Beyond the Talk Box: Celebrating Bob Heil’s Impact

Already history. Welcome the pro audio this week those guys a professional and motivated thanks to try Booth, the best vocal booth for home or on the road voice recording and Austrian Audio Making Passion Hurd introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and Someone Audio Post Chicago, Aaron Robert Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging Sydney to the video stars, George the Tech Whittam from LA and Me, Andrew Peters Voice Sober Talent and Home Studio Guy, and don't forget the code t ri PAP two hundred that will get you two hundred dollars off your try Booth and Austrian Audio Making Passion Heard. Unfortunately, someone won't be heard anymore, which is a sad loss to the industry. Is Bob Hile, who's having an illustrious career kicking off playing the Mighty organ and then becoming a pro guy. And Georgie you had the privilege of catching up with him on numerous occasions. I'm gathering, Ah yeah, I think more than once. There's just one particular interview from the NAM Music Trade Show here in in Anaheim from twenty seventeen where I had a good long interview. I mean, you know, pretty long for a trade show interview. It was like nine minutes, and he really got a lot into his history. And you know, at the time, I think I was remembering, let's get onto the you know, let's get on to the topic in hand, you know what I mean. He was giving me a lot of his backstory, you know. And now I look back and I'm like, I was sure. I'm glad I had that chance, you know. Yeah, and to really hear it straight from him. You know, I'm sure he told those stories a thousand times, right, but it was really cool hearing it from him. I mean he literally created the sound system and envisioned the sound for Quadrophenia that he really Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I have a really I have a clip here I can play from that interview that where he talks about the birth of what he called the birth of rock and roll sound. I think that's what he called it. Here to take a listener, just go into the internet. Put in the night rock and roll sound was born. It's a true story. It really was the first night, and it was with the Grateful Dead. It's quite a story. They wrote the song trucking a trucking about it because they're sounding all the gear. Yeah, well there's someund men got confiscated the night before because he wasn't supposed to be out of the state of California. We won't get into that. You can go figure it all out. But they come to Saint Louis with no PA, ironically to where the Fox Theater the perfect place. Well there again, the stage manager causes, you used to have all those speakers, and I said, yeah, talk to this guy, handed this the telephone to Garcia and then we hit the front page of Billboard because we went on tour with him out of there, and at that time, nobody had ever played through anything like that. I didn't know that. I'm like, this is pretty good because I had Longevin board that I had gotten and recording board. I had Macintosh ams and yeah it was. It was a big high five that's what I looked. And it was beautiful. It wasn't just a loud PA. It was a beautiful sounding pace that was new then. Well, because of the pipe organ, I learned to listen, I had to voice and tune that. At the age of fifteen, we started in harmonically nobody realizes about the harmonics that are so important. I learned that as a young kid and it's carried through everything I do. But then I was on the road. We hit the front page of Billboard and everybody was calling us. One of them was the Who. We ended up with them for six years, and from there it was it was humble Pie of Jay Giles, on and on and on. But then they took Frampton out. He was a star of humble Pie. They took him out as a solo act and I his little gal Penny was married in my home when they were eighteen. If she called me shortly after, I need a Christmas present for Peter, and I sent her a talkbox. You can write the rest of Peter Frampton's history and it's well defined. You go to our website. Wow, yeah, I remember the talkbox. Frampton comes Alot that came out. It was like such a feature and it was so weird, like you never heard anything like it before. What a story though, Yeah, I love so. I'd love to get into his brain as to how he actually even came up with that idea. I'm thinking he was hanging a lot with the Grateful Dead when he came up with that. I think I know what you're getting at. There was some serious psychotropic stuff activity going on there. But yeah, I mean the fact that he started I didn't get that part of the interview because but he started as an organist, so that's you know, a very high level of me positionship required to play an organ. And then he would set up the organs, he would tune the organs. He was aware of the organs sound and those organs have you know, like just to know how the PA sounds because the organ is a big sound. You're you're aware of loud instruments, Yeah, with a lot of sources, you know, every pipe of types. So yeah, what an incredible background he had in the history. And then you know he's out there selling mics at