GC PRO ADVISORY BOARD: Dave Hampton

It's been my pleasure to call Dave Hampton a friend for the last decade or so. In addition to enjoying our times just hanging out, Dave has been an invaluable resource for regarding the technical applications of audio tools. For that reason, we're very happy to welcome him to the GC Pro Advisory Board.

Dave leans on the custom API/de Medio console in Paisel Park's famed Studio B. This was the console Prince had built completely to his specification, and more great tunes have rolled through it than your average collection of faders and knobs. Dave's not just a guy who crawls under the board. He's equally comfortable behind the faders.

GC Pro: So we are sitting down with our buddy Dave Hampton, who is technical guru that I’ve known for probably eight or ten years now. He is Mister Technical Wizard, and has built unique systems and solutions for all sorts of different artists. So, thank you very much for joining us, Dave. We’ll just start with a little quick background. Where’d this whole musical gear, technology, passion begin? DH: It started a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. (laughs) I grew up in South Central Los Angeles, and I went to L.A. Trade Tech College, and learned electronics. And I was kinda like the goofy little kid in the neighborhood who liked to DJ, play records, take car radios apart… do anything with electronics, build them with batteries, you know. Started doing that, and then I learned Ohm’s Law, and it all took off from there. A lot of my friends were going to school at this time, and they played instruments, and they were going to a college that had an experimental program called Electronic Music and Recording. And they didn’t want to do their homework. They used to get electronics projects for their homework, but they were music majors. So they would all line up over at my house and I would do their homework for them. So one day I went to school with one of them, and the teacher handed out a block diagram, you know, just basically a flow chart. But it was for an ARP 2600, so I just went into the thing and stared moving the faders and working the flowchart, cause I just knew flowcharts from electronic school, and it’s like, "Oh, that’s that, that’s that…". The guy said, "Man, you’re pretty good,". Then, when they turned out the lights and I saw all the funny lights it made and the sound, I was like, "That’s cool. That’s something else I can do." Cause in trade school, you can really only do fixing copy machines. You can get your radio license. A specific number of things you could do at the time. Electronic music wasn’t one of them. GC Pro: Doesn’t sound very creative. DH: Exactly. So I transferred over to Cal State Dominguez Hills. Went to school there, and ended up going to school being counseled by Jose Valenzuela, who everyone knows as "Chilitos", from the Pro Tools Latin America… that was my guidance counselor in college. GC Pro: That’s cool. DH: One of my classmates was also Marcus Ryle, from Line 6. We all came out of that program. One little guy named Armando Sedon taught us all recording, and the basics of multitrack audio, and just everything that was going on, on a modified PM1000 PA console. And an old 3M 79 16-track 2-inch. GC Pro: What was that curriculum called? DH: It was called, at that time, Electronic Music and Recording. It was also called the Recording Workshop in the beginning. It was just a very, very experimental, very crude. Everything that was there was something that they had grabbed together, just gifts from anywhere, and they were just trying to keep it afloat. So when I came to school there, I spent a lot of time in the studio just as a tech there, keeping everything alive. That’s where I just really learned how to spend time with the gear and make it work, and ‘do what you can, where you are, with what you have’ type vibe. But it’s important. So when I was in college, I wrote a couple of papers on building home studios, and that’s how I got to know about studios and stuff. Then, Jose left to go to work at Oberheim. Marcus left to work at Oberheim. He left Oberheim and started Fast Forward Design [the equipment design firm that evolved into Line 6 – Ed.]. Then he pulled Jose from Oberheim over to Fast Forward. So when Jose left, he said, "Hey, hire this kid, he’s good." GC Pro: Was that pre-ADAT days? DH: Right. From school I went straight over to Oberheim and spent about six years there, building stuff from the ground up, working with Tom Oberheim. GC Pro: That was quite a think tank of young talent over there. I didn’t realize… DH: A lot of people don’t realize we all came out of the same school. GC Pro: Will Alexander was over there at Oberheim too? DH: Yeah, Will Alexander was at Oberheim, yes. He was there a couple years before I started, but was a legend all the same, because he was also dealing with Fairlight when that broke on the scene, so he was like "The Cat". And I was one of those brainy kids, and at that time Keyboard magazine was relatively new, so I would read articles about every guy who was keyboard anything. Brian Bell… that’s how I met Brian Bell. I’d read articles about him and didn’t realize he’d worked with Herbie until years later, but I met him and I said, "Hey, you’re Brian Bell, you did this, this, this, this," I was just reeling it off. To me, while the