Straight Time Productions

by Don Bell
(Lanesboro, MN)

In 1971, I moved from New York to Pittsburgh to build a studio for Don Singleton. We were roommates with Bob Schwarz, who was working maintainance for Atlantic Records.


We bought a used 20 channel AudioFax board from National and moved it to Pittsburgh. We rented Studio A from Karl Hardman, producer and lead male of "Night of the Living Dead". Karl's shop was the top of a 3 story building that used to house a radio station, WPIT.

I converted the 4 track console to a 20 x 16 inline configuration. 96 tubes, Langevin 5116b preamps and 251 eqs. And we bought a Scully M-100. The first 16 track in Pittsburgh. Karl's biggest machine was a 2 track Scully 280 and a collection of Ampex 350 copies.
The studio came with a nice collection of mics. A pair of Elam 251s, a pair of AKG C61's, a pair of Sony C-37s and nice bunch of other vintage mic, dynamic and ribbon. Karl's engineer seemed to buy mics in pairs.

We also got one of the new AKG BX-20 boing boxes. I wanted an EMT but got voted down.
The M-100 had some quirks, not the least of which was tape tracking problems and RF pickup in the playback/record head.

Don Bell

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