easter this year, I was at Saint Eustache in Paris listening to their organ, which is quite amazing. That was a really incredible experience.
Stan: There are so many neat instruments in France and I really dig some of the Pierre Cochereau or Marcel Dupree recordings at the organ of Notre Dame Cathedral. One of the things that's characteristic of those instruments and part of the tonality is the fact that the damn things are out of tune. They're difficult to get to, hard to tune, and expensive. Expensive to service. So, oftentimes you listen to some of the recordings of those instruments and you'll notice the basses go plummrouw like a whole squadron of B 29s whose props aren't quite synchronized. (Laughs) You know that sound. Well, that's a real characteristic sound of some of those instruments and it's because they've drifted out of tune, so if it's a low D, it's close enough to D. It hasn't gone to D flat. It hasn't crept up to E flat yet, so we've got D kinda-flat-sharp. And, that's a really neat sound on the pedal. Frankly, I love it. I love it more than when all the basses are thoroughly in tune. But, believe it or not, if we have a concert band up at the college and we've got three tubas, or in the orchestra, if I've got three string basses, they will acoustically couple together. Just like loudspeaker systems will. They will couple together to produce an in-tune bass, and you have to work at getting them out of tune. You have to be quite out of tune before the phase lock loop breaks. With the pipe organs [French or otherwise] the random large linear dimensions, usually in excess of many meters, between different families of pipes, one of each producing the same frequency, just about guarantees that these pipes won’t couple.
You can take three tubas and seat them together with the bells quite close together and somebody plays a G, and the other two guys will have an awful time playing anything other than the same G. (Laughs) There's a lot of acoustic coupling between instruments that happens. A lot of people don't realize it's happening, and it's part of what happens in the excitement, especially in live performances, with amateur orchestras where people get really excited during the performance and everybody, somehow or another, gets the message that the total was more than the sum of its parts, and where did this come from? What's going on here? And there's this elevated excitement that comes up and the instruments couple together and suddenly, "Wow, we're a really working unit." "Yeah, man, this is what happens when you've got a working unit. It's fun, isn't it?"
Dave: When you're playing that must be exciting and when you're conducting that must be overwhelming.
Stan: It is. And the thing about conducting, I love conducting. And I love playing, too. When Decca Records recorded Star Wars with Zubin Mehta and the L.A. Philharmonic, I was invited by the Decca recording team to go there and participate in that recording session. I had the good pleasure and privilege of meeting Zubin Mehta and of meeting John Williams, the composer of the Star Wars music. And it turns out that we're all the same age within just a couple months of one another. I asked Zubin, 'cause he's a bass player, did he ever miss playing bass. And he said, "Well, once you've played the big instrument, (which by that, of course, he meant directing the whole shebang), you really don't like to go back to the section anymore." (Laughs) I found that to be true.
Dave: But you're still doing both.
Stan: I still do both. But I do mostly playing. Yeah, we've had a situation up at college where the staff got together and said they wanted their people who are teaching, even part time instructors, to have Master's degrees. The administration up there was trying to grandfather me in and you had to do three semesters consecutively to be grandfathered in. And I'd done two semesters and took a break, two semesters and took a break, and two semesters and took a break. So I didn't have three consecutive semesters, so they couldn't do it. But occasionally the band director or the orchestra director, when they're sick or out of town or whatever, call me up, "Would you mind conducting a rehearsal?" Hell no, I'd love to do it!
Dave: Which college is this?
Stan: Oh, it's Cerro Coso Community College, here in Ridgecrest.
Dave: You like Dixieland and Big Band and all other kinds of music.
Stan: Yeah, we have a Dixieland band here in town. We also have a Big Band, a 21 piece jazz/ dance band called BBX [Big Band Xpress]. The Dixieland band has been around for a quite a number of years, about forty years. And the big band's been around, we just celebrated our tenth year. This was a direct outgrowth of the Change of Command band that I had over at the Navy base. Everything's downsized so much now that we can't do that anymore. But we used to do it. I had a roster of sixty-three people in that band, totally volunteer. And a lot of us wanted to keep it going, so what'd we do? We branched into the Big Band and we branched out into a concert band which is now the Cerro Coso Community College Band. We got it included into the curriculum!
Dave: And you play in both of those?
Stan: Oh, yeah.
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