The Capricorn Days

April 1968 thru July 1971

In April of 1968, after completing the active duty part of my military service, I moved to Macon, Georgia and began building a recording studio in the back part of this storefront at 445 Broadway.   We called it the Otis Redding Memorial Studio and didn't know it would become Capricorn Records.  At that time we expected to make R&B recordings in the tradition of Memphis and Muscle Shoals..

We had a nice large room, 24 w x 32 l x 16.5 h, if my memory serves me correctly.

  It might be hard for readers of today's recording magazines to realize, but in 1968 there were no manufacturers building recording consoles.  They were all custom built, and this is the one I built for our studio.  It used 16 Universal Audio 610 input modules.  Track assignment on these modules was by a left-center-right switch at the top.  This board had  4 mixing busses.  Busses 1 and 4 went all the way across and were the left and right positions of the assignment switch, in the center position buss 2 was available to inputs 1 thru 8, and buss 3 was available to inputs 9 thru 16.   I designed this board for a 4 track machine, but 8 tracks came along shortly and the the center position of the inputs 1 thru 4 were given output line amps, attenuators and VU meters of their own, seen at the upper left side of the board.  There was a mono buss out and a pair of stereo busses out.  Above the top of the UA 610 modules can be seen two linear pan pots, one for mix buss 2 and one for mix buss 3.  Their outputs along with #1 left buss and #4 right buss were routed to the stereo busses.  The mono buss was a sum of all four of the sub mix busses. 

  I was quite excited last year when Universal Audio came to market with their UA 2-610 which is two of these tube mic preamps in a rack unit.  It's kinda like having my old board back.