music is fascinating and all that stuff, I was just amazed at the freedom everybody had to build what was on their mind, to develop their ideas. So, I was like, "Man, this is so cool. You can just build what you want and these guys will use it." That was the thing that made it attractive for me. And then, in my six years at Oberheim, I was doing technical work there and doing artist relations work, everything you could imagine. Anything I could do to get involved in the business, cause I really loved the business. I loved being Dave from Oberheim. I loved being the studio doing stuff. So I’d work from about seven in the morning to two in the afternoon at Oberheim. Then I’d work from four in the afternoon until two in the morning in private studios, just helping people program drum machines, helping people modify synthesizers. Pretty soon, I made more probably in two days than I did in two weeks (laughs). GC Pro: Right. DH: And I said, "Eventually, I’m going to have to choose-" GC Pro: Between a private facility and- DH: Well, it was right when the money started changing in the business. Right when they started going to the "all in budget", and producers were taking larger chunks up front and they were building facilities. So, they’d go, "Okay, I’ll just go take thirty, thirty-five thousand and put a studio in my house, and you can just pay me the money. Cause I’m an engineer, I’m gonna play the instruments anyway." So it was right at the heyday of all that. And it was good. It was just an open door at the time that allowed you to get in and work with people on the ground level. So you’d find yourself working with all kinds of folks who you would just read about before. Because the large format way of working was kind of rounding a corner. GC Pro: Even back then, eh? DH: Even back then. Because large format studios typically would get the money from the client. They would not update the gear on a pretty consistent basis. So what happens is, pretty soon if the client can afford what the studio has, so why should I get in a car and drive down there? GC Pro: Exactly. GC Pro: Consequently, if the studio never updates and they never realize, "I’ve got to constantly see what the need is that I gotta meet and I gotta constantly change to try and serve some portion of that need." You know, if I always expect everyone to be the same ignorant musician that comes in and, "Oh yes, I’ll record for free, and you can have all my royalties." GC Pro: Right. DH: Which some people did. There was a lot of studios that survive like that. "Sure, whenever you wanna come in, just come in," you know. If they’d have had the foresight just to look at their market, study it a little bit more, then some of them would be alive now. A lot of large-format studios closing because they assume that people have it like that. The economy changes. People change. A lot of people want to work smarter and not harder. So, when they go to make a record, well, it used to be flowing. That doesn’t mean that their money is your money. Their money isn’t your money until they offer you a chance to provide your service. GC Pro: Right. DH: I think that’s the big difference. I still see it today. GC Pro: We’re in another whole era of thinning of the pack. DH: Yeah, it’s a thinning of the herd, man. And anybody who wants to get with providing good service, and being sincerely frank and honest with your client will probably work a long, long time. Anybody that wants to be the internet-savvy, automated scumbag will probably do hordes of business and make a lot of money real quick -- I doubt if they’ll be around for the long haul cause they’re not in it for the long haul. They’re in to win it in their terms. GC Pro: Capitalize quickly. DH: Yeah. But I mean, I don’t have that option. It’s the other reality that I live, that I always talk to you about, and am real open with everybody about it. The reality of being an African-American with technical experience is not one where you can readily walk in a door. You can’t do it. I couldn’t do it then, and still can’t do it some places now. Because, it’s just the way the world is, and that time, you had a lot of people that did not expect people to know anything. There were technical studio situations where you would never see anybody who looked like me who was technically responsible for anything happening. So, it’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just the way it was. So consequently, you had a lot of older black musicians who I worked with in the beginning who’d give you a chance, but the minute you come off really knowing something, they’d want to check you with a person who didn’t look like you. Just because they were used to not having knowledge come from— GC Pro: Even your peers? DH: Yeah, but it’s just par for the course. That’s why I always pointed out to people that it’s a different time right now, where you can readily have an exchange. If you’ve got good relationships, you can have an exchange with people and everything’s cool, and you can do good business. But sometimes, you gotta realize that the world’s a funny place, man. The world’s a funny place. GC Pro: There are preconceived things— DH: It is, man! GC Pro: --that people are raised with. DH: It ain’t easy being green! GC Pro: (laughs) DH: But it’s cool. For the most part, I don’t let it bother me. What I do like to look at—take, for example, a situation like this [referring to Prince’s newly redesigned Paisley Park complex – Ed.]