Mastering Music Moment
Hear their stories. Tell your own.
The Mastering Music Moment are stories from Focal authors and music and audio professionals about the moment when they knew they wanted to be in the audio and music business. Every month, the Mastering Music Moment will feature someone different, each moment as unique as the person telling it.
You can be a part of the story, too. Enter-to-win one of the focus books of the month, and you will be automatically entered to win one of our grand prizes -- one of three POD Studio UX1’s from Line 6 and Performer Magazine!
Enter below!
This month: Bob Katz
 When I was 7 years old, my father brought home a tiny tape recorder that he was selling at his store. I was fascinated with it. Of course it was a toy with 3" reels, but it worked and it had a little crystal mike and a permanent magnet erase head and was a lot of fun to hear the tinny signal play back and a drag to wait 10 minutes for the rewind time. I guess you could say I was hooked from the age of 7. But it really was a series of stages until the real moment. I was always musical, I had a real stereo in my room with a VM changer and was fascinated by stereo demo records with the chorus coming out of the two speakers. Then I began to play the clarinet at the age of 10. For my bar mitzvah all I wanted was a real stereo tape recorder to record my playing and anyone else I could find to sit still, and my parents obliged with a tubed Telectro model SS-132 stereo tape recorder that had two speeds with a capstan that you could lift or push down to change between 3-3/4 and 7-1/2 IPS.
I took that thing apart and started modifying it as soon as I got it! I attached a pair of crystal high-impedance headphones to one of the stages so I could monitor the recording without feeding the speakers, and the machine had overdub facilities so you could record on the second channel while playing back the other. Then I put electrical tape over the erase head so I could do "sound over sound" and overdub in stereo a la Les Paul. It was fun and that was one of my hobbies through high school. But the real moment came when my friend David (who was a year older) and had gone away to college, got a summer job at WTIC radio and he told me all about slip cuing turntables and playing the music for the announcers and I was hooked! I knew then that I wanted to be a radio engineer, too.
As soon as I got to college I joined the college radio station and of course I had my own show and also became the technical/recording director and recorded speeches and soon musical groups at the college radio studio. I never became a professional radio engineer but instead went into television. Then while I was the audio supervisor of Connecticut Public Television, I did tons of moonlighting with my own home-built recording equipment recording musical groups, and eventually that became my fulltime profession, audio engineering!
Enter-to-Win
Each month, we're giving away free Focal books, and everyone who enters is automatically entered to win one of our three grand prizes for the year -- one of three POD Studio UX1’s from Line 6 and Performer Magazine!
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Featured Author: Bob Katz
Bob Katz has mastered (or recorded) three Grammy award-winning albums. He currently runs Digital Domain Studios just north of Orlando, Florida.
Previous Mastering Moments
Alex Case
Dale Angell
Robert J. Shimonski
Bob Katz
Mike Collins
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