Famous Columbia Engineer Frank Laico Appreciation Thread - (UPDATE: RIP April 19, 2013)*

That's a great story, Matt. Thanks for sharing.

I'll give "She Shot Me Down" another listen tonight.

 

Love this little story with Frank sharing Mitch Miller's audio recording rule #43 of don't wax the floors and take the drapes and hangings away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8B9J9bzBxE

CBS STUDIO C on 30th Street, a.k.a.: "The Church".
http://www.reevesaudio.com/vintagesessions.html

 

One of the great engineers, ever. I'm glad you got to talk about SHE SHOT ME DOWN with him. The sound on the material he recorded for that album, when heard on a good pressing, is amazing. I always think of him as Tony Bennett's engineer...


If you don't have, get this DVD. It's an interview with Frank, as part of the AES's Oral History series :

http://www.aes.org/historical/store/oralhistory/?code=OHP-043-DVD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8B9J9bzBxE

 

Nothing quite like a decent sandwich when your hungry and a quality beer to quench the thirst.

An old thread from PSW with a cool pic and another shot of inside "The Church".

http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/t/26144/0/

 

http://www.cloudsandclocks.net/interviews/Simons_interview.html

and some more cool info:

http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_tony_bennetts_left/

 

She Shot Me Down is one of the best engineered vocal albums I ever heard. No one else I know of captured that midrange so very well. I own a Promo 45 of "Good Thing Going", my favorite track off of that LP. Superb sounding record and only cost me $.25 in a past find.

 

MY HERO. Love his work, and yeah, he is a gentleman and very 'with it' indeed. The level of detail he remembers is astonishing. Love the guy.

GD

 

Greetings,

First, an introduction. I found this resource a couple of weeks ago, and have been consistently amazed at the high level of discussion and depth of participation by knowledgeable people in many topics that are interesting to me. The breadth of audience is pretty amazing, too.

It's also nice to see the lengthy discussions of issues here, so I don't feel the need to apologize in advance for the length of this post. There is a lot to say, and both Frank and 30th St. have been intensively discussed on many threads in these forums; that's why I'm hopeful that my first post here won't be criticized too much for its length.

I am currently Chair of the Pacific Northwest Section of The Audio Engineering Society, and have been on the Committee for 21 years (!). Starting about 3 1/2 years ago I have been friends with Frank Laico, who moved near Seattle about 6 years ago or more and started attending our AES meetings about 4 years ago.

Feeling that he was not getting enough attention for his outlandishly impressive career, I and Bob Smith (another AES Committee member who was the one who brought Frank to our meetings) put together two meetings where we looked at Frank's life and career and listened to some of his work. We repeated the first meeting three times in various places, and did the second one once. A discussion of that second meeting was done by Matt Lutthans, and can be seen here:

[MOD: Threads now merged.]

Those are my legs and shoes and computer in the picture next to Frank.

He is now 93 years old, and the last year has been pretty rough for him. He had a stroke in February 2011 which left his mind mostly intact, but took away much of the functioning of his left arm and leg. This has resulted in an arduous but apparently typical journey through various rehabilitation and care scenarios that have meant a kind of roller coaster ride for him emotionally and residentially.

I am happy to report that he is now on a relative plateau physically, emotionally, and residentially, to the point where we (his wife Colette, his caregivers, my AES Committee, and I) feel that we can do another meeting with him, and the date will be June 19, in Shoreline, WA (just across the City Limits North of Seattle).

To minimize the intrusion into his life, we will be in a meeting room of his care facility so he can easily leave if required, and easily come back if possible. For the last month or so I've been meeting with him twice a week to prepare for this June meeting, and while he has up days and down days, he is doing pretty good. He is definitely looking forward to being with us.

You should also know that last year we nominated him for the Honorary Member Award in the AES, which is an international award from an international organization, and after deliberation at the top, they awarded it to him.

This may not sound like a big deal, and I thought when filling out the nominating form that it was going to be a free membership or something, and "why is there all this paperwork for a free membership", but it is actually a hugely important honor.

Previous winners include (among many, many others) Harvey Fletcher (Fletcher-Munson curves) , Harry F. Olson (line array inventor among many other things), Edward Wente (inventor of condenser microphone), Leo Beranek (acoustician and author), Hendrik Bode (Bode plots are widely used in amplifier and other electronic design), Les Paul (needs no description here), Leopold Stokowski (same), Leonard Bernstein (same), Walt Disney (same), Sherman Fairchild (well known to old timers like me), and etc. etc. etc.

The last Honorary Member in 2010 was Sir George Martin, who you may have heard of, so this is a pretty big deal and we are very proud that Frank's accomplishments have finally been suitably recognized. (With this in mind it's important to remember that for most of his career the engineer received no album credit.)

Additionally, David Simons, author of "Studio Stories", is a friend of Frank's and in large part rediscovered him in the course of writing the book. Dave has agreed to be present electronically and be the color commentator, as well as doing a presentation about live reverb chambers and discussing specifically the ones at 30th St. and 799 7th Avenue, their similarities and differences.

We will show pictures of all of the above, and movie excerpts showing 30th St. in action. I found these wonderful forums in the course of researching for the visual part of our presentation.

Further, we've decided to make this a Webinar, where people can log into a website (with Java enabled on their computers!!!) and see and hear what we in the room are seeing and hearing, for free. Note that remote viewers will only see what's on the presenting computer screen (i.e., pictures, movies, charts, etc.) and hear the PA feed. We will not have an active camera.