NAM, you know, which is that's one of the neatest reasons to get to go to a NAM show, is you you did get to see a you know, a Bob yle you know, and you got to talk to him and interact with him. And uh, you know Wes Dooley from ae A Microphones. He grew up repairing RCA microphones. You know, it's a trip. Wesly is great, totally just another rate or booth at Nam exactly a living historian, right, and you get to talk to these folks face to face, it's amazing. But yeah, I got to I met Bob's daughter, who still works for Hyle and still goes out to trade shows and you know, does the beat, you know, and she was very very nice, and there just there's just a heck of a legacy there, so it will be he will be missed for sure. And he was a huge, huge Ham radio operator amateur radio is playing an organ over the Ham radio station kids, his own station. That was just like organ playing I think or something. Yeah, it was over shortwave, right, yeah, yeah was Also he was also friends like because he's he's actually from well he died in Illinois. Yeah, he's from Saint Louis, all right, but he was his friends with Thomas Holman THX. Thomas Holman started did the THHX protocol. Oh he's the th h and THHX yeah, oh wow. And and Thomas Holman ended up I believe over with like you know, connections to Skywalker's sound and yeah, another audio luminary or whatever. So cool. And then like Bob also picked up they picked up Bob to be a host on a podcast called This Week in Tech Twit dot TV, which was the show that influenced me to start my own show fifteen twelve years ago. And he did his own show over there about Ham radio and they did it for quite a long time actually until they had to end the show. But they still have his rig that he had built for that show. It's still at the Twitch studios in one corner of the studio. You know, a memory of Bob so really cool, really really cool. The quirkiest thing I thought with Bob was the friendship with Joe Walsh. He was also at Ham right then. Joe Walsh actually used the talk box a bit, did he? He did. He said later on that interview that Joe Walsh really kind of had it mastered. He really clearly in hearing his interviews and reading his interviews how he had extremely He's extremely tight with Joe. They were best buddies and they spent a lot of time talking Ham amateur radio together. Do they go driving in Joe's Maserati Frother Lady And it was actually Joe who was experimenting with using the mics that Bob had made for doing amateur radio because that for doing studio work. Yeah, Bob hated the crappy mics that amateur radio operators were stuck using, so he made a better mic, and then Joe was like, Yo, plug this thing into your studio console. And Bob's like, I never would have thought of that. He's like, I'm telling you it sounds better than fifty seven or fifty eight, and he's like, yeah, you're right, it does. And a brand of microphones was born from there. So, you know, his most well known podcast mic, the one that's kind of the gold standard, is called the PR forty and it has a distinct tone to it. You know, it has a distinct voice. Is it kind of big sounding? It's big, and it has a lot of cut like mid range. It's like a combo of like a SM seven and the four sixteen or something kind of almost it doesn't have the top end of before sixteen, but it definitely has more of a cut. So if you ever listen to Leola Porte on This Weekend Tech or you know, any of the shows that Leo does, you'll hear the distinct sound of that mic. It's not a flat or a high five mic. It is a, it's a broadcast mic, but it's a dynamic sounding mic. Yes, it's a dynamic mic, and it's voicing is designed for being heard. Let's just put it that way. Yes, the PR thirty and the PR twenty to me sound a little bit smoother. I like the voicing of them better personally. But the bottom line is Bob tuned his MIC's by ear, and he said that specifically literally the interview. I wasn't curious about response curves and all this stuff. I would just go by what I thought sounded right. So you know, those mics are tuned by Bob's ear, and you know, the guy had a good ear. But you know, probably by time he got into his fifties sixty seventies, you didn't hear everything. Did all the mics as he made them throughout the years, is getting brighter and brighter. That's a good question. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I'm sure he wasn't the only one to put his ears on the mics after, you know, after quite a while, but uh, yeah, I know it's true. I mean the sound systems I listened to growing up that were often not equed well unfortunately, or often helmed by a gentleman of an older generation. Yeah, I was like, no, too much, too much, two K and four, there's gonna be thank you. You're gonna you're You're accelerating their progression towards mixing like you anyway, Rest in peace, Bob. Thank you for all your innovation and your your good natured enthusiasm, enthusiasm towards audio and we really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks to Driver and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peaters and mixed by Voodoo Radio Imaging. 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