pan60
10-04-2009, 05:02 PM
SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1Forssell Technologies SMP-500.
Interview with Fred Forssell of Forssell Technologies.
by
pan60
pan60 So let?s have some fun: )~ Tell me a bit about yourself, I always like starting with this... Any hobbies we can learn about?
Fred Forssell No, not really. I?m big into outdoors stuff and that?s why I?ve lived here in northern Idaho for almost 30 years. I used to hunt alot, but, now I do my hunting with a camera and a field recorder.
I?ve been a birder since I was very young, but in the last 10 years I?ve gotten pretty heavily into neo-tropical songbirds. Our property, here, in Idaho has 130 species of birds on it and many of them breed here. With the help of some very well-qualified friends, I have learned how to identify most of the birds that we have by sound, rather than strictly using visual identification. It?s really fun and very good listening practice. I find that spending hours walking quietly around in a forest or jungle and listening very intently provides me with a useful reference point for listening to my equipment designs. There is a softness to sounds in nature that is present, even when sounds are very loud. Man-made sounds tend to be more harsh and offensive to my ears than those that occur naturally. I don?t know, maybe I?m just rationalizing the amount of time I spend in the forest, but I find that when I walk into my mastering room after a long walk in the woods and listen to music there, I tend to hear the subtle sonic qualities even more than I normally do. It works for me anyway.
pan60 Wow, very cool! I have a modest plant collection, as well as a collection of Tarantulas. Not spiders, mind you, Tarantulas: )~
We had an awesome chat the other-day, and you spoke about so many things, I felt we needed to do an interview with or without gear to review. In this case, the gear will be an added treat: )~ How did you get started in this industry?
Fred Forssell If you mean the music business, well that started before I was born. My mother is a classical music accompanist and played piano for hours everyday. My father was in radio and then television when it came into its own in the early 1950s. As a child I had the run of the radio and television stations and I use to sit for hours and watch everyone work. It was cool to see the racks of tube equipment and cabling that made up those studios. So, it was music and equipment that I was drawn to from a very early age.
If you mean how did I start making equipment, that?s a slightly different answer. I was a touring tech, sound guy, stage manager, and production manager in the rock and roll world from the early 1970s until I quit touring in 1991. In the early days you really couldn?t just drop into some music store and buy all the complicated stuff that the tours were starting to need, we had to figure out how to build it ourselves. We were kind of making it up as we went along. I would figure out how to build a piece of equipment so it could be set up and torn down every night and still function without ground loops, RF problems, or reliability issues. Once I learned how to do that that I started really listening to it. Does everything sound the same as it did before I starting using the thing I just built, or did something change? Was the change sonically good or bad? What caused the change? Can it be improved? How did it effect the performers? That type of thing.
When you take that form-follows-function/need-design approach, and then carefully evaluate the effects on the music and sound, in my opinion, you have a good basis for learning and evaluating design techniques and approaches. In the end, it is all about the music and musical performances. We tech people are only there to help the artist do what they do, and let others share that experience in a meaningful way. Everything else is secondary? to me anyway.
Did that answer your question?
pan60 Yes! I love piano music, you were fortunate to grow up with such a great tactile input. A couple of my uncles, and my grandfather played guitar, my grandfather also had a small home studio and recorder to the old cylinder. I used to love watching and listening as a child.
So, tell us about the type of music you get to work with as an engineer and/or producer, or what do you prefer to work with?
Fred Forssell After seeing Jimmy Hendrix for the first time I decided I wanted to play guitar. That didn?t work out for me, but I spent the next 25 years working with rock and roll acts. My work was mostly as a tech, sound man, roadie, and/or stage/production manager. I built a lot of studios for the people I worked with, and I built a lot of custom equipment for those studios and touring stage set-ups. But, rock and roll was my music. I didn?t do a lot of engineering with those acts because they had REALLY good people doing that already. But I was watching and learning how they did their stuff. So, I was always thinking about how I could build equipment that helped them do what they do, or that sounded better than what they were using at the time. I did lots of modifications to existing equipment. To do that, I had to figure out how the stuff worked. As I gained more knowledge in the area of equipment design, I came to know a couple of really good designers who became my mentors in the area of circuit design. They also introduced me to the concept of REALLY listening in a controlled high-quality listening environment.
That was the mid-1970s and I?ve been hooked on listening to good music played on good systems ever since. And for me, my sonic point of reference was actual live musical performances. Why didn?t these systems sound the way the live performance sounded? What caused the disconnect between actual musical performance and reproduced versions of the same thing?
When I burned out on touring and doing large shows, I just started working on my design and listening chops. I hooked up with an old friend, who is a recording engineer, and he asked me to do some work for him. That got me back into the studio and we have spent years tweaking and working on his set-up. This continues even today.
The equipment that I started making from that experience eventually came out into the marketplace and has been pretty successful. As a result of that success I got turned on to modern bluegrass music. I was quite stunned to discover the level of musicianship and quality of the acoustic instruments being played in the bluegrass world. It was something I was unaware of and I was totally hooked on it instantly. Hearing musicians like that, playing those instruments in close proximity, all hours of the day and night, simply blew me away! I starting working even harder on my designs, using those sounds, as my reference.
That lead me to meeting, and later working, with a lot of really top-notch bluegrass players. I even went out on the road again for a couple of small tours working with two of the best mandolin players in the world. And (surprise!) I really had fun with them during this time. It was WAY different that rock and roll, and a lot more enjoyable, as well.
So, that is the type of music I?ve been working with for about 10 years now? bluegrass, acoustic jazz, and acoustic music, in general. I still like classical music, but that is not as accessible to me as the other genres I just mentioned. I did some recording work and some producing work, too, but, really, my place is in the lab and the listening room evaluating my design work so that others, who are more talented than myself, can use my gear to help them make better recordings.
