My Band Name For Today

Mix Magazine, a publication for recording engineers and producers, recently interviewed erstwhile teen sensation Donnie Osmond. And it turns out Donnie is a FREAKING SUPERGENIUS! Donnie tells of working on a homemade console with an Ampex 4-track:

"And I used to live underneath that console. I used to look at where the wiring ran. I'd get my soldering gun out. I'd find some cold solder joints and I'd fix them. I must have been between 10 and 12 years old when I started doing this."

So in true boy genius fashion, Donnie saves the day:

"So Westlake [Audio] calls me and says the engineer's stuck in New York. The console was delivered and it's just sitting there. I said, “Screw that! I'm gonna install this thing.” So I undid the crate and had a bunch of guys help me bring it through the window and set it in place. For a week I worked on this console. The engineer showed up the following week, changed a couple of grounding points and said it was done...I was 14.


How does it feel knowing Donnie Osmond is better than you? Huh? Is it enough to make you mad? Oh, yeah. It's enough to make you the mean kind of mad!

Lest you think Donnie's technical bravado was arrested in the early 70's, wait til you see the kind of digital juju he's working with these days. It's a melon-farming mouthful:

"I have these three Yamaha 2400s. The reason I have three is that there is a throughput problem with FireWire. If I transfer 24 tracks all at the same time, I'm going to miss some data. So I decided to get three machines and do eight tracks each at a time. Those that had 16 tracks I'd just play the 16 on the 24 head and separate it out and put it through two of the 2400s. The Yamahas have these really good preamps so I didn't get any external preamps. I was thinking I would just take the drives out, but found it was just as easy to USB it, put it into my little laptop, then take it out in the studio and transfer it. There was a little bit of a sync problem getting all three machines to start at the same time through MIDI. So I put a reference tone on the tape that would go into one channel of each of the Yamahas. This way, I could line up that tone later in Nuendo and all three sets of eight tracks would be aligned again."

That's easy for you to say, Donnie.

Dangit. Now I wish that I was Donnie Osmond more than ever. The guy has it all. He's like a real-life Buckaroo Banzai. He's got the hot chicks. He's got the fast cars. He's got an Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Shucks, he's even a little bit Rock & Roll.

Other wanna-be musicians out there wish they were Trent Reznor or KISS. Not me. I wish I was Donnie Osmond.

Or maybe the drummer for Whitesnake.

Read the entire article online at Mix Magazine: http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_call_techie_love/index.html