Sound Without Limits

By Dan Mayfield
Of the Journal
The crowd didn't notice the hums and booms from the balcony at the Downtown bar Launchpad.
Faded into the background between sets, musicians playing a tuba, bass guitar, a music box and one synthesizer were pumping out grooves that soon became a repeating, waving, undulating force from the balcony, rattling the metal supports. The group called The Chuppers was filtering the instruments through its electronic equipment, making a racket that was as much orchestra as it was small-arms fire.
The Chuppers is the band created from the Electric Ensemble class at the University of New Mexico, a class invented by Manny Rettinger to help students learn to use sophisticated recording equipment — by using antiquated equipment.
One day a week, Rettinger's Ubik Studio looks more like a Radio Shack warehouse explosion than a recording studio, as he digs out all of his old recording equipment and turns his students loose.
But the equipment isn't steady. Instead it's all broken up and rewired, and hot-wired, into several different portable devices, which Rettinger calls "chuppers." Each chupper has its own personality, from the 30-year-old ARP brand synthesizer tied to a keyboard, to a synthesizer hooked up to some sort of noisemaking device and an amplifier and a bullhorn, or the stringless guitar wired through a signal processor tied to a ground-firing speaker, and the old Macintosh laptop wired into a Victrola speaker.
"The cutting edge has always been high tech," Rettinger said. "This is like a science fair."
So he takes the students back to the days before CDs and MP3 recordings. The equipment is stuff that Rettinger has amassed in his 35-year recording career. He now runs Ubik Sound, a recording studio, and records UNM's concerts.
His class, though, has become incredibly popular, with 25 students showing up on Monday nights to the cramped studio. Some of the students are in the class, some aren't. Many use the time as an opportunity to play with others who are devoted to music and UNM's burgeoning recording classes.
"I'm doing an independent study, and hopefully this is a minor for me," said Rick Martinez, a classical guitar and recording student at UNM.
The class, he said, "Is teaching me to have a studio mind, to fill in the spaces. It's bringing it together."
The sounds between the notes — created by the feedback generators or the synthesizers — are now just as important as a score, he said.
At a recent Monday night class students were playing with a synthesizer, which led them to a sound of a ringing telephone, which led them to find which Pink Floyd song used the same sound, to a Macintosh computer rigged to a chupper with an old phonograph horn attached playing the song, and to trying to figure out the song "Time" on the synthesizer and all of the weird sounds in its intro.
Soon, four of the students were deconstructing how engineer Alan Parsons recorded the complex sounds in "Time" in the early 1970s.
Parsons used very similar technology to what is mounted on each chupper to make the lush quadraphonic sounds on Pink Floyd's early records.
Parsons' ideas went back to the early 1960s and the original studio experimenter, producer Joe Meek, who made the first fully electronic recording of the song "Telstar" in 1962.
"To me, a lot of the things (Meek) did were so unique. To me, that's what I'm trying to get back to. We know about it, us old timers," Rettinger said.
But, he said, those that grew up in the digital age take feedback and special effects for granted. The class shows students the processes that computers do, that once had to be done by hand. It's like a darkroom vs. Photoshop.
"A lot of classical students, it's changing them," Rettinger said.
"This has helped me in so many ways," said classical piano student Peter Moore. "I like to play on bullhorn. It has a processor and a compressor, and I stay away from the keyboard. Once I find that sound, OK, I'm done, and I find something new."
The class is stretching students' minds around what recorded music can be, Rettinger said.
"You start thinking outside of the beat," Martinez said. "You're more creative off the beat."
Rettinger, though, sees his chuppers as more than just audio devices. Student Sahra Saedi and Rettinger built a video chupper that is tied to a pair of cameras. With simple video editors, she mixes the video like the musicians mix the sound.
"I've logged archival footage and we layer it and mix," she said. "This is about the same thing, you see, but it's a movie. We feed it through other cameras."
The video mixing is a rare chance to explore the limits of video equipment, she said, something she doesn't have the time for in her film classes.
"Like the Buddha said, nothing is permanent, so we're not recording this," Saedi said.