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Cuniberti reamp11/13/2023 I road-managed a band for Elektra/Asylum records for a year. But I knew I wanted to be a recording engineer and I took whatever job I could get in the business to pay my bills. I went back home to the Bay Area and started over. Well, the studio was never built because the land was actually in a National Forest and after a year they ran out of money fighting all the legal roadblocks. I moved there hoping I would someday be the chief engineer, making tons of money and hanging out by the pool with famous rock stars. When the Rockets broke up a year later, the owner of the studio hired me as a caretaker/intern for a studio they were trying to build in the mountains above Santa Barbara. It was a loose atmosphere and they let us fool around with the equipment and do some mixing. In Ojai, working on the Rockets recordings. When did the recording engineer bug start to bite you? When we stopped playing they handed us a reel-to-reel tape in a white box and asked us to leave. They wouldn't let us into the control room. We did a recording in a small studio in San Francisco's Chinatown district a year earlier. Was this your first recording studio experience? Tom arranged for the band to record at his friend's studio in Ojai, California. We had a big following in the Bay Area that eventually attracted an engineer by the name of Tom Lubin from CBS studios in San Francisco. Eddie Mahonie was our lead singer before he became Eddie Money. I was into rock and played in a band called the Rockets in 1972. Although, this year I did find the time to play in a Yardbirds tribute band I call The RaveUps, great fun When I couldn't play in a band and engineer at the same time I stopped playing professionally. I played the drums from the age of 15 until I was around 30. Years later my friends and I would sit around at night smoking pot and play the tapes. Mind you, I couldn't hear what was previously recorded because when I put the recorder into record the speakers would shut off. If I kept doing layer upon layer, I would get this garbled collage of sound. I would record records at different speeds sometimes backwards, people talking, stuff off the TV, until the half-hour reel was full. Then I got bored with that and discovered if I put a band-aid over the erase head, I could create a sound on sound recording. I soon became bored just recording my favorite records and began recording sound effects. In 1965 my mother bought me a Sony 7" reel-to-reel tape recorder. Currently the principal mastering engineer at The Plant in Sausalito, California, he talks about making records with the Dead Kennedys and Joe Satriani, as well as inventing, patenting and marketing audio hardware (the Reamp), and what it means to be a good recording (and mastering) engineer. An audio autodidact, he followed his muse from the archetypical teenage reel-to-reel sonic collages to recording one of the most famous instrumental records in rock, the whole time making it up as he went along. John Cuniberti grew up in the sixties in East Bay, that oft-forgotten "other half" of the San Francisco Bay Area.
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