Because of the limited capacity of the Webinar service, I've attached a poll here to determine the level of interest so that we'll know if capacity is likely to meet demand. Please fill it out if you are wanting to attend, either in person or remotely. Frank has many friends in recording centers, and we are intending to publicize this there, too. Because of the logistic$ of the Webinar $ervice, it is uncertain if we will be able to do this again. No revenues are being generated; it is strictly an educational enterprise.

When we get a meeting announcement on our PNW AES webpage, I will update this original post if that is doable. If not, I'll post in the thread.

Thanks for your attention and interest, and to Steve for creating this wonderful resource.

Best wishes,
Dan

PS Here's a few pictures of Frank at 799, in 30th St., and at a show I did a couple years ago, along with Herbie Hancock.

 

Great information and wonderful photos!

 

Fantastic - I'll be there (via the web) unless the world comes to an end

My favourite Frank Laico engineered album has to be Tony Bennett - "Who Can I Turn To", which he engineered at 30th St. along with Ted Brosman. Incredible sound!

 

Barring some unforseen circumstance, I will most definitely log on to the webinar. After John Kraus and Palladino from Capitol (+Roy DuNann), Frank Laico and Fred Plaut are my favorite recording engineers. I love and respect his work. I'm sorry to hear he's had some health issues, but happy to hear he's pushing himself through them as best he can. Please thank him for all his great work for me (especially for the Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Miles Davis material). His engineering on most of Sinatra's SHE SHOT ME DOWN is a masterwork.

 

I love Mr. Laico and his legacy of sound. God bless him for being interested enough to do this after all of his issues.

But...count me in that column of voters who think the reverb on "She Shot Me Down" is over-the-top. It is one of the reasons it is one of my least-listened-to Mr. S LP's.

 

Paul, are you listening to SHE SHOT ME DOWN off the actual LP? Just curious, as I couldn't get into the sound as mastered on the tracks from the 20CD Reprise set (though the remaster issued on Universal is better), but I love it on my U.S. LPs.

 

Yes, first the orginal pressing and then I thought a mid 80's Japanese would sound better...not to my ears. It's just me, I guess.

 

Thanks Paul.

 

Longer (7+ minute) version of the video posted in the previous thread:

Frank Laico "Studio Recording Long Version" (Web 65)

Recorded 11/8/2003.

 

She Shot Me Down

I'm glad this came up.

I just bought this recording recently, and the only reasonably priced CD I could find on Amazon was sold from England.

It came surprisingly quickly, and I've listened to it once so far. To my ear, the orchestra on most (maybe all?) songs sounds like it's in the other room, or only the wet return from the reverb with no dry signal, or via leakage into the vocal mic. Sinatra's voice, on the other hand, sounds front and center with a strong but not overpowering reverb.

This CD is a Universal/Frank Sinatra (signature) Red Hat logo, "Digitally Remastered @ (copywrite symbol) 1981 and @2010 Frank Sinatra Enterprises..." etc. Doesn't appear to be a bootleg or anything, and like I say, the voice sounds fine (with "fine" being an understatement. I haven't played it for FL (Laico) yet, and doubt that I'll be able to.

One listening hardly makes for a solid opinion, true but I've been doing other things...

One thing I do know is that in 2008 I bought a copy of "Sinatra Nothing But The Best" Reprise R2 438652, released 2008 @ Frank Sinatra Enterprises, to have the "New York New York" track (at least parts of which were originally recorded by FL), remastered by Bernie Grundman, and the orchestra sounded very squashed and the voice was very up front. One of my friends had a Sinatra Starbucks Hear Music Opus Collection "Fly Me To The Moon" with NY NY from the original masters, and it was not squashed at all and the sound was much more open. A look at the waveforms confirmed that the reissue was right up to the limits below distortion, while the earlier version was softer in the quiet parts while approaching full scale in the louder.

So perhaps this was an artistic decision by the Estate, as is the dramatic tonal darkening (if what I'm hearing is darker than the original) in She Shot Me Down. As is noted elsewhere in these forums, FL said the amount of reverb in the original was intentional.

A great vocal performance regardless, IMHO, on all versions.

 

Re: She Shot Me Down

Be aware that there were two different pressings of this CD with totally different masterings but identical packaging. These can be differentiated by the length of track 2, "Hey Look, No Crying" and/or by the etchings on the inner ring.

There is a [thread=153560]very long thread[/thread] about the Sinatra Universal discs where this was discussed; see in the vicinity of post #664: [post=5531669]She Shot Me Down[/post].

If the length of track 2 is over 5 minutes, it's the first pressing, which is a recycling of the versions in the 1995 Complete Reprise Studio Recordings 20-CD set, aka the "suitcase." If track 2 is 3 minutes, it's the "better" replacement remaster which Martin referred to. (This second pressing is also [post=5790285]HDCD-encoded[/post].)

 

This is interesting information. My track 2 is 3:03.

Interestingly, nowhere on this CD's three song listings (4 page "booklet", back cover, CD label) is there any playing time information. I guess that's not important anymore?

For future reference:

Track 1 3:56
2 3:03
3 4:28
4 3:47
5 3:30
6 4:41
7 3:48
8 4:08
9 5:51

Thanks for the info.
Dan

 

You have the "new" (revised) pressing.

I believe this was 20-bit remastered by Keith Blake and produced by Gregg Geller circa 1998, but it was never issued at the time. (This comes from information contained in the Universal Japan SHM-CD reissue of two years ago. See post: [post=5681691]Japanese mini-LP release of "She Shot Me Down"[/post])