First three years at Miami: the Rathskeller, Foundation Sound and finding John Meyer

The best job on campus came with the Miami Commitment. In my first year I was the sound guy at the Rathskeller, the campus bar: a 1970s-looking octagon on the lake in the middle of Coral Gables, in the centre of everything.

It was a tricky room. The stage sat on the second floor, right above the food and beverage area, and an octagon needs a lot of distributed systems to work properly. Everett Price, the manager, became a great friend, and I stayed for multiple years. I got into every system in the building and had a modest budget to improve them. Then I went to the Rathskeller advisory board, secured the funding to redo everything, and we flew a completely new system. This was before line arrays, so I chose high-end Yamaha speakers, the best fit for a space like that. I learned the things I knew less about, DJ consoles, CDJs and record players. I rewired probably the entire place and replaced almost every speaker in the distributed system and on the main stage. And I booked all the bands. In my first year at university I was effectively running my own club, and it was great fun.

I was getting paid for it, too. Better still, I was building a network of students who cared as much as I did about sound, audio and recording. The campus had several recording studios and live sound setups, and I threw myself into all of it. We started a sound company. I came up with the name Foundation Sound, and we built the company around it.

The two biggest players were me and Joey Raia. We brought in two friends, Courtney Jacobson and Mike Determan, and between the four of us we put together a whole sound system.

The school had plenty of old sound equipment in kits: the blue kit, the green kit, full systems in road cases. The blue kit was effectively being retired. Joey already worked at Criteria Studios, the famous studio in Miami, where he had started as an intern and become a studio engineer. I was in there occasionally. One of our professors, Clyde Hagler, ran the entire place. Lots of famous recordings were made there, including the Bee Gees and many others, and one room has the grand piano that Eric Clapton's "Layla" was recorded on. I got to play it. I played the Layla piano solo, just for fun. Clyde was super cool, and more than 30 years later I still own a soldering gun he gave me, with his name on it.

We got our hands on the dead equipment from the blue kit and made it live. We replaced cable ends and resoldered XLRs. We took apart a couple of Yamaha stage wedges that did not work and fixed everything. I rebuilt the grills, fitted new crossovers because the old ones had aged, and replaced the speaker connectors. Soon we had a full sound system running. We could load it into the back of Joey's car or my truck, which I had by my second year, and we were doing gigs all around town with some top bands.

The best gig was the sound for the tailgating parties before Miami Dolphins games, at the stadium. Members of Gloria Estefan's Miami Sound Machine put together jam bands with people from the jazz vocal school. They were super talented, and we put on some great events.

I recorded a lot as well, but live sound always won. It had to work on the spot. There was no time to sit in a studio recording the same thing 1,200 times to get it perfect. I cared more about the art of performance. So I kept doing live sound while getting much better at the technology and what it could do.

In my last year I was appointed chief engineer of all the studios and facilities. I no longer worked at the Rathskeller, though I was there a lot and kept helping out. As chief engineer I maintained the equipment in every studio on campus. The Weeks Center had a huge multitrack studio, with full separation between the recording rooms and a lot of Sony equipment, including two 24-track DASH recorders. One of my projects was replacing all the all-pass filters on the converters in those machines with Apogee filters, which were well known to be better than the originals. That was when I first understood Apogee and the technology coming out of there. It was also when I first heard of Bruce Jackson. I had not met him then, but years later I worked with him closely.

The Weeks Center also had some big Genelec studio speakers. I looked after the studio in Gusman Recital Hall too, in a facility way above the recital hall. I did a lot of sound system design and got into measurement.

Meanwhile I was well into the tech. This was the era of dial-up modems. Our engineering classes ran on VAX/VMS systems, central computers with terminals, nothing like what you would expect these days. I had my first laptop. The one place at the university with great computing facilities was the School of Architecture.

My best mate through most of my years at university was Dave Lampton, who was in my programme. Another guy, Matt Mankins, was in mathematics. The two of them were the gurus who ran the School of Architecture's support desk, so I was in there nearly every day studying with Dave, with Matt around too.