. This is a pressure cooker, man. You know? They’re have been a ton of people throughout the world who have been flown in to deal with the problems here throughout the years. Don’t for one minute think that I don’t understand why I’m having a certain kind of trouble with pressure from local people, pressure from people far away. GC Pro: Right. DH: So that, if you have to do something and wait for the regular group to approve you, you’re never gonna do anything, because you’re always waiting to be approved. I come into most situations knowing I’m not going to be approved of at all, just based on 85% of the population still having troubles dealing with packaging issues. GC Pro: Mm-hmmm. DH: Alright? So, what do I got to lose? Nothing. GC Pro: Right. DH: It’s cool, but it’s just, it’s the dichotomy of how people are. You take the good with the bad. But it would be nice if it was initially like the call I got. "Come fix some gear that’s not working and help us get back on track." GC Pro: How long had it been since this place has really been functional? Was there a time when it was fully functional and working well? DH: I think there probably was. I hear things back in the heyday and they were saying, "Oh yeah, it had this, this and this," and I’ve seen some marvelous things and some marvelous pictures, some marvelous records here. I think it was probably working good one day. But when, I don’t know. Like I said, I wasn’t privy to any of the serious history of it. The only thing I was privy to is what we found inside the wall, what we found inside the electrical, what we found everywhere, and trying to basically do a CSI on the building. And figure out, "Can we make this work, and if so, how can we make it work in the most logical fashion that’s respectful of the owner, his wallet and his purpose?" GC Pro: Right. DH: It would be very easy to say, "He’s Prince, he’s hot. Okay, it’s going to cost ten million dollars." And a lot of people, that’s their technique. You wouldn’t believe some of the estimates I got. I keep them on the wall. Some of the things I get from people who—you know, you come into a region, and you don’t want to disrupt the flow, but you want to participate in the economy. So you get the local vendors and you say, "Hey, I need somebody that does this, I need somebody that does that." And I get people telling me all kinds of outrageous numbers. GC Pro: Right. DH: Cause if I call you to be a plumber, and you tell me it costs you X amount of dollars to be a plumber, you still have to come be a plumber anywhere I need to. GC Pro: Right. DH: You pull into 7801 Audubon [Paisley Park’s street address – Ed.], you’re not carrying plutonium pipe. GC Pro: Right. DH: You’re carrying regular pipe, and you’re a regular plumber. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with fair profit. I’m all for fair profit. I’m just against the concept of totally disrespecting the situation and just going for it, just for the hell of it. GC Pro: Right. DH: Because it doesn’t create a long-term path. For me, that’s the only choice I got. I can’t do the short thing. It doesn’t do any good. But you learn. I couldn’t believe—I had some people that just--. We redid the closet in Studio B, and I had one vendor come in, and he was gonna charge me $33,000. I’m like, "Thirty-three thousand dollars? Okay, thanks man, appreciate it." And here’s a chance a guy had to come in and do it right and just be sincere and frank, and that’s not to take away anything from anybody in the cloth-hanging industry. Okay? It’s just to be realistic. Why you gonna come in and do something like that? And so, that’s the same thing in audio. There’s a way to go about servicing folks, the nature of help and service. It’s real easy for a lot of schools to pop up right now and exist to educate people about how to be a recording engineer and go be aggressive and do this and this. It is very hard to teach people how to be of service. How to be helpful. How to be there for someone when they’re in the process of creation. Creation is so easy now that a lot of the tools we have that it sometimes cheapens the concept of being an artist. Between what’s left of the record companies trying to cheapen it, and between the mass folks that can do it at a moderate level, cheapening it, the artist’s artists have a narrow window that they now have to get through. And they’ve gotta be thinking big at all times. They gotta be thinking multimedia, they gotta be thinking content. They gotta be thinking product placement. Thinking all these things other than what they used to think. "Hey, I got a session today, I gotta go sing here, I gotta go play here." Those thoughts are all long out of their heads. GC Pro: That goes right to one of the guys you’ve worked with the most, which is Herbie Hancock, who’s been one of the most creative, cutting-edge guys who’s pushed the envelope for 20, 30 years now, whatever it’s been. How did that relationship begin? DH: That began… wow. I would like to say it began when I was working on Babyface, and I forget what year that was. But it actually began way when I was a kid. Because my dad used to play records all the time and we didn’t have much when I was growing up, but he had a big record collection. We had