Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1541592
18 M PS E . O R G Charles Maynes MPSE Board member It seems a little weird to be a direct contributor to this, but that is the way things can go sometimes… I got my start in sound way back a few thousand years after dinosaurs walked the Earth—back when I was in junior high (middle school nowadays). I started recording things with the Pioneer open reel tape deck my father bought when he served in the Marines in Vietnam. It was a quite interesting experience, and I was largely using recycled tapes he had recorded (something I now quite regret) with it—usually tracking bands I played in in the late '70s to early '80s. It was quite a revealing experience for a young Getting into "The Industry" is something each of our members has a unique, and usually unusual path into the film, TV, interactive, and gaming audio community. MPSE Wavelength is pleased to present an ongoing column that presents the various experiences of our membership in their path into the industry. Our MPSE Board of Directors will be presenting their experience, and we would love to see our membership contribute to this column about their experiences as well. teenager at the time, but I felt it was fun and interesting to be able to have audio quality which was better sounding than cassette audio fidelity. From there, after high school, I decided to go to Grossmont College in the East County of San Diego and studied in their telecommunications department in fall of 1980. I ended up with a double major (since it only took about a semester's worth of extra classes) of television production and broadcast journalism. During that phase, I got my first job working at a commercial recording studio owned by Randy Fuelle named Hit Single, who I had known from my band interactions. The band had been signed by his "World Records" label, and he allowed me to learn working in a commercial setting. The first task I had was wiring up the facilities TT (Tiny Telephone) patch bays, which had me breathing a lot of lead solder fumes—and engineering some of the various local acts which came in to record there. During this period, I was playing drums in a band called "The Seventh" and we established ourselves as a sort of modern tech-oriented group that used synths and drum machines as a part of our jam. San Diego is more known for "Rootsy" sort of rock 'n' roll and country & blues, so we were very much an anomaly in the local music scene. However, since this was the era of groups like Duran Duran, Flock of Seagulls and Ultravox, who were getting play on the new 91X radio station, which was San Diego's version of KROQ (the pioneering alternative SoCal rock station in the '70s and '80s). We tended to get supporting slots for a lot of up- and-coming bands, which today are considered sort of classic rock-styled things. The biggest show we got was opening for Duran Duran at the height of their popularity (at least at the time) with a sold-out show at the San Diego Sports Arena. As all this was unfolding, I also was working part time through college at Alberts Music City, which was a local music store. Somehow that seemed to sort of work for me, as I was hired a much more upscale shop in town named Musicians Repair Service, which was owned by a guy I owe a ton to, Michael Krewitsky. The shop was the leading repair facility in the county, but also sold high-end studio gear and keyboards and synths. Through another friend of mine, Rob Conrad, I met Mike and ended up purchasing an Emu Systems Emulator II from him and dove headlong into sampling effects and musical instruments (like the instruments of the Harry Partch Ensemble and their Gamelan from San Diego State University's music department where I was going to school following my graduation from Grossmont College. I promise this will lead somewhere related to film sound soon! So, Musicians Repair hired me to specialize in selling their synths and sampling systems and to develop sounds which we made available to people who purchased the systems from them. This also led to my very first film sound design job with Martin Lopez (who would later move to LA and work at Soundelux with his friends Dutch Hill and Tom Ozanich) to make special sounds for the film Return of the Killer Tomatoes using the Emulator II and the BY CHARLES MAYNES MPSE BREAKING ENTERING &