It was a phenomenal facility for the time. It had lots of Macs, some of the first higher-end machines able to run things like AutoCAD, which ran on DOS, and some reasonably powerful PCs. I used Photoshop for the first time there. We ran Mosaic as the web browser, before Netscape Navigator. There were no firewalls, so we built the School of Music's website. It was for what is now the Music Engineering Technology programme, which was the first University of Miami programme to have a website. I remember using Google for the first time there too, when it launched publicly.

So a typical day looked like this. Classes with Dave. The School of Architecture to study. A recording session at night. Most evenings something was going on, and I would study until three or four in the morning, sleep for a short time and start again. Audio, acoustics, recording and live sound were running alongside high-tech work for the time in the architecture lab.

That lab is where much of my early understanding of tech beyond basic computer use came from, along with building the first website for a University of Miami programme. That was in about 1995 and 1996.

My degree was a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Audio Engineering. Because of my focus areas, the things I was working on and the classes I took, it was really electrical engineering and computer science. I was doing hardware development and software development, writing code for digital signal processors, building websites and getting involved with the early internet.

Digital audio signal processing was a big part of that. At Miami I had an amazing professor, Will Pirkle. Will was a real practical guy. He had graduated from the programme years before, gone to Korg and worked as an engineer on early digital audio signal processing, and then come back to Miami. I had him in one of his first years back, in 1995. He was passionate and knew exactly what was happening in the industry in those days.

In his classes we programmed every one of the common signal processing algorithms, choruses, phasers, flangers and delay lines, on Analog Devices SHARC DSPs. It was the most amazing class and I learned a huge amount. All of it was in assembly language specific to that signal processor, because there were not even high-level compilers for these processors at that time. I took that capability with me to Meyer Sound. All of that DSP work I had learned at school.

Along the way I got involved with the Audio Engineering Society, which held a convention each year. That is how I came to Meyer Sound.

In my second and third years I was studying the industry. Who was doing the most amazing work? Who had the most interesting technology? My passion was loud professional loudspeakers, so I looked at them all: Meyer Sound Labs, Eastern Acoustic Works (EAW), JBL, which had been well known for many years, and Electro-Voice.

I wanted to push the cutting edge of live sound, and Meyer Sound pulled me in. Their systems were known as some of the best in the world, installed in venues like Carnegie Hall, Benaroya Hall and the Royal Albert Hall. And they were just starting on something new: self-powered loudspeakers. Meyer was one of the first to bring them to market, with the power amplifiers and supporting electronics sitting in the same cabinet as the speaker.

That year's AES convention was at the Javits Center in New York City. This was my third year, 1995 to 1996. I went up with Joey Raia and a few friends. We stayed at Joey's house on Staten Island and took the ferry in to the Javits Center. My whole focus was to find John Meyer, the founder of Meyer Sound, and propose myself to him for an internship.

John was one of the most respected, highly technical engineers around. He had studied acoustics in Europe, and he was well known for building the early sound systems for the Grateful Dead. He was based in Berkeley, California, and his hair and beard came down to his belt. I was nervous, but then I saw him walking towards me on the conference floor. I walked up, shook his hand and said, "Hi John, I'm really nervous right now, but I wanted to introduce myself, and to ask if you have any internship programmes. I'd love to come and work at your company on my summer break and help out."

He looked me up and down and said, go and talk to Pete Soper on the booth and tell him I sent you. So I did. Pete Soper was a very tall guy, also with long hair and a beard, and super nice and friendly. He said, sure, let's see if we can figure it out. We swapped a couple of messages, worked out timings, and he said, come on out.

That is how I went to Meyer Sound, on an internship I had created for myself. It was not a formal programme. It was a company in Berkeley, California, building loudspeaker systems, and that is how it all got started. I went out in the summer of 1996 and came back at the end of 1996. I graduated in 1997.