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

Click here to post comments

Join in and write your own page! It's easy to do. How? Simply click here to return to Scully Model 100 Series Tape Machine.

Enjoy? Click here to share the HTML code with your friend's!

Would you prefer to share this page with others by linking to it?

  1. Click on the HTML link code below.
  2. Copy and paste it, adding a note of your own, into your blog, a Web page, forums, a blog comment, your Facebook account, or anywhere that someone would find this page valuable.