to do chores every Saturday, so we did our chores, and that was one of the records we all used to listen to, Herbie Hancock. GC Pro: Headhunters era? DH: Early, early stuff. That and Miles, and a bunch of other stuff. But we had to do our chores and check them off, you know. But I had done some work many moons ago for Babyface. Rebuilt a studio complex for him. And there was an article on some of the stuff in EQ and a couple of the other magazines. One of his assistants had read it, and contacted me and said,"Herbie Hancock needs some work done. Would you come take a look at the studio and see what’s up?" and I was like, "Wow, this is the guy whose records I used to listen to when I was a kid!" I’m like, "Cool!" in my mind, that was heaven for me. GC Pro: Huge. DH: And everybody else thought I was crazy. "Are you kidding? Babyface is hot!" I’m like, "Are YOU kidding? That’s Herbie Hancock!" (laughs) GC Pro: Right. DH: They didn’t know who I was talking about! So, I’m like, "I’m gonna go over here and see what’s going on." But it was cool, you know? It was one of those places that initially I just went into doing some modifications to the control room cause he’d just gotten a Euphonix in there, and we were trying to make some space. Then it turned into more and more just technical responsibility. "Can you do this? Can you do this? Hey, ever thought about doing this?" And then, as I started get more involved, my other interests from college came back, because I remember reading articles about Brian Bell, and things he had done. Well, I ended up being responsible for some of the artifacts and memorabilia that I used to read about. GC Pro: That’s great. DH: I was like, "Wow!" GC Pro: Very full circle. DH: Full circle. Off of there, we just started talking, talking, spending more time doing different gigs, being on tour, being in the studio. He kind of hipped me to another way of thinking, which is not that of—not necessarily always trying to plan everything. I used to plan this and have a backup plan, and he would simply turn to me and say, "You know what? You plan on it working." GC Pro: Right (laughs). It’s classic jazz-- DH: A classic jazz perspective. But it has helped me, because when I come here consequently, and I’m looking for something to grab onto something to understand how to read a musician. Whereas basically, a technical person or a support person, you learn how to read them another way. Non musical cues. You look at their feet, their hand, their head… all the different ways they relay information, and figure out whether they’re in a good mood or a bad mood Approachable or unapproachable. Or all of the above. (laughs) GC Pro: Right. DH: And you try and design your help around all those signals. And I think that he kinda just offered up some other things that kinda took me to a life thing, to learn more about people. That helped me hone in on providing better service. Because, the minute I started applying some of the things tht he would show me and Wayne would show me, it’s a night and day difference about what I got out of the gig, what somebody else got out of the gig. And then, you remember having fun doing music, which is what I remember when I started. Having fun doing music. There have been some times where I haven’t had fun. You know, "Man this is a drag." And I couldn’t figure out, "Yeah, it’s work, man!" and when I first used to start in the studio systems would say, "Hey man, always have fun with this. Always have fun." I used to stay in the studio all the time. They would drag me out and say, "You know you gotta come go to dinner, eat with us." I was like, "No, I can’t. I gotta stay here," and they’d go, "No man, you got to have fun with this." So, I’ve always tried to keep some of those lessons that they taught, of just having fun. Not letting it get you so uptight that you weren’t really enjoying yourself and everybody around you wasn’t enjoying themselves. So that’s kind of like how I’ve used some of the things going on now. When surround started, we started messing with that a couple years ago, and I started seeing more and more people getting into it. I saw the first Surround conference, the second one. And I started seeing a pattern. I said, "You know, surround is going to be good a whole other thing that people don’t even realize. Surround offers a passive way to get everybody back in the room again." Because, if you can’t shake a traditional record budget up to get all the musicians back in the room, you can sure shake an experimental budget up very quick to get people back in the room. GC Pro: Right. DH: And the whole thing about helping people to do their thing. What I view us as, all us technical people, engineers… we’re kinda like librarians of history. We’re the last of a generation that’s gonna pass on what this last generation’s gonna pass on. So you would have had to work some 20-odd years to be able to be in a position now to- GC Pro: To give your knowledge and wisdom to the next generation. DH: Right. Right. To pass it on. GC Pro: It’s a responsibility. DH: It’s a responsibility. But you gotta be looking to do it, too. GC Pro: Right. DH: It’s cool. I learned so much from Herbie, and still do. Just on the people and humanistic tip. Life stuff. Working on your life. It makes you fuller, so that when you got the chance to be creative, you’re really into it.