Straight Arrow? Where is it?

Vermont is a pretty idiosyncratic state - Yankee ingenuity and cussedness, Yuppie tourism, Cows, Mountains, Ice Cream, Moonlight and Autumn Leaves, etc. Among other things, it is pretty small, and Montpelier, its capital, only has a population of 8,200 people, even on Saturday night, which makes it roughly the same size as the small exurban New England town I live in.

Straight Arrow, a recording studio in Montpelier, is similarly idiosyncratic, and very much a studio for its surroundings. Mike Billingsley, its owner, is an interesting blend of musician, composer, producer, inventor, media guru, iconoclast, etc. Situated in half-a-duplex perched on one of the rocky ridges that are the high ground of Montpelier, the studio attempts to provide a broad range of services for a local clientele, and features Mike's passion for acoustic excellence, with some novel tweaks to make things work really good for really cheap. So you see things like radial arrays of dried ears of Indian Corn on the walls being used as HF acoustic diffusers. When a local bowling alley went belly up, Mike bought several hardwood alleys to use as flooring in sections of both the acoustic room and the control room. Mike has been doing digital recording and editing for years, using the F1 format (remember that?) and some relatively cheap little video editors (Sony SLHF-1000 and SLHFR-900) to get frame-accurate edits of audio. If this all sounds a little quaint, keep in mind that Mike has been at it for years, and when he started there was no alternative to the decakilobuck Sony DAE 1100 editor, now itself a candidate for the Smithsonian Digital Antique Collection. Mike's system worked well enough then and still does now, and Mike has gotten good enough at working with it that he hasn't yet felt the need to move (and spend $$$$) into the current DAW scene.

Anyway, you get the picture. Straight Arrow is a cross between a project studio that Mike uses for himself and his own projects and a full-service studio servicing local musicians for very low prices (ca. $300/day). A lot of his clients are acoustic (classical, folk, some world music), and he records about of a third of his clients on location, in a hall that he rents for that purpose. Meanwhile, Straight Arrow is really laid out to take care of Mike, up to the point where he can run the multitrack from a remote in his acoustic room and engineer his own performances.

Who is this Mike Billingsley guy, anyway?

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You'll get more of a sense of the place by getting to know Mike. I first met him at a National Public Radio Music Recording Workshop in the mid 80s. At that time, along with doing lots of remote recordings, he was busy fooling around with stereo microphones. He kept us all mystified and amused by rigging up a special prototype microphone that he kept under wraps (Skip Pizzi, workshop head honcho, called it "The Executioner" because Mike kept it concealed in a kinky sort of black Spandex covering) and used to make recordings to compare with NPR's more traditional array of microphone types. Naturally, we were all a little skeptical. I advised him to get in touch with a couple of mic manufacturers and see if he couldn't get some help and support.

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	SASS® (Stereo Ambient Sampling System)

I'm pleased to say he took my advice, and after some years of development work came out with the SASS® (which stands for Stereo Ambient Sampling System) microphone, manufactured by Crown, which has been pretty successful in the marketplace. For a while, there was a B&K version as well. All this speaks to a seriousness of purpose, especially in the acoustic realm - Mike is deeply caught up in the details of the stereo illusion and hard at work on making it work better. As an inventor, he is definitely from the "cut'n try" school of Gonzo Engineering. Lots of brainstorming, lots of quick'n dirty experiments, and lots of intuitive guesses. Not a lot of modeling, lab work or nerd-type scholarly research. In short, a Vermont Yankee type of inventor.

His work in microphone design has led him to an interest in underwater acoustics and he has been working on (you guessed it) an underwater stereo microphone. He has also gotten interested in 3D sound, a discrete 4-channel microphone, and Virtual Reality kinds of things, particularly in relation to film sound. Meanwhile, he is a world music fan, an active student of Tibetan multiphonic chanting (he played me one of his recordings, and he's really quite good!), a social liberal interested in an array of Green issues and local politics, and involved in media production (which I didn't really get into with him).

Kind of a Renaissance guy.

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