Richard Del Connor .com

THE BEGINNINGS of ME

I was born in an apartment complex, near the ocean, in Pacific Beach, California, at 7:58AM.

Our next door neighbors were prostitutes, (working their way through college I was told).

I took and passed the first RIAA Recording Engineer School Program, that was taught in San Diego, in 1974 at Soundtrax Studio with a 2" 16-track Stephens reel-to-reel tape recorder. Sweet.

1974-76 I worked at Bonita Recording Studio, in Bonita, California, near the Mexican border.

1976 I started contracting to other studios, as a studio remodeler, based upon my remodeling the Bonita recording studio, then another studio, then another...

So now I was becoming famous as a recording studio carpenter, not a recording engineer.

1978 I got an offer to remodel the Beach Boys' Santa Monica recording studio. I worked for Hank Cicalo and Tom Scott. I still have one of the Beach Boys cabinets from that studio.

1979 I was hired by The Village Recorder as a carpenter...and I worked for Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac... I traded some of my weekly hours for recording studio time down-time. But now I was the talent and record producer, not the recording engineer. I hung out with all the recording engineers and techs. I helped deqausse and set up the 24-track recorders for sessions with Frank Zappa and Supertramp...

Over the next five years I befriended several recording engineers so I wasn't getting to engineer as much as I wanted, and I wasn't able to produce as well as I could have, because I wanted these famous recording engineers to produce me. I gave them extra control, but I ended up kind of producing by default rather than by initiative.

I enjoyed being a session player, because I didn't have to engineer or produce, just play.