Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1474752
50 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Fall 2022 what I had been paid in the union. We got pretty famous for taking old beautiful Neve Mic Pre/EQ modules from older desks and racking them up. I built racks for The Rolling Stones and for Heart and a bunch of studios around the country that ended up being used by big names like Pantera, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and many others. We were restor- ing a big API for a studio in Seattle when I got the call from Frank Estrada at Paramount. They had picked up a couple sitcoms again and I was back! I worked on Cheers, Coach, Major Dad, Frasier, Becker, and all the rest. All in all, about eighty shows in and eighty shows back out again. Pilots counted. For me they were just as much work as a show that hung around for years. I worked steady from '92 until 2006, when Paramount closed our department and laid me off again, this time for good. I had been there seventeen years and was in deep shock when that happened. I figured I would never again smell the inside of a hot stage. I purchased a little mixer from a new company called Sound Devices and with a 416 and K-Tek pole, I worked for Entertainment Tonight, grabbing B-roll at parties and a few other odd gigs. There was a one-day call to run a small PA at the equestrian center near my house for Warner Bros. Then, I was asked by an AV company in Santa Monica if I wanted to mix a couple bands down at Olvera Street. I had mixed weddings and bands at backlot parties at Paramount hundreds of times, so I said sure. I figured it was the little concrete bandstand at the top of Olvera Street. The day of the event, as I was parking at Union Station, I turned around to see the whole park fenced off for an international televised music festival and party sponsored by Seagram's with a huge stage and lighting truss. I was to mix three big bands from a tent three hundred feet from stage on a Digital Yamaha 5D. I was mixing for the cameras and had to follow along during sound check between the Front of House and The Monitor guy … in Spanish! I don't speak Spanish. I also had to track it all on a 48-channel Pro Tools and 48-chan- nel Tascam. The Pro Tools crashed 3/4 of the way through but the Tascam lived. So did I, somehow by the skin of my teeth. I grew a few gray hairs that day. After starving for another year or so, I got called by Warner Bros. again to do the same one-day PA gig at the equestrian center. I worked with Steve Blumenfield again, only this time, I realized WB really needed to hire me. Mike Riner had taken the job as Department Head and needed to replace himself in engineering. I lobbied hard and he told me he'd call me if and when he could. While I waited, I took a gig for a company installing video conferencing equipment at Amgen in Thousand Oaks with my friend Mark Aragon. We were to upgrade three hundred fifty rooms at Amgen with HD projectors, cameras, and all new audio. Mark and I were on about our fourth room when I was over at Disney in Glendale measuring a room for an upgrade late on a Friday by myself when I got the call. Mike from WB said, "Hey, I'm thinkin' about bringin' you in Monday." "What time do you need me?" I asked. "To be there? 8:30." I replied, "I'll see you at 8:00!" WB had DM2000 digital consoles on the sitcoms and they also had mobile wireless single-camera show packages with Cooper mixers that ran on batteries. Wow, I was back in school! With Mike's help and the tutoring I got from Mitch Quinones and Ara Mkhitarayn, I learned the WB version of a sitcom package and all about the single-camera stuff too. Then I went to work, first rewiring all those single-camera carts and then all new everything for the sitcoms too. It took a long time to get everything the way I wanted it. Like before at Paramount, I was able to work on the packages during the summer hiatus. After a few more years, every package had new everything. The single-camera shows got rid of the Fostex PD4's and the DB824's and moved onto Sound Devices. In two years, we purchased twenty-four 788T 8-track decks and helped the manufacturer with test- ing software versions and getting the bugs out. Then all the sitcoms got new patch bays, multi-pair snakes between racks all connected with Elcos for quick disconnect. We also added a nice A/V tie line rack down on the camera isle and got some Sound Devices PIX270i for recording the audio masters and for HD video playback for the sitcoms. I had the packages all right where I wanted them. In 2020, we were starting to buy Sound Devices' newest Scorpios and CL16. I was there for twelve seasons. From Two and a Half Men, Old Christine, Cold Case, and Without a Trace to The Big Bang Theory, Mike & Molly, Two Broke Girls, Mom, The Mentalist, Shameless, Lucifer, and Young Sheldon and all the others. Another eighty or so. What a ride! I went out for a two-week medical leave that turned into six weeks. The very day I was ready to return was March 27, 2020; the day they locked the gate and closed Warner Bros. because of the coronavirus. By the time the studio re- opened about five months later in August 2020, I had moved my wife and kids to Maui and I never looked back. Most people have a job they go to where they see the same four or five people every day and they become like family. I had fifteen stages each with at least twenty people I consid- ered family. My family was hundreds of people. I spent all my time with them, ate all my meals with them, and they truly became my giant family. I love them and miss them and I am forever grateful to each of them for being professional and personal and for making my career what it was. I was twenty-seven when I joined 695 and now, in 2022, my son Skyler is twenty-seven. He has dabbled with sound a few times, once even mixing a school play on a Mackie in high school. Now he wants to join the family business. Skyler has been in Seattle since college but is moving back to LA this summer to join Local 695. He plans to learn how to operate Fisher booms and peds with his sights set on sitcoms. He will be the fourth generation in my family to enter this crazy busi- ness and when somebody some day asks him how he got his job? His story will start in 1930 with my grandfather Harold, son of a bike shop owner, and his "Process." The next chapters are yet to be written.