Interview with Fred Forssell of Forssell Technologies.
by
pan60
pan60 So let?s have some fun: )~ Tell me a bit about yourself, I always like starting with this... Any hobbies we can learn about?
Fred Forssell No, not really. I?m big into outdoors stuff and that?s why I?ve lived here in northern Idaho for almost 30 years. I used to hunt alot, but, now I do my hunting with a camera and a field recorder.
I?ve been a birder since I was very young, but in the last 10 years I?ve gotten pretty heavily into neo-tropical songbirds. Our property, here, in Idaho has 130 species of birds on it and many of them breed here. With the help of some very well-qualified friends, I have learned how to identify most of the birds that we have by sound, rather than strictly using visual identification. It?s really fun and very good listening practice. I find that spending hours walking quietly around in a forest or jungle and listening very intently provides me with a useful reference point for listening to my equipment designs. There is a softness to sounds in nature that is present, even when sounds are very loud. Man-made sounds tend to be more harsh and offensive to my ears than those that occur naturally. I don?t know, maybe I?m just rationalizing the amount of time I spend in the forest, but I find that when I walk into my mastering room after a long walk in the woods and listen to music there, I tend to hear the subtle sonic qualities even more than I normally do. It works for me anyway.
pan60 Wow, very cool! I have a modest plant collection, as well as a collection of Tarantulas. Not spiders, mind you, Tarantulas: )~
We had an awesome chat the other-day, and you spoke about so many things, I felt we needed to do an interview with or without gear to review. In this case, the gear will be an added treat: )~ How did you get started in this industry?
Fred Forssell If you mean the music business, well that started before I was born. My mother is a classical music accompanist and played piano for hours everyday. My father was in radio and then television when it came into its own in the early 1950s. As a child I had the run of the radio and television stations and I use to sit for hours and watch everyone work. It was cool to see the racks of tube equipment and cabling that made up those studios. So, it was music and equipment that I was drawn to from a very early age.
If you mean how did I start making equipment, that?s a slightly different answer. I was a touring tech, sound guy, stage manager, and production manager in the rock and roll world from the early 1970s until I quit touring in 1991. In the early days you really couldn?t just drop into some music store and buy all the complicated stuff that the tours were starting to need, we had to figure out how to build it ourselves. We were kind of making it up as we went along. I would figure out how to build a piece of equipment so it could be set up and torn down every night and still function without ground loops, RF problems, or reliability issues. Once I learned how to do that that I started really listening to it. Does everything sound the same as it did before I starting using the thing I just built, or did something change? Was the change sonically good or bad? What caused the change? Can it be improved? How did it effect the performers? That type of thing.
When you take that form-follows-function/need-design approach, and then carefully evaluate the effects on the music and sound, in my opinion, you have a good basis for learning and evaluating design techniques and approaches. In the end, it is all about the music and musical performances. We tech people are only there to help the artist do what they do, and let others share that experience in a meaningful way. Everything else is secondary? to me anyway.
Did that answer your question?
pan60 Yes! I love piano music, you were fortunate to grow up with such a great tactile input. A couple of my uncles, and my grandfather played guitar, my grandfather also had a small home studio and recorder to the old cylinder. I used to love watching and listening as a child.
So, tell us about the type of music you get to work with as an engineer and/or producer, or what do you prefer to work with?
Fred Forssell After seeing Jimmy Hendrix for the first time I decided I wanted to play guitar. That didn?t work out for me, but I spent the next 25 years working with rock and roll acts. My work was mostly as a tech, sound man, roadie, and/or stage/production manager. I built a lot of studios for the people I worked with, and I built a lot of custom equipment for those studios and touring stage set-ups. But, rock and roll was my music. I didn?t do a lot of engineering with those acts because they had REALLY good people doing that already. But I was watching and learning how they did their stuff. So, I was always thinking about how I could build equipment that helped them do what they do, or that sounded better than what they were using at the time. I did lots of modifications to existing equipment. To do that, I had to figure out how the stuff worked. As I gained more knowledge in the area of equipment design, I came to know a couple of really good designers who became my mentors in the area of circuit design. They also introduced me to the concept of REALLY listening in a controlled high-quality listening environment.
That was the mid-1970s and I?ve been hooked on listening to good music played on good systems ever since. And for me, my sonic point of reference was actual live musical performances. Why didn?t these systems sound the way the live performance sounded? What caused the disconnect between actual musical performance and reproduced versions of the same thing?
When I burned out on touring and doing large shows, I just started working on my design and listening chops. I hooked up with an old friend, who is a recording engineer, and he asked me to do some work for him. That got me back into the studio and we have spent years tweaking and working on his set-up. This continues even today.
The equipment that I started making from that experience eventually came out into the marketplace and has been pretty successful. As a result of that success I got turned on to modern bluegrass music. I was quite stunned to discover the level of musicianship and quality of the acoustic instruments being played in the bluegrass world. It was something I was unaware of and I was totally hooked on it instantly. Hearing musicians like that, playing those instruments in close proximity, all hours of the day and night, simply blew me away! I starting working even harder on my designs, using those sounds, as my reference.
That lead me to meeting, and later working, with a lot of really top-notch bluegrass players. I even went out on the road again for a couple of small tours working with two of the best mandolin players in the world. And (surprise!) I really had fun with them during this time. It was WAY different that rock and roll, and a lot more enjoyable, as well.
So, that is the type of music I?ve been working with for about 10 years now? bluegrass, acoustic jazz, and acoustic music, in general. I still like classical music, but that is not as accessible to me as the other genres I just mentioned. I did some recording work and some producing work, too, but, really, my place is in the lab and the listening room evaluating my design work so that others, who are more talented than myself, can use my gear to help them make better recordings.