The Sound Board

From optometrist to illustrious Jazz recording engineer ......

Rudy Van Gelder died on August 25, 2016. For those not familliar with him and his achievements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Van_Gelder More elaborate reviews are available and/or certainly will be appearing now as obtuaries.

When he started, his mission was to allow small private labels to sound as good as the three big labels at the time (RCA, Columbia and Decca).

Unfortunately, he remained reluctant to reveal much about his recording techniques.

One of his memorable sayings, about the demise of the LP, which he called “the biggest distorter”, was: “As far as I’m concerned, good riddance. It was a constant battle to try to make that music sound the way it should. It was never any good. And if people don’t like what they hear in digital, they should blame the engineer who did it.”

Rudy could always get such an open ensemble sound and yet had such focussed individual instruments. His Hackensack room was very balanced. Everything was clean, yet round. Great attention to detail.
When he moved into the CTI era he stepped up his game to meet the times. He moved with the technology to get an entirely different sound.

I'm not surprised to find out that the Columbia 30th Street studio was the model for his room. I have multiple friends and acquaintances who have various gear from 30th Street that they picked up for pennies on the dollar when the studio was shuttered. Me, I'm stuck trying to get manufacturers to make decent clones of some of that gear.

.